Pokemon Go is nothing like the Game Boy game you remember — it’s a free mobile game that lets you see tiny creatures called Pokemon through the window of your phone, as if they existed in the real world. Then, you can catch them. (“Gotta catch ’em all!”).
In this generation and time, no one wants to be left out and so you’re probably wondering out of curiosity with all the noise and twist of a game, just a mere game. Well, this is not just any game.
To start with Pokémon, is coined from the name ‘’pocket monster.’’ Pokémon is a game with animal creature and the deal is to catch as many Pokémon as possible.
Here are some of the reasons why there is a frenzy about Pokemon Go
It brings people together: Video games have long had a bad rap for keeping kids inside. Smartphones, they say, are turning an entire generation into anti-social zombies. Pokemon Go turns this logic and its head, and then some. Even in Canada, where the game has yet to “officially” launch, stories abound of players running into each other while hunting monsters in the wild.
By using “lures” — hot spots activated with incense to attract more Pokemon creatures — players are finding themselves surrounded not only by Pokemon, but new human friends too.
It’s the first mainstream mobile app of its kind: Augmented reality apps aren’t exactly new. Niantic, the Google-owned company that developed Pokemon Go, actually released an AR mobile game called Ingress two years ago. Some people are saying that Pokemon Go is pretty much just a skin of that game, formatted for the mainstream market through the addition of an already popular media franchise.
They aren’t wrong, but Pokemon Go is also exceptional in that it doesn’t involve using special glasses or a VR headset to experience in full. The app simply taps into a user’s smartphone camera to show where monsters are hiding nearby — in real time, everywhere they go, right against the backdrop of their own lives.
Its nostalgic: Don’t get it twisted, this one isn’t about “the kids.” Rather, Pokemon Go fans appear largely to be men and women in their 20s and 30s — people who were kids in the late ’90s when the Pokemon franchise first made its hit. Many of us would run home after school to watch the TV show and live vicariously through its protagonist, Ash Ketchum. We couldn’t “catch ’em all” back then outside of the Pokemon card and Nintendo games, but we can still sing the theme song by heart. Now, we can pretty much do both — and that’s way more exciting.
It might actually make us healthier: Gamers are getting out by the thousands to search for and battle their Pokemon, some of them logging so many steps at a time that the app is being hailed as an inadvertent exercise tool. The game is also reportedly lending additional mental health benefits to some players.