Pokemon Go is on everyone’s lips and all displays. But Cortyn has not been caught by the hype at all.
If the spark of “Pokemon Go” doesn’t ignite
Oh dear. How the whole world is currently going crazy about “Pokemon Go”! Just this hypetrain completely passed by me. Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s currently going round and round in circles around me and doesn’t want to settle down. It’s annoying. A little.
After all, it’s not my lack of interest in Pokemon. I come from the generation where you bought Pokemon Red on the first day for 70 DM (does anyone still remember Deutsche Mark?) to secretly play it under the blanket with a flashlight on the GameBoy, which today is only called “lunchbox” due to its size.
When I heard about the game announcement back then, I was pretty hyped. Catching Pokemon in the real world? Awesome! Nevertheless, I am not captivated by the end product at all. It feels a bit like Farmville, where you keep doing the same thing over and over again. Collecting more and more of the same Pokemon to progress.
Sure, in the future, there will be more features, such as friend battles. But I absolutely can’t understand how you can develop a Pokemon game without friend battles in the launch version. After all, that was already possible almost 20 years ago on the GameBoy with the link cable.
A Cycle of Aversion
But somehow it’s also a cycle where my aversion escalates. Everywhere you only hear about the game. What astonishes me the most is that the “parent generation” of mine, who always accused you of staring at a monitor all day because it would give you square eyes, is now doing nothing else. Suddenly it’s “in” and suddenly you have to justify why you’re not playing along. A flipped world, I would say.
When I wished back then that the “old folks” would take more interest in gaming, I surely didn’t mean it like this. The more people get on my nerves with the game, the more it annoys me. An eternal cycle.
But all the stories surrounding the game disturb me as well. An American shoots at teenagers because they are playing Pokemon Go and he thinks they are breaking somewhere. Several teenagers break into a military training area where live ammunition is being used. A driver crashes into a tree because he is gaming while driving.
Yes, I know that these are just isolated cases and that most people are just having fun – and they should. It’s probably best to handle it like the Cologne Carnival: Just lock yourself in the apartment for a week and hope that everything will be back to normal afterward.
Actually, I also wanted to ask if the hashtag “Pokemongo” is not a bit poorly chosen for Germany – but hey, in the last few weeks people haven’t been so mindful of fitting hashtags if you think back to #Nice.
Until then: Have fun with the game, bring me a Charizard and don’t hurt yourselves. I’ll bury myself until it’s over.
