Are we allowed to feel joy anymore?
A level of cynicism will eventually infect the joy of playing Pokémon Go, until we can no longer experience the happiness of finding a Squirtle on a park bench without anticipating the inevitable letdown.
Pokémon Go is not the best game ever, nor is it the most entertaining, but it has generated more communal joy in less time than any digital experience in recent memory.
Which has led us to want to tear it down. Maybe want isn’t the right word. The fact is, we will tear it down. It’s what we do.
Viral phenomenons such as Pokémon Go are often treated like the opiate of the masses: something that makes us all feel good, but is also probably bad for us in some fundamental way.
Having everybody agree on anything, especially in today’s increasingly polarized society, is rare. So many people simultaneously embracing what is, in essence, a child's video game, is rare. Of course, those of us who play Pokémon Goknow it's more.
There's surely something primal about the treasure hunt, a trigger for the dormant hunter-gatherer part of our brains.
With its cartoonish yet real GPS-generated map overlay, Pokémon Go turns our mundane world into a fantastic landscape full of hidden wonders. Hiding Poké Balls in minor landmarks turns oft ignored signposts into momentary monuments worthy of intense, if fleeting, scrutiny. Finding a Rattata in the office and then throwing a virtual Poké Ball at it until you catch it is a perfect midday distraction — as long as your boss isn't watching.
If you're not playing Pokémon Go on your phone... wait a minute, of course you are.
The phases of viral
We're still more or less in the honeymoon phase, which came close on the heels of the discovery phase, when many of us found out about Pokémon Go (was that really only a week ago?) and downloaded it for the first time. It might be argued that these tiny epochs are one and the same. After installing Pokémon Go, it doesn’t take long to catch your first Pokémon. The time between discovery and honeymoon can last a matter of minutes.Of course, Pokémon Go would not be as compelling if not for its meteoric growth, which propelled the gameplay into a massive shared experience. We're all Pokemon Trainers, we're all talking about the same thing at once. We're all running around Union Square trying to catch a Weedle. Twitter exploded withPokémon Go references and a thousand online stories reflected our new obsession.
We are, in a sense, tearing Pokémon Go apart with interest. Every attribute is examined, every quirk illustrated. Every unusual moment that happens to take place when someone is playing Pokémon Go is worthy of the spotlight.
Just as quickly, the cracks started to show. Tales of overuse, abuse and pure stupidity soon spread.
And we started to ask, “This thing you love, what if it’s hurting you?”
We train too much
As I read the latest round of Pokémon Go concerns, I recalled the fate of Flappy Bird, another recent near global phenomenon that died before its time. That game was as simple as Pokémon Go is sophisticated. It offered retro, early '90s jaggy graphics and approximately one gaming action. Yet we loved it and endless stories were written about how to play it. Then the creator flipped out and pulled the plug. He couldn’t take the laser-like attention of millions of Flappy Bird users, some of whom could not control themselves and began blaming the game developer for their own obsession with the game.
Pokémon Go is protected from such a flameout by a number of critical factors. It's owned by a real company, Niantic, and the brand is owned by, among others, game and console maker Nintendo. Unlike Flappy Bird, Pokémon is already beloved by millions; this game is just an expertly crafted brand extension. There is no one person to pull the plug and considering the money-making engine it's already become thanks to micro-transactions, it’s unlikely anyone will.
Even so, the end of joy is on the horizon.
Viral, but not in a good way
Such intense use on such a massive scale inevitably reveals the creator’smistakes and miscalculations. A feature like the Lure, which is supposed to attract more virtual Pokémon ends up also attracting criminals who use it to lure unsuspecting targets. Despite the admonitions to pay attention to your surroundings, the game is designed to make us stare at our tiny mobile phone screens while we walk around parks, homes and busy sidewalks. How could people not get hurt? On the flat-out mistake front, Pokémon Go's big privacy blunder, where the Google sign-in gave access to all your Google data, is already bearing the kind of fruit Eve handed Adam: a possible congressional investigation — Senator Al Franken would like to know more about the game's privacy practices.
The ratio of positive stories to negative has already started to shift. For every, "Pokémon is bringing families together" write-up, there's another video of some idiot falling into a lake while chasing a Pikachu.However, unless Pokémon Go is proven to cause cancer in lab rats somehow trained to play the game, I don’t think warnings about the potential dangers of playing an expertly crafted game that blends bug-like cartoon characters with our real world will stop us from playing.
Nor will the joy killers who seek to transform Pokémon Go into a bit of slight entertainment hiding a terrible evil.
No, it'll will be the same people who love the game who will usher in the final phase of virality (the one that comes after our current Obsession): Disinterest.
We will eventually stop caring.
Our interest will not be sapped by anything or anyone. The joy we feel now is real, but it simply can’t last. At some point, the magic of discovery will not seem as magical and, bit by bit, Pokémon Go will recede from the conversation as the cynicism and concern grows and we run out of things to say about it on social and digital media.
Six months from now, we may still be playing Pokémon Go, but that joy of discovery, that pleasure of shared entertainment, the sheer fun of a viral phenomenon will be gone.
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