So I’m playing Pokémon Go again. Trust me, I don’t want to. Every time I close the app on my phone, I tell myself it’s the last time, that now I’ll bury the little Pokéball icon down under three layers of sub-folders, in the digital tomb I stuck it in at the end of 2016, when I decided that I was done with it for real. But then I’ll be walking to the library, or sitting on the toilet, or wandering around in the awkward time between and track practice that isn’t long enough to fill with anything useful but isn’t short enough to wait out. And I’ll drift off to wondering how my Flareon is doing in the gym, or if some new Pokémon might come out in this odd weather condition. As soon as the compulsion hits, it’s all over, and soon enough I’m cleaning the computer-rendered version of Grinnell of all its various monsters.
In a way, Pokémon Go is the perfect game to hook college students. It’s easy to excuse in the academic mindset that every minute has to be optimized, because, if you’re going to be walking from one place to another anyway, then why not whip out your phone and make something of this wasted time? And, once it has you hooked, it’s all too easy to begin to feel like you really are accomplishing something, what with all the various stats that go up all the time. You spend time to catch Pokémon, catch Pokémon to defend gyms, defend gyms to get experience points, use experience points to unlock new items, use those items to catch Pokémon, and so on and so on, none of it ever really adding up to anything outside that one little app.
Pessimism about these sorts of things is easy, so it’s probably a good idea to remind myself, whenever I get into one of these spirals, that there are worse things in the world than wasting ten minutes a day on a game that’s actually pretty fun.
Sometimes I go in the opposite direction too, remembering the pinnacle of Pokémon Go as some kind of golden age, lost and gone forever. It did offer fun people-watching for a couple of days, and there was a nice sort of common language between all the newly-converted obsessives. But, by and large, it wasn’t a great time. My memories of early Pokémon Go are inextricably fused with national angst in the 2016 Republican Nation Convention and personal turmoil at the inevitable trip to college. Pokémon Go was, at best, a distraction from a world where most things weren’t going all that well.
There are certain memories of Pokémon Go that I still cherish almost non-ironically: walking to the park with my dad on a summer evening to take down a Team Instinct gym, finding myself in the middle of an agricultural fair in my first week of college while looking for Rapidashes, or even these days, exploring unfamiliar streets in the town I’ve lived for two and a half years by now. I’m not so sure I can give Nintendo much credit for those memories, though. More than anything, they’re just parts of life that tangentially intersect with some dumb mobile game.
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Note: This is going to be the last post for at least a month, probably longer. I've really enjoyed keeping this blog for the past year, but the posts are starting to feel more formulaic, and it's getting harder to come up with ideas that I haven't already explored, plus I've just started a writing project that's much more time consuming that I expected.
