Today’s article is not about
travelling, but about adventures and discoveries. Indeed, how can we omit a game which made people get out of their homes? Caused
so many incidents? Became incredibly popular? People who haven’t heard about Pokémon
Go may not understand why a stranger is going back and forth while tapping the
phone. Is he/she taking a photo? Recording a video? Searching something on the
map?
Here are more real examples:
police arrested a man who was catching pokémons near the church. They found
something strange about him, and thus, something potentially dangerous. In the
USA man thought that a passerby was catching pokémons during the night. He approached
the player to discuss the game and got stabbed.
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| justinluucreative.com |
Pokémon Go is a mobile game
based on augmented reality and a player’s geolocation, which was released on 6 of
July in Australia, New Zealand, and
the United States. A few days ago it was released in Germany, the United
Kingdom, Italy, Spain and Portugal. In the nearest time developers are going to
release it in more countries, however the game has already become so popular,
that mobile users from the countries where the game hasn’t been released yet,
found ways to install it.
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| 9gag.com |
“I choose you”
According to the research
of SurveyMonkey, the game already has more than 20 million of active users per
day, which is more than the market’s previous hits, such as Candy Crush, Draw
Something and Clash Royale. The game became the first on iTunes in the USA.
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| justinluucreative.com |
However, it may be not very
clear why the game became popular so quickly. After all, augmented reality
games were launched about a year ago. For example, a sci-fi game called Ingress (which was made by a company invested by Nintendo). Nevertheless, Pokémon
Go may be successful due to the fact that more and more people got ready to try
this technology out. Pokémon characters made it easier for the company to
promote the game as most of the users are already familiar with them. I
personally can’t deny the fact that the game itself is very user-friendly and
not sophisticated.
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| justinluucreative.com |
Good?
A lot of online magazines
point out that the game has a good effect on the health: it’s said
that Pokémon Go reduces anxiety, depression, motivates to workout and just
obviously improves mood. So is it just a sunshine and fresh air that help users
to tackle mental problems? Some players claim that they got more confident
knowing that people around them are playing the same game and this little fact
makes it easier to meet new friends.
It took Michelle Obama 8 years to convince people to run outside and be active.— Steve (@AgitatedStove) 7 июля 2016 г.
Nintendo did it in 24 hours.#PokemonGo
Bad?
However, even though it has
passed just a few days since the game’s launch, there were some incidents
connected with the game, and some of them were significant. Players go into
dangerous neighborhoods in order to catch imaginary creatures, get robbed, have
car accidents and so on. Some gamers were fired. BuzzFeed
says that one woman got upon an insane amount of spider webs while playing the
game.
Ethics
Besides, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s administration asked visitors
not to play the game inside the museum, as it’s not an appropriate place to do
it. The same claims have some other
museums.
And there are more questions
related with ethics. Is it ethical to catch pokémons on the cemeteries? In churches?
In hospital corridors? Such examples sound unreasonable, but you can find a
real story of each on the Internet.
All in all, Pokémon Go is extremely popular right now, that resulted in an enormous boost for Nintendo. The Internet went crazy too: online newspapers write articles about new incidents every day, social networks are full of memes and YouTubers make videos promoting or judging the app.
Do you play Pokémon Go? If it hasn't been released in your country yet, are you waiting for it?
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