"It's like we're living in this weird, technological wonderland," the woman laughed. She was smiling, after having just caught a Magikarp in the middle of the woodlands trail. I had just met her, a half-mile away from town. Both of our phones were out, and we were bonding over our quest to find rare pokémon along the Wallkill river. "This is what technology is supposed to do!"
She was maybe thirty-five or forty, and had downloaded Pokémon Go that morning after hearing so much about it. She was friendly and smiling, and a bit unsure of where was best to find these digital monsters. I never caught her name, but we stood and talked about how this was a good excuse to go for a jog. We parted ways with a laugh, wishing each other good luck. If we hadn't both been playing this game along this woodland path, I would have walked by her without barely meeting her gaze.
Oh, Magikarp: the eternal joke of the series.
Games are supposed to be a way to bring people together, in theory: could it be that this strange little phone game of wild goose chases was the way to finally do that?
A First Foray Into Pokémon Go
For those of you not already obsessed, or sick, of hearing about this new game, here's a brief run down: Pokémon Go is a game that uses maps of our world, then blends that information with augmented reality to populate our world with the very popular Japanese pocket monsters. Keeping a map open on your mobile device lets you hunt for them down streets, through fields, and even your house, if you're lucky. You can make them stronger, evolve them, and fight over parts of the world that have been marked as gyms. You can have fun just seeing which cute creatures might appear on your street, or go all in, fighting over your downtown to keep your name in big lights above the nearest church or bar.
Since the game was announced as back in September 2015, there has been a lot of hype that came before this. The catchy "Gotta Catch 'em All" Slogan of the series was in full force way before it finally came out this last week, on July 6th. Yes, I've been a fan of Pokémon for a while, but I wasn't sure if I would be a fan of this game in particular. Wasn't this just a way to market a famous kid's game to the masses?
College Campus: Treasure Trove and Treacherous Terrain
On Friday, July 8th, I was able to walk around SUNY New Paltz campus during my lunch break and right after work, specifically to explore Pokémon Go. Pokéstops - locations that could be anything from memorial plaques to churches to just well known street art works - let you get items like more pokeballs or potions to heal your creatures. I found that the more pokéstops in a location, the better chance you were going to find pokémon. I had no luck that morning looking around my house, since there was no popular locations in the middle of a woodland residential street. I was hoping I'd get luckier on a college campus.
The game uses maps information to help populate an area, and since SUNY New Paltz is mostly built around a pond, it was only natural that a few water based pokemon began to appear pretty quickly. Poliwhirls definitely liked to appear along the water, and a little further away, poison based pokémon seemed common: Nidorans and Venonats skulked outside of the administrative buildings. I discovered that parking lots seemed to attract flying pokemon, like Pidgey or Zubat. The night before, I had only gotten four or five monsters after a half hour of walking about a state road a few miles away from town. On campus, I got more than that in fifteen minutes. I also ran into gyms, and after capturing enough to hit level 5 in the game, I was able to challenge one to a battle. My guess was, since it was summer, I'd have a chance to try to take a few and hold them before students lived back on campus full time.
I was dead wrong: there were summer students, as well as orientation students on campus. While most of the pokemon I had gathered started with a CP (Combat Points) rating of under 100, many of these gyms had fully evolved monsters with ratings of 400 or more. Some people were taking this game very, very seriously. I slunk home in shame, and found myself thanks to thunder storms and bad connections, stayed home until late at night. I went out into town for a little bit, and realized that main street New Paltz was also a hot spot. After grabbing a few more pokemon before I lost battery, I went home, and went online to look up more about this game. I realized how hooked I was...but also how massive the game seemed to be taking off. Friends were talking about organizing day-long capture runs down to major cities. I arranged with my friend Reid to check out New Paltz properly at lunch the next day, just to see how big this game was.
I had fun on Friday playing, don't get me wrong, but I wasn't really impressed. I had no idea what was waiting for me the next day in town.
