Poke-Diaries

The thinking person's Pokemon Go

[smalltownpokemon-blog]

Level 19: obsession

Some days I wake up and all I want to do is play Pokemon Go. I want to wander the streets of my town like a squat, middle-aged zombie, doing nothing but catching Pokemon. I don’t want to eat or hydrate. I don’t want to think about dinner or do the dishes from the night before. I plan the day out in my head as I lay in bed first thing in the morning. I could stop and charge my phone at the coffee shop from time to time. I could go on catching Pokemon and staring at the street out the window while I waited. It would be a tolerable pause.

I could walk the whole length of town. It’s not that long. I could keep going west along the river. I could creep past the power plant at night, the lights glowing like a strange city above me. There would be new Pokemon spawning on the banks of the wastewater pond, Pokemon I’ve never caught before.

I’m annoyed by the life that gets in the way of Pokemon Go. A job. An irritating colleague. A husband. A student. A child. A neighbor. I’m not sure if I’ve ever been this obsessed with anything.

I could just keep walking all the way to Louisville, to the park at the Falls of the Ohio, where the water becomes white and frothy for a moment. I would curl up along the bank and let the sound of the river sing me to sleep. I could get on a plane in Lousville. I’d have to take my credit card with me, but I could charge my phone at the airport. I could go to Europe and catch Pokemon on the streets of Paris. I would spend my days in a café chair, setting lures. I could never come back.

I would never have to make the bed or think about dinner or do the dishes. I would find the best routes in Paris and walk them every morning. I would take gyms and collect coins and plan the best strategy for getting to the next level. My biggest worry would be whether to buy an egg incubator or a lucky egg. Everything else would fall away.

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I play Pokemon Go with the sound off. With the sound off, you hear things.

One day, I heard two crows in the tree above me making very un-crow like noises, a noise more like something you’d expect in a jungle—percussive and clucking.

Squirrels chirping at each other.

Birds on the top of a telephone pole chatting away.

A vulture that flew low enough over my head that I heard the sound of its wings flapping, a whispering noise that made me duck.

Down by the river, I swear I heard a strange grinding, buzz that was the collective sound of twenty Canadian geese munching on grass.

Motorcycles without mufflers. Cars without mufflers.

Leaf blowers and lawn mowers.

A guy on a motorcycle that sounded like a leaf blower.

The intense cricket colony in a flower bed at the end of the alley, as if all the world’s crickets had taken up residence in this one group of plants.

A woman yelling, “F*&% you, whore!” out her car widow. I could never figure out who she was yelling it at. I hope it wasn’t me.

Dry leaves blowing along the sidewalk.

The lapping of the river water against the shore after a barge passes by.

Dogs barking. And then more dogs barking. And then, yet more dogs barking.

Footsteps.

Conversations.

The quiet between a couple reading together on a bench beside the river.

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The rules

There are no rules to playing Pokemon Go beyond the structure created by the game itself. This doesn’t mean you can’t invent your own.

Rule 1: No using multiple accounts. I’m not a gamer, so the thought of using more than one account to play didn’t even occur to me. When I realized other people might be doing this, I was horrified. I’m still horrified. I imagine their souls being divided over and over again until they’re all empty inside, like some deal with the Pokemon Go devil. Do you talk to your other selves? Do you have a favorite? Do they all get along? This seems like a dangerous road to go down and I do not approve.

Rule 2: No cars. This is a rule of the game. You’re not supposed to drive and play Pokemon Go. The game itself gets upset if you’re moving too fast, though sometimes it’s just because the GPS on your phone is messed up. Still, cars are cheating.

Rule 3: No waiting in hiding until someone else takes down a gym and then slipping your Pokemon in before they have a chance. Imagine you spent hours learning how to make a perfect macaron, and you’d been through like five different attempts, and they failed, but then you produce the perfect macaron and right before you get a chance to eat one, someone steals them all. That’s what this is like. I’m not a violent person, but if I ever end up in jail, you’ll know it’s because I assaulted someone who snuck into a gym.

Rule 4: No driving. Seriously, you really shouldn’t do this. I see you doing this. I know who you are. Maybe if you live out in the country or the burbs, driving around to play Pokemon Go is justifiable. But not in downtown Madison, which is one mile long and half a mile wide. Walk. Or bike. Don’t drive.

Rule 5: Never spend a dime. I acknowledge this is totally my own weird rule grounded in my own weird baggage. When I first started playing the game, my dad made that typical skeptical dad noise that all fathers have and then asked, “How much have you spent so far?” I told him nothing, which was true and is still true. If he ever asks again, I’ll be able to tell him the same. It would be easy to buy stuff. I’m tempted. But I guess I’ve absorbed deep down in the marrow of my bones the ridiculous by-your-bootstraps ethos of this idiotic country and I’m channeling it all into Pokemon Go.

