Pokemon GO

I am so incredibly amused by this game. Not necessarily the gameplay itself but the fervor in which I see people playing it. It's unlike anything I've really seen. The office is abuzz, the majority of people playing the game and talking about what they caught and things they learned the night before. That type of communication is fostered 1. Just because people are enjoying themselves, and 2. Because this game doesn't have any sort of tutorial system. You're thrown into the world, pointed at 3 starter Pokemon, and once you've caught your first one, you're cast off into the world.

Much like Ingress, Niantic's last app, Pokemon GO is location-based, meaning you gotta get off your ass to go play. As you walk around, recognizable locations around you are designated as Pokestops or Pokemon Gyms. If you're out in the middle of nowhere, you're going to have a harder time finding locations than if you're downtown in a large city, where Pokestops are plentiful. Pokestops are places were you can get random items given to you every 5 minutes. Things like Pokeballs, Potions, Pokemon eggs, etc. are found here free of charge.

My first two days of playing Pokemon was pretty sparse with regard to resources as my neighborhood didn't have but one Pokestop a couple minutes from my house, and downtown where I work was oddly bare considering Ingress is flush with locations downtown, and Pokemon GO uses that data. Downtown was fixed three days after launch, and I went from having to ration about 6 Pokeballs a day to having about 60 at my disposal at any given time.

Anyway, on one of the sad time, drought days, I was out of Pokeballs for most of the day. My only hope was to level up by hatching a Pokemon egg I had incubating. Eggs hatch by walking around. Each egg takes either 2km, 5km, or 10km to hatch, and no, driving doesn't contribute to your walking total (unless you're driving less than 15mph, so hope for traffic. lol). On this Pokeball-less day, my co-worker wanted to take a break and go walk down to the lake to see if he could catch some water Pokemon. We could see the leaves being flicked up, indicating that there were plenty of Pokemon down there. I was all for a walk as it served my egg hatching purposes, so away we went.

This is an interesting thing about this game, it's absolutely making people get up and get active. A lot of these people aren't necessarily people who are excited about such things, BUT they'll do it for Pokemon. I saw so many people walking around my neighborhood. I'm walking the dog more. I work at a very sedentary job where I stare at a computer screen all day. That whole get up and move every hour thing doesn't normally happen, but it has been the last few days.

Yesterday, someone in another department found a Haunter while she was just sitting at her desk. The word spread and everybody started looking by her desk, Design talking to Dev talking to QA talking to Project Management. A lot of times we're very insular in our departments but not so when we're all trying to find Pokemon. It's become a sort of group activity. It's a fun thing that connects us, and I've talked to people at the office that I hadn't really interacted with much prior. One of the rather quiet devs has been talking a whole lot more as we all try to figure out all the mechanics of the game. People have been going with each other to lunch and interacting with each other a lot more as result of this game.

However, some of that daily chatter involves the common question about if the servers took a shit or exclamations that one lost a [insert Pokemon name here] because the app crashed. Pokemon GO has been fraught with trouble from day one. I had to log in dozens of time as the app crashed and kicked me out. I'll lose at least 10 Pokemon a day because the app decides to shit the bed at the exact moment of capture. I'm fairly certain that if it weren't for this being a Pokemon game and everyone being so stoked on the mere idea of it, people wouldn't stand for an app that has this many problems. I'm sure things will improve, and this fervor for it can't last, but while we're in the thick of it, I'm enjoying the hell out of Pokemon GO.

Every time you see a Pokemon nearby that you haven't caught yet is exciting. Every time I get enough resources to evolve one of my Pokemon is exciting. Every time I walk far enough to trigger a Pokemon egg to hatch is exciting. I'm going to keep playing as long as I'm finding joy in playing it. See ya out there.