It’s a Pokemon GO world, and we’re just living in it

At a minimum, Pokemon GO makes walking the dog more interesting.

This morning, Hazel and I caught Kakuna in my alley, Pidgey in front of the nearby comic book store. I was told I don’t have enough skill level yet to visit the Pokemon Gym, which is apparently where you go to test battle skills, and which is located at the town pool.

Oh, and I failed to immediately notice when Hazel went No. 2, the ostensible purpose of our walk, because I was busy scanning the horizon for other Pokemon characters I might capture and add to my menagerie. “Scanning the horizon,” in the strange, instantly addictive new world of Pokemon GO, means staring into your smartphone, at the screen summoned up by the app.

On July 6, Nintendo, the company behind the longstanding Japanese RPG and trading card universe of Pokemon, released Pokemon GO, developed as a game by Niantic, a Google offshoot. Niantic is headed by John Hanke, a 1985 graduate of Cross Plains High School in the Abilene area, and a University of Texas graduate.

Pokemon GO became an instant sensation. On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that playing Pokemon GO was more popular with U.S. Android users than tweeting, binge watching TV on Netflix or listening to music on Pandora or Spotify.

That’s according to research from the digital market intelligence firm SimilarWeb, which looked at daily active user rates for the popular apps.

On July 11, 5.9 percent of all U.S. Android users played the game. In comparison, 4.1 percent used Twitter’s app on the same day. Pokemon GO had also passed Pandora Radio, Netflix, Google’s Hangouts and Spotify Music in terms of daily active users, the company said.

Cautionary tales

There were reports of the app being used to lure people into robbery traps and cautionary tales about distracted walking and driving, and even the story of a North Texas teen being bitten by a venomous snake while on a Pokemon treasure hunt.

The craze has people wandering into yards, driveways, cemeteries and even an off-limits police parking lot in search of cartoon monsters, prompting warnings that trespassers could get arrested or worse, especially if they cross paths with an armed property owner.

The Pflugerville Police Department posted a Facebook warning July 11 after officers spotted a man playing the game in a section of a police parking lot where the public isn’t allowed. The player had to pass keep-out signs and go over a fence or under a gate to reach the area.

“He was playing a Pokemon game with his phone up in the air,” Pflugerville Assistant Police Chief Jim McLean told reporters.

Three players got locked inside a graveyard in Pennsylvania while hunting virtual monsters and needed police to let them out. They didn’t realize it closed at dusk and called police just after 9:30 p.m. Tuesday when they discovered the cemetery gates were locked.

Not for nothing does the app open by warning, “Remember to be alert at all times. Stay aware of your surroundings.”

The app has been an undeniable phenomenon around the country.

In Milwaukee, where I spent a recent Sunday with my wife, we overheard a 20-something couple at brunch complaining/celebrating that this new app had taken up their whole weekend.

And on the lakefront there we saw another passel of young adults walking around in the instantly characteristic Pokemon GO pose: Eyes down at the phone screen, phones held mostly in front like some kind of divining rod. And then, sometimes, there is an odd kind of lurching around as the player maneuvers himself into position to capture the character, accomplished by swiping an on-screen ball in its general direction.

It’s an ingenious combination of the actual and the virtual, an overlay of a fantasy world onto the real one. And it is to be applauded for its cleverness and instant success, yes, and for knocking Nintendo out of the doldrums as its stock has soared.

(The game is free to play, but players can make in-app purchases to enhance the experience, and there is reportedly an adjunct device coming.)

Getting couch potatoes to ‘GO’

But mostly I cheer Pokemon GO for reintroducing the outside world to a generation that has been seduced by PlayStation and Netflix.

How many times have you heard modern parents wishing that kids would do what the parents used to, just wander around the neighborhood, finding things to do (while those same parents simultaneously fret that it’s too dangerous for kids to be wandering around, but that’s a different column).

Pokemon GO is a big, swift kick off the couch and into the out of doors.

It is ingenious, too, because it’s an instant nostalgia play for anybody under, say, 30. Most of that generation grew up with Pokemon.

Some knew it in its original form, as a role-playing game on Nintendo’s Game Boy handheld device. Many collected, seemingly, thousands of Pokemon trading cards, which have come in and out of fashion, but when they have hit, they have usually hit very big.

My own kids, now high schoolers, went through a Pokemon card phase back when. My nephew in grammar school in northern Indiana has collected cards avidly in more recent years.

Pokemon has been a boy version of American Girl dolls, but one that doesn’t require a trip to a downtown store or a home-equity loan.

An Ohio political group even announced it’s using Pokemon GO “lures” to get millennials to register to vote.

Pokemon is, I think those of us on the outside can admit, a confounding world of elfin and animal creatures possessing mysterious powers. I remember trying very hard not to let my eyes glaze over as our older son, probably at 5 or 6 at the time, explained in exacting (excruciating?) detail the capabilities of one Pokemon character or another.

And I wonder if that was the moment he realized Mommy and Daddy sometimes feign enthusiasm for their kids’ enthusiasms.

But, hey, it kept them occupied, and it probably taught them about systems and rules and maybe even about imagination.

And now it is back in a pretty compelling form, sucking down young people’s phone batteries, yes, but also making them move more enthusiastically than any phys ed class ever has.

If kids wore Fitbits, this would be the magic bullet for getting them to their daily 10,000-step quota.

Except for purposes of experiment, I don’t see myself continuing to play the game, even if it does amplify the dog-walking experience.

And I have to wonder if, after such a white-hot start, it will last. One of my sons just headed off to YMCA camp expecting, he said, that his peers will have moved on when he returns home in two weeks.

I don’t know enough yet about the intricacies of the game that’s been devised to know whether it is capable of holding interest in the long term. And as a non-native of the Pokemon world, I accept that I will probably never find out.

Still, even if Pokemon GO does end up only a fad, it’s a pretty entrancing one, especially as a signal of what may be coming as more people devise ways to mix imagined universes with the real one. How long before people are dodging “Harry Potter’s” Dementors, or, I don’t know, seeing their back yards rendered as dragon keeps?

This story contains material from wire reports.

This story was originally published July 15, 2016 at 3:39 PM with the headline "It’s a Pokemon GO world, and we’re just living in it."