Pokémon Go: Welcome to the aPokélypse

It’s time I addressed the elephant in the room—just kidding, there are no Gen 1 elephant Pokémon—but it is high time we talked about any of the other one hundred-fifty virtual pocket monsters, ranging from heartbreakingly adorable to mildly horrifying—I’m looking at you, Mr. Mime—available in Nintendo’s new mobile app, Pokémon Go. It’s a video game, it’s an app, and it’s a cultural phenomenon. Pokémania is back and bigger than ever, and the whole world seems to be flipping out over it. I’ve seen a half dozen or so articles praising Pokémon Go as a health miracle and even more calling it a social atrocity. These latter articles are filled with some of the most pretentious snobbery I’ve ever read in articles about video games—or about anything really. The truth? Pokémon Go is not saving the planet, but it’s also not the herald of the end times. Seriously, everyone needs to chill.

Before I get too deep, let me provide some context. I’ve been a gamer my whole life, and I’ve always been a Nintendo gamer. I bemoaned Nintendo’s announcement last year that they were planning on dipping their toe in the mobile market at last because I have an unhealthy fear of change. Well, the worst is here, and it’s not too bad. In fact, it’s pretty good. I downloaded Pokémon Go the day it came out in America and immediately began my Pokémon journey. I picked my Bulbasaur from the obligatory tree-named professor and I started hunting. For three days after that initial excursion, the game would not allow me to log in, so I (somewhat) patiently awaited the day I would again be able to play. A few days ago, I got back in, and I haven’t stopped playing since.

What exactly is Pokémon Go? Well, the company Niantic teamed up with The Pokémon Company to create a virtual geocaching scavenger hunt VR experience, and if that sounds confusing, it kind of is. But the gist of it is this: You get the Pokémon Go app. It uses your GPS in your phone to track your movements. It tells you how far away pokémon are. You hunt them down, then enter a mini-game in which you swipe pokéballs at them across your screen. One of the most unique features of the game is the VR. As you’re tossing your pokéballs, your pokémon will be flopping around or wiggling its tail in your real world location, whether you’re in bed in the dark or standing in front of the Empire State building. The photo ops are endless, and the internet is already filled with images ranging from hilarious to mildly horrifying. Sometimes you find a Dratini working the register at Wendy’s, but sometimes you find a Pikachu hiding behind a tombstone, so it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The game also boasts a handful of other important features. Most importantly, it has something called Pokéstops. These are landmark beacons scattered across your map pointing out significant real-world locations, from wall murals to duck ponds. Walking up to one will allow you to claim some in-game goodies like more pokéballs, hatchable eggs, and healing potions. And that leads us to the third important feature of Pokémon Go. The gyms. Certain landmarks on your map will be Poké Gyms. After reaching level 5, you will be asked to pick a team (go Team Mystic or go home). After this point, you will be able to start taking gyms for your team. To take a gym, you simply go up to it and defeat its pokémon with mons of your own. After enough defeats, the gym will fold and you will be able to occupy it. There’s nothing like checking your app at 3 in the morning to find that the Pokéstop on your local greenway (it closes at sundown, by the way) has just been retaken by Team Instinct. If you combine the hunting, catching, and fighting, it all adds up to a pretty satisfying, adrenaline-packed mess of a game.

So why do some people hate Pokémon Go? The way I see it, there are a handful of legitimate reasons, and then there are plenty of petty ones. The game has some real problems. Firstly, it can be dangerous. It’s up to the player to watch where they’re going when they’re on a Pokémon hunt, which is fine, but I can understand a parent having some serious anxiety about their kid chasing a charmander across a highway. Secondly, the game eats up battery like some sort of electronic leech. You can easily burn through a fully charged iPhone battery in a couple of hours playing Pokémon Go. And, most importantly, the game is a glitchy mess. Pokéstops often don’t work, preventing you from earning your hard-earned goodies. Pokémon disappear without warning. After catching a little monster, the game suddenly freezes, and when you reopen it, you’ve wasted your pokéball and the monster is nowhere to be found. The game doesn’t let you click on things. It prevents you from challenging gyms. It crashes without warning and won’t let you log back in for hours. The loading bar gets stuck at half-full and just never finishes. It’s a mess and it’s terribly frustrating. Niantic is currently in the process of working out all the kinks, and I’m glad about that, but that doesn’t make the current situation any better. Sometimes, the game is essentially unplayable, and that ruins the experience quite a bit.

