So apparently I'm one of those people now. The kind who stands on the sidewalk at 10:45pm staring at a glowing rectangle, swiping at little cartoon monsters that aren't actually there. Pokemon Go went live here on Wednesday and by last night my whole street had turned into a slow-motion parade of people walking loops around the same three blocks, phones held out in front of them like they were dowsing for water.
I want to be clear I did not plan on downloading this thing. My nephew was over Wednesday night, practically vibrating, telling me I had to get it, and I figured fine, fifteen minutes, whatever. Four hours later my phone was down to 9 percent battery and I'd walked further around my own neighborhood than I have in probably two years combined.
Here's the part nobody explains well until you're actually doing it: the game doesn't just conjure Pokemon out of thin air wherever you happen to be standing. It maps them onto real spots using GPS, and a lot of the "PokeStops" turn out to be things you've walked past a hundred times without noticing. There's a little brick mural two streets over I didn't even know existed until Wednesday night, and now it's got a lure module running on it and eight teenagers parked on the curb next to it.
The servers were a mess, for what it's worth. Half of Wednesday evening the app just spun trying to log in, or it would kick you out mid-catch right as you were about to close a Pokeball on something decent. Niantic, the company behind this (it used to be a Google internal project before it got spun out a couple years back), clearly did not expect this many people on day one. I don't totally blame them, nobody predicts this stuff correctly, but it does say something that a mobile game about catching imaginary animals managed to overwhelm infrastructure that presumably got stress tested before launch.
The thing I actually want to complain about, because complaining is basically what this blog is for at this point, is the account permissions. Sign in with a Google account on iOS and it asks for way more access than a game like this has any business wanting. There's already chatter online about it and I don't blame anyone for being annoyed. I used a throwaway account out of pure habit, the same reflex I've had since some sketchy Facebook quiz app tried to read my inbox back around 2012, and I'd tell anyone else to do the same until Niantic actually explains what it's grabbing and why.
The AR camera mode, where it drops the monster onto whatever your actual camera is pointed at, is a fun trick for about ninety seconds and then it's just draining your battery for nothing, so I turned it off almost immediately. Catching is identical either way, the monster just floats over a plain background instead of your driveway. My guess is most people turn this off within the first hour and just don't mention it, because the screenshots look cooler with it left on.
What actually got me, more than the game itself, was watching my street fill up with people around 11pm on a Wednesday. Not driving, not sitting on porches with a beer, just walking, phones up, nodding at each other like they were in on something. A guy I've lived near for three years and never once spoken to asked me if the Squirtle by the fire station had respawned yet. I didn't have an answer for him. I'm not convinced this is going to hold my attention past the weekend, honestly, my thumbs already ache and I still haven't finished the browser extensions post I started two weeks ago, but I'll admit the block hasn't felt this weird and alive in a long time.