One more excuse to gawp at your phone and ignore reality

IT’S the craze taking over the world. Since its launch, Pokemon Go has overwhelmed Twitter (‘Cancel all plans!’ is the consensus), become the most downloaded app in history, and has attracted more Google searches than porn. Grown adults have walked off cliffs, into the paths of cars and refused treatment after being stabbed, all in pursuit of fictional game characters. These characters appear on smartphone screens in ‘real world surroundings’ as if by magic – in fact you just download the app and let it access your camera.

It’s big business, of course. In the 20 years since its birth, Pokemon has earned £35billion. This new game is raking in £1.2million a day via in-app purchases – rip-offs to you and me. Such ludicrous ‘accessories’ include treats and perfume to lure the Pokemon, and eggs so you can grow your own monster (a bit like breeding lions so rich people can shoot them).

I tried the game on Friday – a day after its UK launch – and it took me ages to choose my user name (most were taken, including Buggeroff!) and my outfit.

I can appreciate that seeing a tiny monster appear in your phone screen, revealing him to be under the table, is momentarily exciting – if you are five and have parents too dull-witted to introduce you to the works of Anna Sewell or A.A. Milne.

However, I simply cannot understand why adults are becoming so addicted to this new game. Of course, it is being marketed as the answer to the obesity crisis: you have to walk around outside to find your monsters, and visit real monuments and buildings to engage in virtual battles.

But there is no stepometer involved, so I just wonder if it isn’t the computer game world’s attempt to pre-empt a virtual sugar tax, given that the only thing the youth of today seem able to exercise is their thumbs.

And anyway, if you want exercise, rescue a dog.

My attempts to play were admittedly thwarted by living in the Yorkshire Dales: Pokemon Go doesn’t work well in rural areas – the best place to see groups of adults with stooped shoulders, staring at their screens, is in big cities.

But I worry that we will all become similar to those people in the Matrix: supine, dripfed images to keep us docile, while being milked dry.

I understand the need to escape the current, grim reality, which is why fantasy epics such as Game Of Thrones are so popular. I get why people drink, or take drugs, and Pokemon Go is arguably – if you avoid motorways – less harmful, but it’s as though these big Japanese corporations are performing a lobotomy on the populace.

Who has the time to read the news, or a novel, when you are on the trail of a monster during your lunch hour, or even during work time? In the US, where the game has been available for 11 days, a corporation has already informed staff: ‘We are paying you to work, not chase fictional video game characters.’

I wonder if the next generation of games will give us a different, more prescient virtual reality on our phones?

We might be able to walk around Africa, seeing virtual lions and elephants, and well-fed children. We could take trips to the Poles, and see polar bears, paws aloft on our tiny screens, unable to hurt us – picturesque, but a fantasy.

WOULDN’T it be great if those clever Japanese people who come up with this stuff could create an app where, if we hold our phones aloft, actual reality swims before us on our screens: a child worker as we peruse clothes in a high street shop, the abattoir as we grab shrink-wrapped beef in the supermarket.

Pokemon Go is surely the worst manifestation of pointless Western consumerism.

The only time Manhattanites looked up from their phones was when the planes hit the Twin Towers; few of them had heard of Osama Bin Laden, but by then it was too late. Our eyes might be on the Pokeballs, the ones we are admonished to use to capture these virtual monsters, but we are certainly blind to almost everything. We need to look up. And fast.