Why people crapping on Pokemon Go drives me nuts
by Dave Proctor
To my friends and readers,
If you haven’t tried Pokemon Go yet, you should. This isn’t a PSA about how much fun I had with the game. Frankly, I don’t care if you have fun with it. There’s a bigger thing at risk if you don’t try it.
Chances are pretty good that you’re one of the 76 billion people already playing Pokemon Go. I’m not here to sway you, or congratulate you. Go count your pigeons and rats and do your thang. You do you. The people I’m more interested in are the large portion of my News Feed who get excited about blocking content and comments about the growing phenomenon.
Apart from the occasionally funny AR picture of a Rattata in a bowl of soup or a 300 foot Jynx at a baseball game, the most common thing I see relating to Pokemon Go is “I don’t care about Pokemon Go,” or “I’m a man, so I sleep with women instead of catching Pokemon,” or “God it’s so stupid. Get a life.” To those people I just have one major question.
Who are you to question the leisure activities of other people?
I want to take this a step further than the insightful Facebook status above. I don’t want you to just silently admit “Yeah, you’re right, it’s okay.” I want you to question when we became a society of people that freely crap on what someone else does that brings them joy. I want you to ask yourself this question and then see it in other parts of our life. Like Ghostbusters, or Sports.
I don’t think it’s okay when people on my side of the geek culture spectrum write off any major athletic event as “just sports,” or “sportsball,” as if they’re better than a section of the population for not liking it. I hated seeing people that hadn’t even picked up a Pokeball start shaking their head at PoGo when I brought it up because the massive swath of people in their news feeds made them form an opinion before they even tried it. I called him on it and he admitted ignorance.
But try it! Why are we so afraid to try things that we may not like? Or may love? I am on a mission to play as many games as possible, watch as many movies as I have time for, and listen to as much music as I can handle in the spaces in between. Who are any of us to give someone a hard time for something they enjoy? Something that brings them peace, or happiness? Why do we need to then say “Well I don’t need that to make me happy, so I’ve got to be a better person. I’m stronger. I don’t need things.”
If you don’t try Pokemon Go, or ride the next incarnation of a Segway, or pass on the next teen fiction post apocalyptic melodrama, ask yourself why. Why are you doing it? Is it because you want to define yourself as someone different? Or is it because you don’t have time? If you don’t have time, that’s fine. But when someone comes to you and starts talking about how one of those things made their life better, are you going to listen? Or are you going to shut them down.
I say listen, and learn. Find out what makes people happy and make an informed opinion. Try things. Let your opinions be shaped by your own experience, and if you don’t have time to experience everything, let them be based on other people’s direct accounts.
The same for sports. The same for bustin’ ghosts. Don’t be afraid of dying having tried things that make you uncomfortable. No one is living wrong.
Pigeons and rats,
Dave
destroy object 
Dave,
While I agree with your “live and let live and maybe try something new so the fun centre of your brain doesn’t atrophy and potentially cause grand mal seizures of ‘you damn kids and your bullshit’ ” attitude to this new experiment in gaming, I must admit, behind this ostensibly harmless fun something sinister is lurking. I’m not referring to the creepy implications of AR (though they unnerve me in ways I can’t even articulate here). It’s the shallowness of the cultural experience that I can’t shake.
I’m sure one could argue for the rich history of Kami or the Netsuke figurines in an attempt to show how a larger cultural tradition undergoes all manner of revisions and unexpected expressions, and when it is a new medium that instigates that expression it only adds to that richness. But that’s not what this is.
It’s no coincidence that the people who played pokemon in the 90’s as children are now the main demographic generating interest in this game. From game designers to the consumer this has been an exercise in manufactured nostalgia. This is not just the same old story of “I don’t want to grow up,” it’s worse, the entertainment industry doesn’t want you to either. They don’t want to challenge the consumer. If people were running around chasing Care Bears or My Little Ponies or GI Joe’s we would rightly shake our heads and criticize. It would be a clear case of arrested development and, frankly, sad.
I don’t demonize new technologies for their newness. It is the staleness of what is done with them that I find abhorrent. It is the utter lack of creativity in what should be an exciting development in gaming.
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Hey, thanks for the comment. I totally hear what you’re saying, but personally I don’t think every experience has to be perfectly culturally rich to be worth enjoying. The Avengers is not an innovative story, but it is a movie that is fun to watch… sometimes you don’t innovate on all fronts because a lot of newness freaks people out. Pokemon is such a perfect project for this because it takes a recognizable and accessible paradigm and maps it onto something that the world has generally not seen (not all of these people were playing Ingress, that’s for sure).
And I don’t think it’s necessarily sad to bring nostalgia to the table. I feel like there’s an assumption (not saying by you) that those that are in to nostalgia are some how lesser, or lost. I myself really like Mega Man, but I am aware that it was from a different time, and I know what I like about it and how much of it is anachronistic now. Isn’t it possible that other people feel the same way?
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