Last night, when walking to the grocery store, I happened upon a group of three 20-something men staring into their phones and blundering about the sidewalk. That’s not a rare sight in New York City, but these three were bumping into each other like the Three Stooges in a commercial for Apple. They weren’t walking anywhere. From glancing at their phones, it was clear they were playing Pokémon Go, the new game that is sweeping the nation. Why can’t everyone just stop?
For those of you born earlier than 1980, Pokémon was a card game, cartoon, and video game series popularized by Nintendo in the ‘90s where cute creatures with special powers were pitted against each other in battle. Pokémon Go is a game for iPhone and Android users that taps into the phone’s camera and GPS so that users can walk around and find little cartoon beasts in real surroundings. It’s the first instance of “augmented reality” that has become a huge hit, and if this is what the future looks like, I’m headed to the closest H.G. Wells novel so that I can find a way to go back in time.
I don’t want to be the guy telling younger people that their games aren’t very fun. There’s nothing more annoying than the codger yelling for the kids to figuratively get off his law. However, in this instance, the kids are literally on my lawn looking for another Squirtle and I want them to stop. That’s my problem with the game: It is not something you play in the privacy of your own home, but instead you have to take your phone out at work, on the subway, in the grocery store, and all sorts of other places where you generally have to interact with the public who don’t know a Picachu from a Charzard.
There’s nothing wrong with getting sloshed, but no one likes that drunk person who ambles up at a party and tries to engage in some dull, rather loud, one-way conversation. Pokémon Go players are those drunk people, lush in their revelry without any care for what is going on around them other than scoring the next creature. Who wants to be standing at a urinal and be distracted by some dude trying to find himself a Blastoise in the men’s room?
Problems are already starting, especially because the game is sending many people to churches to both capture and train their Pokémon. This guy in Massachusetts, who lives in a decommissioned church, has kids stalking his property day and night and there is nothing he can do about it. God, that is really annoying.
While it is certainly irksome for those of us who are unwittingly suckered into this game, it’s also dangerous for players trying to catch them all. There have been reports of criminals using the game to find victims who are too busy with their face next to a screen to realize that they’re being robbed. There are also some major concerns about all the permissions that users give up to the app’s developers, Niantic Labs, in order to play the game. Why would anyone want to let a company (or anyone else) know exactly where they are at all times, who they’re with, and give them access to everything in their phone? Not only is Big Brother watching, but he’s entertaining everyone with a throwback to their childhoods.
That’s my final problem with this game. It’s a continuation of a nostalgia that is rotting the culture from the inside out. It’s nothing new for each generation to reevaluate the things they loved when they were young. (Just look at Saturday Morning: Cartoons’ Greatest Hits, a 1995 album where the hippest bands of the day did cover versions of the ‘70s cartoons they grew up with.) But things are different now. With the internet as its time capsule, this generation gets to relive those cereal-crunching times forever in exquisite detail, something Gen Xers and Baby Boomers were never allowed to do.
And it’s not just looking at old commercials for Gak that have Millennials assuaging their unending hunger for the ‘90s, they insist on bringing it back into the culture so that everyone can deal with it all over again. It’s like Pokémon Go, which wouldn’t be nearly as effective without the nostalgia, or Fuller House, a reboot of a sitcom that the internet demanded, because apparently there aren’t enough new sitcom ideas in the world.
This penchant not just for nostalgia, but stewing in the juices of old franchises is leading to a sort of stagnation that not only makes this crowd very easy to please (Want a lot of attention? Just write an article about ‘90s kids on the internet.), but unlikely to grow because they’re just demanding Netflix release a new version of Voltron instead of growing up. Not only is this robbing the culture of innovation, but also keeping people from discovering new interests and perhaps opening up a whole new world of obsessions.
While bucking the tide toward the past is going to be a lot harder than telling people to go shove their Vulpix where the sun don’t shine, I’ll be happy right now if everyone keeps their Pokémon Go escapades out of my face and keeps their screenshots of their new creatures off social media. As my grandmother used to say, there’s nothing more boring than other people’s dreams or other people’s hangovers. Luckily she died before Pokémon Go was invented, because your finds might be the most boring of all.