You gotta catch’em all — Pokemon Go is ruining my child

My 15-year-old daughter snuck out of the house last night to meet up with someone she met on the Internet.

His name is Pidgey. He’s a Pokemon Go character.

And she didn’t actually sneak out, but ran out the front door screaming “there’s a Pokemon on the end of our street !!!! ” She returned a few minutes later, breathless and triumphant: she had pinched Pidgey.

Pokemon Go is ruining my child.

Up to this point, my kid has been a thoughtful and responsible version of teenager. That means she sleeps until noon and leaves her dirty dishes on the kitchen counter (right above the dishwasher, argh !!!! ) but gets decent grades and is polite to strangers. She drives us bananas and other people think she’s great: given the alternatives, I’ll take it.

But since the launch of Pokemon Go, she’s been become a scheming, conniving borderline juvenile delinquent bent on getting what she wants, no matter what the cost. What she wants is Pokemon characters.

For those living in a dead wifi spot on the moon, Pokemon Go is a game that uses the GPS and camera functions found in most smartphones to allow players to capture and train virtual characters called Pokemon. These weird looking things appear on the screen as if they are actually in the real world, just trapped in an alternative dimension that only the crazed and obsessed can see.

It’s become quite the thing. And while it’s been praised for encouraging the otherwise couch bound to get off their butts, it’s also led to stabbings, muggings, car crashes and players falling off a cliff while staring at their phones.

Though I doubt my spawn will resort to violence, she does possess her old man’s competitive streak and penchant for the occasional bout of nefariousness. She volunteered, apropos of nothing, to take her younger sister to the park the other day: it was a cover for a neighbourhood-wide Pokemon hunt. Except her sister ratted her out. She returned to detail a laundry list of lawlessness, including multiple counts of jaywalking and low level trespassing: there’s a big empty lot beside a nearby school that is apparently a popular spot for Pokemon to go and make little Pokemon babies.

At one point, according to the notoriously unreliable witness — younger sister will say pretty much anything to get the older one in trouble — there was a mad dash down the street in what appeared to be an all-out race for a loose Pokemon at the corner. Turns out the elderly couple were just walking their dog.

Confronted with these accusations, my first born’s defence was a sophisticated matrix of complex legal arguments based on an individual’s right to pursue characters in an augmented reality without undue interference.

“Yeah, yeah: but look at all the Pokemon I got !!!! ”