Rule 6: Get out of your goddam car. Really. It’s not fair. It’s cheating. You’re wasting gas and killing the planet to catch Pokemon? You’re idling in your car while you set a lure or take down a gym? Sometimes I see you catching Pokemon while you’re driving. There are children on these streets. You are a horrible person.

[smalltownpokemon-blog]

Augmented reality

If you play Pokemon Go in augmented reality mode, the squirtle dances across your dining room table. The pidgey flies around your husband’s head. The Pokemon appear to be right there in front of you like ghosts. Seen but unseen.

When you play Pokemon Go, you walk, compulsively and obsessively. You cross the same squares of cement over and over again on a daily basis. You see things.

You see the couple who live farther down the street. Around level 27, they begin to appear on a regular basis, trudging in a line up to the grocery store down the block and then back. They have a daughter who’s two or three. Sometimes you see all three of them together. The man is always in front, the woman a couple paces behind. The man and woman don’t speak to each other as they walk, though the woman talks to the girl.

Other times you see the man alone with the little girl. He’s got a grocery bag in his hand and she’s trailing along behind. She’s talking, like two or three-year-old’s do. She emits a constant stream of babble as she comes along behind him. He doesn’t turn. Doesn’t speak. He keeps heading up the sidewalk.

Another day, you see the woman on a bike, delivering newspapers. You step out of her way while you’re catching a nidoran.

At level 26, you notice the truck. It’s faded with stars painted across its surface and the words, “Jesus Loves You.” You’re spinning a Pokestop when the truck stalls out in the intersection in front of you. The back is full of clothes and what looks to you like garbage. For three mornings in a row, you see a woman asleep in the cab of the truck, parked down by the river.

The guy with the beard who sits on the bench by the parking lot makes you nervous, but the man who’s missing an arm doesn’t. The one-armed man might live in the run-down house around the corner from you. You’ve seen him around town for years and never suspected he might be your neighbor. In fact, you never noticed the run-down house there at all.

At level 27, a massage table appears in front of the run-down house. For several days a man, a different one from the one-armed man, works on what looks like the top of a car while it sits on the massage table. “I knew this table would be worth the forty bucks,” you hear him say as you’re paused to catch a spearow. One day you see him with a woman and a small child. They’re trying to fit the car piece back on, as best you can tell. The child sits in the front seat and calls out numbers while the man and woman work.

At level 26, you’re chasing something new in your sightings, something you haven’t caught yet. You walk back and forth, back and forth in front of the apartment complex down the street. You’ve heard people wish out loud that they’d tear the apartments down, but they don’t bother you. At level 28, you watched a woman and a man work all day in the heat to mulch along the front of the building and plant a row of day lilies.

There’s a man standing in front of one of the apartment doors. You feel him watching you. You’re torn between the unease of his attention and the appeal of the uncaught Pokemon. As you turn towards home, he calls out to you: “Did you catch ‘em all?”

When you turn off the non-augmented reality, the pokemon become more predictable. They stand there against the backdrop of an animated Eden. Grass sways in the background. At night, fireflies or maybe fairies twinkle in the distance. You could imagine how peaceful it might be inside that world.

It’s easier to catch pokemon in the non-augmented reality, in the world of trees and gentle breezes. It’s easier there.

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The pikachu

“How did you meet your husband?” a student asked me once.

“We both worked at the college,” I told her. “We ran into each other every now and then.”

“I heard you took a class together,” she said. “And you met in the class.”

“No. We were both professors already.”

“But don’t you remember the first time you saw him, though?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “We were friends. He was married to a different woman at the time. It was years before I thought of him as anything but another man’s wife.”

“So, you didn’t know?” she asked. “You didn’t sense something the first time you met.” I could see what she was driving toward. She was determined.

“No,” I said. “I don’t remember the first time we met.”

 #

A sociologist calls these magnified moments. Women tend to tell them about the first time they met the love of their life. The first time they encountered The One. Their eyes met. Music soared. They felt something. Something. Or maybe they tell a story about the proposal. At a ballpark. On the beach. In the Empire State Building. I don’t have a story for that, either.

 #

I caught my first and only Pikachu on August 13 at 5:33 pm. I was sitting on the couch and I looked at my sightings. I recognized the outline of a Pikachu at once. I grabbed my shoes and ran outside. I walked down the block toward the corner and the Pikachu appeared, just like that. Like the Pikachu had been waiting for me all along. That had never happened before and it’s never happened since. I fed the Pikachu a raspberry. I wasn’t taking any chances. I used a great ball. I caught him on the first toss. I sent my brother a picture. I sent my gamer friend a picture. I posted pictures on Facebook. I couldn’t stop smiling for hours. When my husband came home, I met him at the door.

