Gotta catch ‘em all!
IF you’ve noticed a lot of people going outside this week walking around looking at their phone, you can bet your bottom dollar they’re chasing Pokemon.
Despite rain, subzero temperatures and nightfall, I have been to Victoria Park three times since Sunday on unscheduled, spontaneous visits at the begging insistence of my kids; driven them to all the parks in my neighbourhood, twice, waved goodbye to my children who happily headed off to Sydney for a business meeting with their Dad to “keep him company” but whose real motivation was to scoop up Nintendo’s stock market busting cartoon creatures into their devices on a quest across the state to become Pokemon Masters.
I took them on a hike to Mugga Hill, mostly out of curiosity to see if Pokemon live in the Australian bush (they do), mocked surprise multiple times to hear there were Pokemon in our lounge room, front yard and street, and listened with fascination to the endless babble about Charmanders, Pidgey’s and Golbats.
They’re calling it a runaway hit. It’s blitzing the most popular social site in the USA, “Tinder“and pundits are watching its exponential popularity reach for the heavens to soon knock off it’s perch – and probably by the time this goes to print – surpass, “Twitter” – which has 300 million users – as the world’s most downloaded app, of all time (well, since 2008 when Apps were first created).
To put things into perspective, according to Business Insider Australia, “Tinder was launched back in 2012, five years ago. Twitter came out in 2006 – a decade ago. “Pokemon Go” came out last week.”
And it’s only on a limited release while game makers, Niantec test the platform which they’ve admitted has struggled with the demand causing many Pokemon hunters to not be able to play in the first place or have their game crash under the weight of the official uptake in the USA, Australia, Canada, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain and the UK, and unofficially elsewhere with some clever hacks, and soon to be in Brazil, Japan, Malaysia, Phillippines and Singapore.
So, once the world IS able to access Pokemon Go things are going to really go nuts. And I love it. While this simple app has achieved what millions of dollars of government spending on “get active” campaigns to save obese kids in the West from their sedentary plugged-in lives could not, the world is getting up off their buts to go hunting.
Generation of kids who grew up on the franchise of Pokemon, established as a Nindtendo video game and extended to trading cards, TV shows, movies, and ubiquitous merchandising, have dreamed of becoming Pokemon Masters for the last 20 years, projected through the main protagonist of the “story”, a “trainer” whose name is Ash.
Trainers raise Pokemon, little creatures with special powers used to battle other Pokemon and with experience these evolve (get older, stronger, bigger), all while having great adventures.
According to Pokemon “the games encourage strategic thinking and, in many cases, basic math skills. Pokemon puts a strong emphasis on good sportsmanship and respect for other players.”
And now, with Pokemon Go, it’s encouraging kids of all ages to go outside and chase down Pokemon in the real world, of which there are about 700!
One tradie in Melbourne this week said during a radio interview he lost his workmen during smoko because they’d all climbed over the back fence of the site and went off looking for Pokemon in a nearby park. People have started dating after joining organised meetups to play Pokemon Go in groups and at least one man has lost his job choosing to quest instead of work.
What makes this game so much more interesting is its augmented reality feature – a first. Using a phone’s GPS and clock, the game can decide what Pokemon appears when and where, depending if you’re near water or a park, etc.
Some have criticised it for the personal information it freely gives Niantec (an offshoot of Google) access too, right down to where a person is in a given time and place, but many apps already do the same in the background workings of your phone. Big brother has just never looked like this much fun before.
Safety in the real world is probably a bigger issue, particularly with kids and no doubt there are devious minds busy at work dreaming up ways of exploiting it for nefarious means.
An added brilliant feature is that some of the Pokemon are captured in their egg form. These have to then be incubated not over time but over distances, which mean your kids have to walk 5km to hatch this egg, or 3.5km to hatch that egg. Result? They want to be outside all the time, going somewhere, to the park, the green spaces, near the river. Is this the end of the coach potato?
Pokemon Go is clearly a game changer though really its just a new way of playing everyone’s favourite “Hide and Seek” or that other irresistible classic, going on a treasure hunt but given its success (Nintendo shares jumped 23 per cent in one day, this week) other franchises will be jumping on the bandwagon sooner than later.
I’m wondering if Malcolm Turnbull’s got developers working on “Senate Go!” as we “speak”.