Millennials champions of nostalgia
Every so often there are stories in the news so pervasive you can’t escape them — no matter where you turn or duck.
Not all of them are of great importance. But some of them are (more importantly) very entertaining.
For example: Kim Kardashian’s repeated attempts to break the Internet with her naked butt.
And now comes the explosive popularity of Pokemon Go, the virtual reality smartphone sensation that seems to have achieved what Kim never could.
Not only has the new Nintendo game broken the Internet; it has apparently broken the great outdoors.
People — many of them ’90s kids eager to capture the fictional monsters of their youth in the real world on their own turf — have taken their technology outside, in some cases with unexpectedly morbid results. A19-year-old Wyoming woman recently went scouting for “water Pokemon” beside a river near her home; instead she found a body floating in the water.
Not to be outdone, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. was forced to ask smartphone users to refrain from playing Pokemon Go on its grounds, when museum officials realized the memorial appeared in the game as an official “PokeStop” — a place where players can load up on Poke-supplies.
You could call Pokemon Go the first mainstream video game for adults, as its requirement that players roam around their neighbourhoods and beyond (and sometimes in Holocaust memorials) renders the game less accessible to kids, who aren’t typically even allowed to walk around unattended on Halloween, never mind in hopes of snagging a Jynx or Clefairy.
“It hasn’t been out a full week yet,” says Forbes magazine, “and the game app Pokemon Go is already set to surpass Twitter in terms of users.”
What we don’t know, however, is whether it will surpass Twitter or any other social media mainstay, in terms of active, long-term users. I doubt it will.
In fact, I believe proclamations of doom about the game’s outsized presence and its role as catalyst of the virtual reality revolution is a tad premature.
Yes, millennials love Pokemon. I am one of them. I used to rush home from school every day to catch the series on YTV, and I am dying to track down my favourite creature — a rotund and perpetually sleepy monster named Snorlax — IRL.
But I also recognize that millennial attention span — shorter even than Joltik (one of the tiniest Pokemon of them all) — is unlikely to allow the game to evolve beyond a temporary trend.
Nostalgia, even in a new and shiny package — a.k.a. VR — is a craving. And once met, people tend to turn to newer and shinier things.
The problem is that the chance of running into one of your nostalgic touchpoints is exponentially higher if you happen to be from my generation.
This is a phenomenon — nostalgia overload — that a lot of pundits thought reached its zenith with the baby boom generation. Not so. We millennials are the nostalgia champions of all time and the ’90s wist- fulness onslaught is here to stay with a vengeance.
The implications aren’t dire, but they are disconcerting.
I look at my parents when they hear a song they haven’t heard for decades or are reminded of a TV show they used to watch and a genuine aura of surprise and delight washes over them.
I suspect such moments of happy recognition are headed for extinction because my generation and (likely the generations that follow us) are living in an endless loop of reminiscence, where it is impossible to stumble on things from the past, because they are always present.
It’s virtually impossible, it seems, to grow up.
Literally every month a trend from my youth is reimagined in some new and invasive way. Some people like it this way. I don’t. I find it a bit sad — the relentless pressure to regenerate the magic of a moment that faded a long time ago. (Sorry for being such a downer.)
And so I give Pokemon Go six months before we tire of it and move on to the next nostalgia rebirth: perhaps some virtual reality rendition of Digimon, or The Adventures of Mary-Kate & Ashley.
I highly doubt that a year from now, people will still be loading up on Poke-supplies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum or battling Pidgeys on their neighbours’ front lawns. In fact, part of me actually hopes Pokemon Go is a flash in the Pokepan.
But first, of course, I’m going to try to snag myself a Snorlax. Emma Tietel is a national columnist.