The Streets Are Alive With Trainers
"Nothing to see here...just a bunch of 30+ grown men, looking for cute Japanese monsters," Reid muttered, as we checked our phones near a street corner. It was 1 PM Saturday, and while the skies were overcast, the servers were holding strong, and the rain was staying away. Both of us lived far away from a main town street, and so meeting up like this made sense. My wife Jess had come with, since she had been a fan of the games years ago, and figured it was a good excuse to go for a walk.
New Paltz is my home town, and I love it because of the weird patchwork quilt that it is. It has one of the oldest streets in America, and is also sometimes consiered to be a sibling town to Woodstock, due to the amount of hippie culture that permeates it. It's located at the edge of the Shawangunk mountains and miles of untouched forest, but only about 100 miles outside of New York City. It's filled with young life due to the college that is attached to it, has a city pulse thanks to it's proximity to NYC and the many visitors that come up from there, but also carries with it the feeling of a laid back, country village. Bars meant for noisy young crowds are only yards away from bars placed in historic old buildings, filled with creaky wooden boards and open billiard tables.
The amount of memorial plaques meant I could find Pokéstops everywhere.
I'm not exxagerating that playing Pokémon Go through these streets reminded me why I love this town so much. We walked down Huguenot street pretty early on, and walked up to the old graveyard. The old rebuilt church was one of the many pokéstops, but walking into the historic graveyard revealed a hidden one: a plaque set into the ground in memory of the founders. While I'll honestly admit I was really hoping to find the place crawling with ghost pokemon, my friends and I found ourselves actually looking through the gravestones again with fresh eyes. Sure, we had done this before, but it felt new again, having been drawn in by the markers on the map.
It was here that we ran into fellow wanderers for the first time. "Are you playing that new game?" She was friendly, and looked excited to not be the only one wandering around staring at their phone. "Do you know how this map works?" We talked a bit, and she was a tour guide for the Huguenot street, about our age. She had played the original game as a kid, but hadn't had a chance to get back into the craze until now. It was her first walk to look for monsters, and we talked about it. A few moments later, another tour guide waved at us, and gave us the thumbs up. She was also playing the game on her break, headed to the graveyard. As my group walked up the road, two more women on a tour were looking at their phones. They saw us, quickly hid them as if they had been doing something wrong, then took them back out giggling after we walked by.
Everyone Wants To Be The Very Best
In the next two hours, Reid and I ran into twenty other players of the Pokémon Go, and that's only the ones that we could confirm by talking to them or seeing their screens. As we took a walk back to the cars to put money on the meter, we met up with our friend Charlie. He had been in town since 8 AM that morning, and now had captured so many pokemon he was picking and training only the strongest, transfering (selling) the rest for points to train the ones he wanted. He was walking so much because of the eggs you can find in the game: after putting an egg into an incubator, it will hatch after walking a certain amount of kilometers, sometimes netting you rare finds.
We ran into a couple, Dana and Mike, who laughed as they saw us talking about the Oddish we had found on the nearby street. They had just started playing that morning, but had spent most of the day wandering around looking for more as a team. Dana mentioned how she hadn't ever really played the games before, but was now being sucked in right alongside Mike in looking for more. It was a great excuse to walk around town and get outside.
There was a kid, probably in high school, with brightly dyed hair that practically ran by us twice as we criss-crossed up the streets. A man with headphones on and a vaporizer between his lips walked up to a Pokéstop, made a fistpumping action as he obviously had captured something interesting, and kept going. We ran to where he was, and found a Bellsprout in the road.
The town was alive with trainers, and we saw some multiple times as we wove up and down between main street and the Huguenot district. Some trainers had used items on a Pokéstop to make them more likely to attract Pokémon for everyone. When we sat down at one of our favorite bars for a break, the server saw our phones and quickly launched in about how he was happy to have just evolved an Eevee before his shift started. His name was James, and as we shared what exactly we had found where, he mentioned how he had been experimenting with using his longboard to quickly get about town to snatch up rare pokemon on his map.
