(Note: This article was written before a game-changing event happened
around Pokémon Go. I will talk about it tomorrow.)
Seeing the popularity of the previous post, I decided to discuss Pokémon
Go some more. Clickbait? No, not at all. Let’s simply say that after about
three weeks spent playing this game, not only have I been able to get a general
idea of the game, I have also seen just how much it divided people.
I don’t like saying bad things about Quebec, but we’re a society of
complainers. It seems to me sometimes that our national sport isn’t hockey;
it’s complaining and whining on social media. Or wherever the public is given a
place to vent their frustration for everyone else to hear. In some cases, it
can be justified, but a general lack of research combined with a lot of
misinformation leads to people taking the wrong causes or the wrong points of
view. What’s more, the media, as always, is a mirror that actually deforms the
reality. Obviously, very rarely if ever do we discuss good news; why? That
doesn’t bring an audience in. They talk about the tragedies that occur because
of it. They talk about the idiots who do stupid shit because of the app. THAT,
my friend, is what the media wants to show. Because it’s less about showing the
truth than it is about showing drama.
If an idiot does something idiotic while playing the app, the problem is
not the app, the problem is the idiot. Yet, for every idiot who gets their
hands on Pokémon Go, there’s at least a thousand intelligent players. If not
more. But obviously, nobody ever talks about these intelligent players; there’s
not a news story there. And thus news outlets, caricaturists, will gladly point
out the addiction caused by Pokémon Go…
…and thus that’s what the larger public gets exposed to. Therefore, I’ve
seen such extreme points of view as someone calling all Pokémon Go players “addicted
zombies”, and I’ve seen other joyful similar terms. At the same time, I have
lived two wildly different experiences with the people discussing the game.
The date is July 29th. My birthday. I had work at 3 PM, so I
go Pokémon-seeking for a moment, in the hopes of catching a female Nidoran
(kinda uncommon) or a Psyduck (pretty damn rare). I live in a suburban area, so
Pokémon spawns here are kinda rare; I’m just thankful I live a minute of walk
away from a common spawning point, and two minutes away from a Pokéstop. I go
out and see there’s a father with his two kids, they’re playing Pokémon Go;
Heck, they immediately recognize me as a player since I was looking at my
screen while walking. They tell me they’re looking for Eevee, since they’re the
next most common thing after Rattata, Weedle and Pidgey. I can see why, you
need 75 Eevee candies to get all three Eeveelutions. The kids seemed to happy
to be running around catching virtual beasts on their devices, with the parent
nearby to watch over them. And the father seemed pretty happy too to follow
them around, ask them if they had spotted any good Pokémon nearby; he even
called Eevee by name! Seems like a cool dad to me.
On the other side, I’ve discussed with someone who is completely the
opposite; so reviled and disgusted by Pokémon Go that she felt justified to
insult everyone who played it. I won’t name names. I’ll just say it happened on
Facebook, after someone posted one of the pictures shown higher (the Pikachu
with the sign sending people down the cliff) on a gaming community. She was
quick on the insult button and peppering her posts with the “exasperated”
emoticon (though everyone will tell you it looked like the “angry” one. She
wouldn’t stop even after being told off by just about everyone else, she was
also putting down anyone who claimed “well, it makes us go out and exercise!”
by saying they should have had the will to do that without the app anyway. I
stepped in at that point. In the end, it seemed pretty clear that she had no
desire to understand the appeal, she was bashing on everyone who said anything
good about the app.
Alas, a person in Quebec who complains about something without knowing a
damn thing on what they’re complaining about, it’s more common than Pidgey. I
checked on the woman’s page and saw she had two young children; I tried saying
that it was inevitable, her children would someday want video games at home,
and that she might actually enjoy going out for a walk with them playing
something like Pokémon Go. To which she explained that the father of these kids
is, I quote, “a gamer nolife”. How bad it really is, I don’t know; she also
says that she won’t be the “cool” kind of parent, that in her mind kids should
just play outside to make friends and not play video games, and that if her
kids want anything even tangentially electronic they’ll have to pay for it
themselves.
To which I replied that teens today need at least a cell phone because
the world around us is crazy enough and we never know what might happen; her
kids are too young for cell phones, but once they reach the teenage years they
will need one to stay in contact with friends, and with her. To which she
replied that cell phones get stolen all the time anyway, that all their friends
will have cell phones so that’s the ones her kids will use if they ever need to
call, etc. Basically closed to any kind of argument I tried to put forth. It’s
her choice; I can’t change her opinion. Still no apologies for rudeness either
even though she got significantly more polite after I started bringing in valid
arguments based on the future of her children. And at least she stopped posting
there after we had our discussion, so there’s that.
Just goes to show the two completely different mindsets about the game,
and two completely different ways to approach parent-child relationships. One
plays with their kids even if it’s video games, the other refuses to even let
them anywhere near a cell phone or a game console. It’s no secret that the news
are usually reporting on the negative side of the app, though some news stories
have popped up recently, showing more of the positive sides. The old man’s sign
on my previous Pokémon Go article just shows that when someone hates something
with a passion and refuses to understand the appeal, they’ll just close
themselves off and refuse any argumentation. That’s not how life works; you
need to at least try to understand what you’re so vehemently against, so that
you can have legitimate reasons to dislike it and not base yourself solely on
hearsay and the fun of hating on something popular.
Not that there aren’t already plenty of reasons to hate on Pokémon Go
based on the app and the company themselves, excluding anything related to the
stupidity shown by some who are playing…
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