By the end of the day, I’d been reduced to this. Photo credit: Nabeel H.
I wasn’t going to get Pokemon Go.
I really wasn’t. I loved the Pokemon games, but I didn’t have the time or money to fuel a freemium game obsession.
Yet, my third grade memories whispered softly to me, when I used to wilfully be late to school to catch the last 10 minutes of the original Pokemon anime. Ash Ketchum was everything I wanted to be when I was seven – 10 years old and free to travel everywhere. Also, my mom wouldn’t let me have a dog, so Ash and Pikachu’s relationship really spoke to me.
Now, 14 years later, I began my climb (or descent?) toward becoming a Pokemon Master.
The power that’s inside
If you’ve never touched a Pokemon game in your life, great. Pokemon Go doesn’t work like any of those. Basically, you create a spunky avatar and explore the real world. Every once in a while, a Pokemon pops up. No battling there – you just chuck Poke balls at it with your finger until you hit it. If it stays in the ball, you can collect it.
As you progress in level, you can do Pokemon battling at gyms, which are physical sites that require you to be nearby to participate. Likewise, Poke Stops, which help you refuel on Poke balls and other items, may also require a bit of travel.
Eventually, the Pokemon get harder to catch (they’ll pop out of the balls or deflect them), but that wasn’t the first difficulty I encountered.
For one thing, reports of the game’s glitchiness had been greatly under-exaggerated (the game released an update that helps with this a few days ago, but for the first few days, users may have well been in the gaming Wild Wild West). I got the famous “servers down” screen multiple times before Pokemon Go stopped being polite altogether, opting to just get stuck on the loading screen.
I learned to restart over and over, and to close all other apps while I was using the game, symbolically cutting ties to the 21st century world. I considered just playing the game in the morning, but I just found myself googling the game while I waited, figuring out how to get Pikachu as my starter much too late (I love my Squirtle, though).
My house in Houston sits on several lakes, meaning there were plenty of water Pokemon around. I could catch a ton of Psyduck and Squirtles by sitting on my butt in my room watching Netflix. I fell asleep dreaming of Magikarp.
In the morning, I went with my sister to the mall and played there. I was mildly concerned when the only Poke Stop in the mall was by the small children’s playground. Pokemon was created for a generation now in their late twenties, but the swarms of people my age on their phones gathering around looked a little creepy – a little like Death Eaters, but instead of Dark Marks, we had smartphones.
I was glad to leave, even if I was empty-handed. It wasn’t until we were near my house that I caught a Tauros – my one Pokemon for the trip, but it was worth it.
Pokemon Go, I (finally) choose you!
Ash may have been gifted with the coolest Pikachu ever and a Meaningful Name, but even he couldn’t make it on his own. Besides his adorably peppy electric sidekick, he had a variety of friends who lent him a hand and taught him Valuable Lessons Along the Way. So, when my friend texted me and asked if we could go catch Pokemon together, I agreed.
By this point, I’d learned how to pick up and hatch eggs, and was running around in 39 degree heat. Air conditioning sounded great.
We drove around a park (at a slow pace, of course), while I played for both of us. When the driving trail led into a long walking path with plenty of Poke Stops, we decided to bite the bullet and run for it.
The dinosaur was the Poke Stop. Don’t worry – the playground was empty, so I didn’t ruin any kids’ fun. Photo credit: Gabby Vigil’s Snapchat.
I ended up running half the park track, carrying my giant purse filled with ice water bottles, my Starbucks, and my phone held out in front of me. My friend laughed at how ridiculous I looked, but for the first time I understood why people loved the game despite its glitches.
It was all of the mental exercise of a mobile game, plus the physical exertion. I was Ash on his Pokemon quest. I was my third grade self again.
“I got a Bulbasaur!” I found myself yelling to my friend. I did a happy dance up and down the park, and failed to notice I’d run around 8km without feeling tired.
At this point, a car full of passengers drove up beside me. “Are you playing the Poke-eee-man?” yelled the driver. (I don’t understand why so many American parents pronounce Pokemon this way.)
I nodded.