 “I caught a Pikachu,” I told him.

 He didn’t know exactly what a Pikachu was, but he understood.

[smalltownpokemon-blog]

Level 20: the river

There are about 15 Pokestops along the river in Madison and 4 gyms. I spend a lot of time walking along the river.

Almost every day, I take a picture. The pictures are never as good as standing there. They always fail. The pictures never get at how the river is never the same. The pictures are never as beautiful as the river itself.

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Level 23: Sacrifices and regrets

The aerodactyl that got away in the hotel room in Nashville because my husband was trying to tell me something and I had to pretend I was listening so I wasn’t as focused as I should have been. The snorlax I saw as we started our walk to the coffee shop but gave up because it would’ve taken twenty minutes to find. The exeggutor I spotted outside our house one morning but couldn’t go after because I was getting my daughter off to school. The damn blastoise that I successfully tracked down using the technique my gamer friend taught me to walk up and down the sidewalks changing directions and then still got away even though I threw like 20 ultra balls at it. The weird black outline of a thing that shows up in my sightings sometimes at night when I’m in my pajamas and too tired to go find it.

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Level 2: Poke-heaven

I live in a small, historic, river town in southern Indiana.

Okay, I live in downtown Madison, Indiana. It’s a little Poke-heaven. Seriously. The visitor’s center should be packaging Poke-vacations. Poke-getaways. We could become a Poke-mecca.

I live right next to a Catholic church which is also a Pokestop. I can sit on my couch, watching football, and fill up my bag with Pokeballs and potions. My neighbor down the street lives with two Pokestops right outside his door and a gym down the street.

There are eleven gyms in downtown Madison, which is about a mile long and half a mile wide. I can’t count how many Pokestops there are. A lot. See the picture above of downtown Madison, where all the blue squares are Pokestops.

If I lived somewhere else, I would have given up playing Pokemon Go after two days. I certainly wasn’t going to drive anywhere to play. I remember the first time I went to my friend’s house out in the country after downloading the game. There was nothing there. It was a Poke-wasteland.

Living in downtown Madison, I lucked out in a lot of ways. I can walk to a grocery store, to my doctor, my dentist, a pharmacy, a coffee shop, a chocolate shop, a shoe store, a bookstore, a library. I can walk somewhere to buy an appliance. Who else can walk somewhere to buy an appliance?

Living in downtown Madison with Pokemon Go, I hit the lottery. Of course, as a sociologist who studies place, I find this fascinating. Pokemon Go rewards those of us who live in dense, walkable spaces. The distribution of Pokemon makes sense--why would they appear in places where there aren’t many people? 

It’s a simple question, really. Why put all the things where the fewest people are?

[smalltownpokemon-blog]

Level 1: the rattata in the chips

I downloaded Pokemon Go in mid-July. It took me about a week to figure out how to catch a Pokemon and at least a couple of days to suss out what happens at a Pokestop. Gyms scared me. I stayed away from them. I had the idea at first that there would be people there, standing around at the gyms, fighting me on their phones. This sounded more than a little terrifying.

I caught my first Pokemon in our bedroom. It was probably a pidgey. It might have happened because my finger slipped. I was much more interested in taking pictures than I was in catching things. A few days later, I caught a rattata while we were eating dinner at a Mexican restaurant. The ratttata was in our chips. My husband and daughter found this highly amusing.

I was playing mainly to see what everyone else was talking about on social media. I was not yet hooked.

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Tips

Tips for playing Pokemon Go...I don’t have them. This isn’t the place for that. I’m not a gamer. Pokemon Go is the first video game I’ve played in over 15 years. Before that, I had a brief obsession with a couple of Buffy the Vampire Slayer games on XBOX, because, Buffy. Before that, I played Mystery Mansion on a Commodore 64 obsessively with my sister one summer. I contemplated a science project tracking skill development at Donkey Kong. I really liked Pong. It was deeply soothing.

You will not find tips here.

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Level 28: what we talk about when we talk about Pokemon

I’m obsessed with Pokemon Go and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’m that middle-aged woman you see standing in front of the post office staring at her phone and you’re not sure what she’s doing there unless you know that post office also happens to be a gym. I’m that person walking up and down the same block over and over looking for a snorlax. I’m the one muttering at my phone while I waste 20 pokeballs trying to catch a damn pidgey. That’s all me.

I’m also a writer and a college professor and a sociologist. All of that means I don’t just play Pokemon Go. I spend a lot of time thinking about Pokemon Go. Analyzing Pokemon Go. Reflecting on Pokemon Go. 

This is the place where I talk about all of that.