Waiting For Love Or Death With Pokemon Go

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No, I haven’t downloaded it to my android.
My professional life and my thoughts and writing are still too mired in direct human-to-human interaction.  I will admit to feeling a kinship, with some minimal sense of attraction, to “cute” characters, mostly because that seems to be my husband’s favorite adjective for me.

I suppose I should give a very official link to download it; it’s free, although it did allegedly make the developers 1.6 million dollars in the first day when they released it.

I will not, however, cite any of the reviews I have plowed through, which include technical praise and complaints about things like rapid battery drainage and the need to connect to an auxiliary battery to play over two hours.

I am finding there is a massive (and potentially controversial) psychosocial phenomenon.  The human race is going to have to get a handle on what is happening.

The seduction is primal.  Being a hunter (for survival ) may be the oldest of human behaviors other than sex.

It is certainly older than having women grow grain to help folks.

The lure is great — far greater, far more seductive, than, for example, growing a virtual farm with your android.  You don’t have to wait for crops.

People have primordially wanted to capture cute things.  To hold a bird in the hand, or even a butterfly in a net.  Even if the animals might die if so “imprisoned” indefinitely.

But with cute little Pikachus and whatevers, (Pokemon is reportedly a shortened version of “Pocket Monsters”) no existential life and death crises. Just easy-to-advance levels, according to game reviewers.

Apparently, the first thing the app does is get your position on (mother) earth.  This is a necessary step to locate these cute creatures who only exist in an “augmented” reality, visible only to other game players.

This is the first step I have trouble with.  I have often refused geographic location information on simpler games.  I actually enjoy my sense of privacy, and would rather NOT feel that a Pikachu (let alone another unknown human) were present when I am home alone with my husband.

The operative idea here is the other humans, who are in competition at the hunt.  This is a human-human interaction, in an analogy to the kind of competition that causes people to start wars.

There may perhaps be some benefits for folks who are so impaired by anxiety and depression that they can’t leave their homes without the desire to hunt cute little beings.

There were early, less mature, stages of my life, like when I left home and started college, that I thought every single human being was someone I wanted to know.

Then I became more discriminating, knowing that people who had tastes and interests in common with me were people I would more enjoy knowing.

Reviews of Pokemon go are already consisting mainly of meetings of total strangers in popular public places.  The common ground between these people is an interest in catching cute virtual entities.

Human time and energy are precious.  I love meeting new people, and I still believe something can be learned from pretty much everyone.  I have learned to embrace technological advances, as technology advances human hopes and dreams.

But in this context, I am not sure where these kinds of relationships may lead.

This feels like a giant human experiment.  It could lead to any of the extremes of human behavior, from love and marriage as the best to violence and murder as the worst.

My role here is standing on the sidelines with a clipboard, and collecting data.

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