By the time my wife and I went home, we hadn't realized just how long we had spent just walking the streets of our hometown. We had a blast the entire time, and Jess had enjoyed the experience, even if she didn't have her own smart phone. She enjoyed the excuse to look around town with friends, and meet other people. Some people were very friendly, grinning stupidly at how many others seemed to be enjoying this game. Others seemed embarrassed, not wanting to meet the eyes of other Pokémon trainers in the making. A few people looked confused by seeing small groups of nerds huddled together around their phones, and couldn't help but ask what was going on. By the end of the day, I couldn't help but ask myself: is this going to be a phenomon that lasts only a weekend or two, or am I going to see this from now on around where I live?
Sunday Morning Hike
Server problems with Pokémon Go have been well documented, and I would be remiss not to mention them. There were gyms scattered around New Paltz, but as of writing this, it's been near impossible to fight at them. Lag seems to favor the defender of the gym, and so after having to heal up my pokémon several times against invulnerable foes, Reid and I decided we would wait to try and take on the gyms for another day. We also realized that by playing at off peak times - morning or evening - we could have more stable service. With that in mind, I got up early on Sunday and went exploring.
There was a gym, set at the overlook over New Paltz, and a good part of the Hudson Valley. I found a Clefairy there, as well as a few other flying and grass types. I found myself just enjoying the sunlight as I stepped off onto a trail nearby, and walked a little. There were certainly less pokémon, but the ones I found felt more special just because I was working to get them. I drove into town, but to the rail trail - a straight path that goes for miles along what was once a rail line decades ago. I walked into the side paths and found Bellsprouts and more Clefairies. From what I can tell, each region can have some of it's own flavor by having specific pokémon. Seemed like town and the college had Eevees in spades, and the forested areas would grant us Clefairies if you went hunting. I've talked with friends that live near old factories, and they boast about mangemites: something I have yet to see. Still, based on the history of the town, finding the silly fairy-type pokémon makes sense, alongside Ghost types when I would walk by old buildings.
Even in a digital game, it feels like my hometown has a life and flavor of it's own. I'm loving that Pokémon Go is giving me an excuse to explore that again.
This Is Only The Beginning
I know this sounds hopelessly optimistic, but I think that the Pokémon Go phenomenon is a good thing, and that for a lot of people, adults and kids alike, this 'game' is going to be a positive. Yes, there's been some pretty interesting stories that have come up from this: my friend Reid explained to us that apparently, where he works has a gym on the premises. Where he works is also a restricted base of operations. The front gate security has had to turn away multiple people who have tried to drive onto the property in order to fight pokémon. There are already requests by Australian police for citizens to please watch where they walk while playing, and not run into traffic. Yet, I can't help but be excited for all the good things. I've been trying to walk a good mile a day just to stay in shape, and this weekend I've gone more than five without complaining, distracted by the search for digital loot. My friends list on Facebook is just a wall of people joking about how they haven't walked this much in days.
The mascot for SUNY New Paltz is the Hawk. So, it was perfect that this was where I found a Pidgey.
I'm excited to see where things go next. Yes, I know the servers are having issues, and that the game has some bugs and eccentricities that need to be worked out, but the amount of fun I've had, and the amount of fun I've experienced other people having is undeniable. I've seen some corners of the internet seethe about how Pokémon Go 'isn't a real game', and is only for casual players.
Call it what you like, but I can't deny how much enjoyment I've seen a community get out of it. I can't deny how it let me share brief, but wonderful moments with strangers. Like my friend along the Rail Trail said at the start of this article: we're living in an age of technology. Oftentimes, this technology seems to divide us, and let us hide behind our screens. It's nice for once to find a game that uses a screen to go out and enjoy reality a little bit more.
