Let me start by saying that I can pretty much count on one hand a number of times I've sat down to actually play Pokemon. I am in no way in expert and don't really know what I'm doing, but I play occasionally because my friends love it and it's pretty fun to try to "catch 'em all". I first heard about Pokemon Go a few months ago, and the concept seemed cool, but I never thought about it again until about a week ago when people started talking about the release date.
The day it came out, my friends downloaded it and I woke up on Thursday morning to dozens of missed messages about it, so I decided to download it too. If I didn't like it, I could just delete, but if I did, great! At 6am when I first got the app, it worked perfectly. I caught Squirtle, the first one, then created my nickname and started the game officially. When I walked outside to go to work just after 7am, I was stunned. There was a Pokemon right on the path in front of me, and pit stops were everywhere. I stared at my phone as I walked, looking for more Pokemon and pit stops for the future. When I got to work, I caught one in the classroom, and I spent the morning eager for lunch when I could try again.
And that's when it went downhill.
With so many people not only across the country using the app at the same time, it was bound to experience issues, but I didn't know how bad. At first, I assumed my login information was incorrect when it kept telling me it "couldn't authenticate the server". Upon Googling the issue, though, it has nothing to do with me at all. The app simply can't handle a number of people, and us eager players are suffering because of it. Every ten minutes we try yet again to log on in the hopes that fewer people are using the app so we can play, and for most of us, we are sadly denied access.
In the few short hours I did get to play, I found it to be a huge success and extremely creative, but also slightly dangerous. Creativity is something a lot of us seem to lack, and working with children, I see the gears in their brains turn as they create animals out of Play-Doh and airplanes out of Legos. To them, they make it and it's there. For most of us, it takes a little more effort. The beautiful thing about Pokemon Go is that it does a lot of the creativity for us. It gives us the Pokemon, and all we have to do is go outside. A lot of us take the same routes to work, camp, school, the store, and everything in between. Pokemon Go gives us a sense of excitement and wonder that we probably haven't experienced in quite some time.
The only downside I see, and the app does warn us, is that it requires multitasking. Just because we're excited about the Pokemon in front of us that we're about to catch, doesn't mean the people walking are, and crashing into them because we're staring at our phones isn't good. Smartphones already complicate the simple process of walking, and this app doesn't exactly help matters. Being from New York City, people, cars, and cyclists are literally everywhere, so this app, in particular, makes my usual walk slightly more difficult.
Aside from the distraction factor and crashing server, Pokemon Go really is a fascinating and exciting experience, and I highly recommend downloading it- just let me login before you do!
