The year is 2025 and, nine years later, I’m one of the people still playing Pokémon Go. The world has changed since the game came out in the heady summer of 2016. Technology no longer seems to have as optimistic a future as it once did. A worldwide pandemic saw us retreat from each other and shelter in place (only for those efforts to be undone in the United States by a baffling vendetta against public health). I moved from New York to Los Angeles.
That last point is perhaps the most relevant to Pokémon Go. Living in a city made it really easy to play a game where you needed to walk around. Spinning a PokéStop or fighting at a Gym were things I did on my way to work or while waiting for the subway. If I’m walking twenty blocks to a movie theater I may as well catch some Pokémon along the way.
It’s much less easy in the suburban sprawl of Southern California. If I’m going anywhere I’m probably have to drive there. Things are far here, a quick errand usually means having to get in the car. Public transport is inconsistent at best and the desert heat — combined with a public infrastructure that does nothing to account for the sun — so driving becomes the most convenient choice, though it often doesn’t really feel like a choice. And you really shouldn’t play Pokémon Go while you’re driving.
So Pokémon Go is played in snatches: while I’m in line at the pharmacy or walking from my car to the grocery store. A PokéStop spin here and there when I can. The occasional Raid if there’s one I can take on by myself — gone are the always-busy Raids of Midtown Manhattan. The game is an oddly lonely affair. With a population so spread out (New York’s population density is around fifteen times that of Los Angeles County) I’m less likely to run into other people playing at the same time. Couple that with a populace that gets around via car and happenstance encounters dwindle. I’m not going to do that Raid on the way because that would mean having to find parking and walk over, and neither is anyone else.
My experiences with Pokémon Go feel like a reflection of my feelings about cities. Though Los Angeles is a city in name, the sprawl of it robs it of those everyday interactions that make somewhere like New York or London or Singapore or Tokyo so idiosyncratic. You don’t happen upon things — be it a new restaurant, a bit of performance art, or, yes, a PokéStop — when you’re ensconced in a car on your way from A to B. It’s all so siloed off.
And yet I still play Pokémon Go. The game has morphed from a way for me to pass time while walking to a reason for me to actually take a walk in the first place. I’ll go on walks during my lunch break because there’s a Gym nearby. If there’s something just in walking distance from home I might walk the distance, sweltering heat be damned, if it means I can hatch an egg on the way. It’s odd that an activity I used to do all the time is now something I often seek out due to gamification. Or maybe gamification has helped me remember that I do, in fact, like walking. Pokémon Go offers a tangible reason or me to get out and about.
Also walking is supposedly healthy, so I guess there’s that too.
Essays, Not Rants! 