(I know the sentiment here is quite similar to Austin's over on VICE. I started writing this and then I read his, but I wanted to finish it anyway to exercise my thought structure. Hopefully you enjoy it anyway.)
As a kid, I can recall many Saturday afternoons heading to my friends’ houses to play our Pokémon games. Numerous hours in community with each other capturing, training, battling, and laughing as we lost ourselves in this experience unlike anything we had ever seen. Whether inside or outside, it was something we could almost always do together. We could trade, we could share, we could tell stories, and it helped grow those friendships closer. The idea that this marvel could one day be the real thing was such a delightful fantasy, but never one we ever thought could be realized. That is until Pokémon Go came around.
In case you haven’t been on the Internet in the last few days, or couldn’t understand what all these people are doing in your backyard, staring at their phones, Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game for iOS and Android platforms that turns the real world into a game one using GPS technologies, allowing you to run around with your friends to real-world locations capturing Pokémon, battling for territory at designated “Gym” spots, and collecting items. As the basic premise from the traditional Pokémon games, that’s a pretty easy sell to existing and perhaps returning fans to the franchise. Or at least it would be if the game worked as intended.
Since the game launched, there have been numerous connectivity and server issues all across the board. From experience, I’ve simply lost track of the amount of times the game has crashed on me in the first day alone, sometimes while I’m merely walking around or, more frustratingly, when I’m in the midst of a capturing sequence. In those instances, it’s a matter of restarting the app, and if you’re allowed to reconnect right away, the Pokémon you’ve met disappears. I’ve had Pokémon disappear from my party after a failed gym battle, and then reappear to me after the game crashes again. I’ve had Pokémon show up in my collection anyway even if the game crashed at the finish of a capturing sequence. It’s a pros and cons situation, but mostly it’s not a smooth experience.
When Niantic and The Pokémon Company first started promoting Pokémon GO in the fall of 2015, it was something that caught my attention. I admittedly did not follow the coverage closely, a check in here or there, but for the most part it was a pitch I fell in love with and remained skeptical of. After a brief perusal of some Reddit threads and various conversations I’ve been having, it seems some people had an idea of what this game should be or hopefully could be.
Pokémon GO gives to us a stripped-down version of the complex and imaginative systems Pokémon has put in place since the beginning of its own journey. Most notably, the battling system at Pokémon Gyms is not turn-based, but a touch game that allows you to fire off attacks or swipe left or right to dodge your opponent’s moves. When your connection is actually registering attacks, it feels less like a Pokémon battle, and more of a rapid tapping contest. Even the capturing sequences feel luck-based, unlike traditional Pokémon, as there’s no user agency to them beyond aiming to throw the ball at the Pokémon. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t.
What it does well, instead of giving levels to Pokémon, is reducing statistics and rule sets into only a few numbers and easy to understand mechanics. Your Pokémon have a Combat Level that you can easily increase with the push of a button as long as you have enough of two resources, which you easily obtain by capturing more Pokémon.
The emphasis to Pokémon GO is much more on the exploration aspect in a way that has never been as crucial. You advance the game by wandering through your neighborhood to encounter Pokémon using your phone’s camera to give you an elementary, yet rather fascinating augmented reality experience. It was cool to go to the lake near my office at work, and run into a few water-type or grass-type Pokémon along the banks of the water. Even more beneficial, there was a gazebo not a five minute walk away from the lake that doubled as what’s called a “PokéStop,” where I was allowed to collect more items, including an egg that would hatch into a new Pokémon as I walked around with it. Unfortunately, along the way, the game did crash on me a few times, effectively taking me out of the experience more than I would like. Still, that stuff is genuinely weird, but in a super fun way.
Pokémon Go is based off of Ingress, Niantic’s previous GPS-focused game, and uses its infrastructure to assign PokéStops and Pokémon Gyms to real-world locations. When a player reaches a certain level, they can join a team and claim gyms together as territory to defend from other teams. Having Pokémon gyms creates a real sense of camaraderie among players, whether you’ve met them in real life or not. Unfortunately, there’s no in-game benefit to teams beyond that as you cannot trade or battle with other players; at least not at the time of this writing.
As a free-to-play game with optional in-game purchases, there’s not a whole lot you should expect from Pokémon Go to begin with, so when it hits, it hits very well. It’s supposed to be simple. But with a lack of social features, unreliable battle sequences, and a frustrating capturing system sometimes caused by connectivity issues that impact basic gameplay anyway, it feels as though technological limitations make this execution of Pokémon less colorful than the reality of what the franchise has been over the years.
However, on the complete other hand, if you look around, none of this truly matters. Take a look at your app store, and you’ll see it’s the most popular free app out there right now. Look at Facebook or Twitter, and you’ll see dozens if not hundreds of thousands of people sharing stories and posting pictures of the fun they’re having. Go outside and you’ll see people walking around, communicating and laughing with other people over a game. It’s marveling.
I have a friend who won’t stop sharing stories with me about the fun he’s having going to the park near his house and capturing Pokémon with his wife, about the community he’s built up in his area to meet up with new friends and claim gyms for their team, about the rekindled joy in Pokémon that he claims he hasn’t felt in a long time. I hear stories from people who would approach a gym in their town, and hear someone shouting from a car driving by that, “That’s my gym!” I see people going to extreme lengths of exploring their real world such as kayaking out into the ocean to claim a gym coincidentally placed out in the middle of the water.
Everything I’ve just described is an experience you could never dismiss just because of a few undeveloped features or a perceived lack of detail. I want to talk to these people. I want to understand them. I want to hear their stories. I admittedly want to enjoy the game more than I do, but even vicariously, this new phenomenon is fascinating to observe.
What Pokémon Go has accomplished is capturing that community experience I recalled as kid. Whether returning players or die-hard fans, it is bringing people together so powerfully that whatever this game seems to be missing is a non-factor. The game itself is questionable, but the experience is remarkable.
We’re still in the early stages of its launch, but Pokémon Go seems to be sticking around for a while. I’m curious to see how the game develops, if any of its issues will be addressed, but at the end of the day, what’s been created here is a lasting experience from something simple. Seeing all the good it’s doing, maybe that’s just enough.
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