“So is my son!” he said excitedly. “I drove him here so he could get some balls!” Right on cue, his teenage son rolled down the backseat window and waved at me.
My day was shaping up to be extraordinary.
Fun for all ages
Over the course of the afternoon, my friend and I roamed up and down streets, adding to our collection. After refusing to align with a gym team, I finally joined Team Valor two levels after I should have picked (I couldn’t decide).
After a much needed dinner at a Poke Stop that happened to be a restaurant, we decided to make a go at one last park for the night. My friend’s younger sister joined us.
Here’s the thing about the sister. She’s 13, which means that she wasn’t alive when the first generation of Pokemon came out. She gave a stream of commentary that I would have live tweeted, had I been able to run any other app on my phone without crashing Pokemon Go.
On Jinx: What’s that showgirl doing on top of a gym?
On Caterpie’s evolution: My caterpillar is glowing! It’s –ew, what is that? It looks like green poop. It has black eyes. It stares into your soul, like evil. (She then nicknamed the resulting Metapod Poopy.)
On Clefairy: You mean that’s not Jigglypuff? (She called it Cleffy for the longest time.)
On Gloom: It looks like it’s wearing Play-Doh on its head.
On Ghastly: I didn’t know what it was, so I called him a Gas Bomb.
On Tangla: I saw that one! It’s a tentacle bush.
On Weepinbell: It’s a jingle! A bingle? A jingle! No?
We’d been playing for nearly half a day each, which meant even armed with a bevy of phone chargers – wall, car, and portable – our precious game time was circling the drain.
My phone was also losing battery due to overheating, at which point I had the brilliant idea of taping a cold compress to my iPhone. I looked like I was carrying around a broken lumpy robot, but I didn’t care.
It was like the part in The Emperor’s New Clothes when everyone decides to play along with how the emperor wasn’t wearing anything, except better – no one was looking up to realize I had used an actual first aid kit to try prolong my obsessive quest.
Parking lot showdown
Gyms in Pokemon Go tend to be a variety of places. There are some random ones (water towers, statues, bushes), but if you drive up next to a place of worship or an actual gym, chances are pretty good that there are going to be people in nerdy T-shirts in the parking lot tapping their phones and looking up suspiciously at the people around them.
In my city, another great place for Pokemon battles is a particular chain of hotdog restaurants. Past midnight, we pulled into the seemingly empty parking lot to cheerfully take the gym for ourselves.
We weren’t the only ones.
In a scene that played out like a hacker version of a Fast and the Furiousmovie, another car slowly pulled up in front of us. We were on the same team, but we both wanted that gym. A furious car battle went down. Windows were rolled down. People yelled stuff out their windows (mostly encouraging stuff, though, because we were on the same team).
And then everyone’s apps glitched, so we had to drive away.
In a perfect future, there would be enough server space for everything.
The light at the bottom of the barrel
I had sworn I wasn’t going to be one of those people.
And yet, a day into my download, there I was, jumping out of a slow-moving car at radical intervals to run through a poorly lit, mosquito-ridden park in an attempt to stock up on Poke balls and Poliwags. Then, I’d jump back in the car, and we’d would continue to slowly and creepily drive around the park.
“It’s 1:45 in the morning. Mom’s going to be like, ‘Where are you?’” piped up the friend in the back seat.
Avatar!Kylee as leader of her first gym.
Her sister, who was driving, hushed her. “It’s just a few more Poke Stops. We’re leaving soon.”
Of course we were leaving soon. We could stop playing any time we wanted. That’s what I had told myself nearly 12 hours before when I began playing, and that’s what I told myself now.
I have no problem playing Pokemon Go for hours at a time, even if that involves running up and down hills. It fulfills a childhood dream for me. My younger friend who had no context for the game also got into it – every catch was a “Yes!” and every miss was a “No! My whole day is ruined.”
Would I spend money on Pokemon Go? Of course not (for all the game’s problems, it would probably glitch out as I was trying to pay). That would also ruin one of the best parts of the game – finding others to help you on your quest to be a Pokemon Master.
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