There are a handful of other problems players hoping to catch them all will certainly find frustrating. One of them is the step system. “Nearby” Pokémon are depicted as being one, two, or three footsteps away. However, the game does nothing to indicate in which direction these pokés lie, and Pokémon Go’s interpretation of three steps away seems to be upwards of a half-mile. My best friend Addison and I devised a system whereby we each go in two different possible directions and if the three footsteps drop to two, we call out for the other person to turn back and join us. It certainly helps, but it’s not enough. I’ve spent a solid half an hour tracking down a single pokémon using this ineffectual distance gauge, only to watch the little monster disappear from my radar entirely. Furthermore, evolving Pokémon is bizarre. The only way to evolve a Pokémon is to get a boatload of stardust and even more candies of its specific type. There are pidgey candies, poliwag candies, charmander candies, etc. Each evolutionary chain has its own special candy. And third level evolutions usually require 50 candies. Each pokémon comes with 3 candies, and you can transfer it back to the professor for one more, but with this system, evolutions take absurdly long. For instance, if I hope to evolve my Koffing into a Weezing, I need 50 candies, so if I get 4 from every koffing except one, from which I only get 3 because I’m not transferring it, that’s still 13 Koffings to get a Weezing. Maybe that doesn’t sound too terrible, but when it comes to your starter, which is pretty difficult to find a bunch of in the wild, evolving is a pain. And if you want a Gyrados? That’s 400 Magikarp candies. Have fun finding 100 karps.

Everything I’ve listed above is a legitimate complaint about Pokémon Go, but now I’m going to get into a few not-so legitimate problems people have with the app. Firstly, there’s the prevalent claim that it’s anti-social. I’ve heard this one from many people watching others walk by with their phones held up to their faces. However, Pokémon Go is a video game, and it’s perhaps the most social video game I’ve ever played. In the four or so days since I’ve started playing it seriously, I’ve met five or six new people and had quite a long conversation with one of them. Calling Pokémon Go antisocial misses the point of the game entirely. To be fair, a lot of people playing the game may be missing the point of it entirely. But a lot of people aren’t. A lot of people are walking outside and meeting other people, and it’s a lot of fun. The truth is, whether an activity is social or antisocial comes down to the way in which a person partakes in it. If you walk around catching Pokémon alone with earbuds in, you aren’t going to meet anyone. But if you look around you and find other people on the hunt, striking up a conversation is as simple as asking “Find anything good?” or “Hey, are you Team Valor?”

Another complaint about Pokémon Go is that it distracts from the beauty of the real world. In some cases, it may. There are times to put the game away and pay attention to the real world. But in many cases, Pokémon Go is getting people to explore real-world locations they otherwise would have ignored. I biked around a local lake today that I haven’t visited in years thanks to Pokémon Go. And I’ll probably be back tomorrow. And sure, I was there to find Pokémon, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t also enjoying the beautiful scenery around me. In fact, I was immersing myself in it for the first time in years. For those who already love nature and the outdoors, it may seem odd that it would require a phone app to get people like me to spend time outside, but the fact of the matter is that it works. Gamers are exploring the world instead of staying holed up in their bedrooms or basements. And that’s a really good change. I would even go so far as to say that Pokémon Go has changed the definition of what it means to be a gamer. I’ve seen teens, young children, adults, and families all playing Pokémon Go. I’ve seen friends on the hunt together and siblings together. I’ve seen couples of all ages. I’ve seen people walking their dogs and searching for monsters. And I’ve seen as many women as men across all age groups. This is different. This is breaking down barriers in the gaming community.

Perhaps the best aspect of Pokémon Go for me has been the exercise. I’ve walked and biked more in the past three days than I have in months. Games have tried to motivate people to exercise in the past but, for the most part, they haven’t succeeded. This time it’s different. Those inclined to exercise or play sports may think it’s weird, and that’s okay, but at the end of the day, getting your exercise by running around chasing virtual animals isn’t much different than by running up and down a field catching a ball. A football may be physical and a Pikachu may be digital, but both are equally irrelevant. Neither one has any value outside of the context of the game. Points in a game of football are just as made up as the pokémon I’m catching, and that’s totally fine with me.

That leaves just one issue. Why is the world so obsessed with Pokémon Go, and what can I do if I don’t care? Well, that one’s a bit more challenging. For one thing, social media exists largely so that people can share their passions and opinions, so if Pokémon Go appears a ton in your feeds, you might just happen to have a lot of friends who like it, and that shouldn’t bother you. People are allowed to have different interests. In fact, they should. And the hype will eventually die down. Hopefully not enough to kill the game, but enough that not every post you see will be Pokémon-related. Eventually, things will balance back out to normal on your Facebook feed. And if you feel like you’re missing out on something or you feel left out, there’s a simple solution: Download the game. It’s free. If you don’t care for it, get rid of it, but at least you’ll know you tried. Pikachu will be eternally grateful.

Nintendo has done something strange again. After the terrible slump that was the Gamecube, it took the strange motion controls of the Wii to pull Nintendo out of a rut. After the abysmal Wii U sales, Nintendo moved into mobile development and brought us Pokémon Go, twenty years after Pokémania first swept this country. If there is one great thing about our favorite gaming giant, it’s that they will always fight against all odds to remain relevant. And they will win that battle just enough times to keep us coming back for more. Nintendo’s long-plummeting stocks shot up 10% in a single night. This may be the beginning of yet another gaming revolution. But if you don’t want to get swept up in it all, you really don’t have to. Just don’t try too hard to ruin the fun for those of us who are out there having a blast. Oh yeah, and one more thing—if you’re not Team Mystic, you picked the wrong team.