There is a time and there is a place for screwing around with one’s phone, and there is a time to put the phone away and pay attention to the real world. With the release of Pokemon Go, a legion of blitering idiots have been convinced it’s a good idea to have their noses buried in their phones like complete zombies all the time.
Call me an grumpy old traditionalist, but silly phone games are meant for one thing and one thing only – to relieve boredom when there’s absolutely nothing left to do.
There may be a lot of people playing this game and there may be stories out there of people meeting their neighbors for their first time, reconnecting with friends or shut-in homebodies going outside and getting exercise for the first time, but this doesn’t really strike me as a good thing.
So many people are celebrating the fact that people are going out and walking around but they’re completely blind to the fact that society has declined to the point where we need a franchise marketed to children to actually motivate us to go out and do things.
Pokemon Go should be a mirror, showing us just how bad things have got. It’s not right that we’ve nearly lost all sense of community and we spend most of our time on our phones or tablets or computers. Pokemon Go should be a wakeup call.
Sadly, that point will be completely lost in favor of being able to act out childhood fantasies of being the very best like no one ever was. While things may seem all innocent and happy-go-lucky, adults go around trespassing on private property in search of Porygons and drive like complete Drowzees and Slowpokes while on the road.
Pokemon Go is not an excuse to be a moron and not pay attention to the real world. People have been ticketed for going out to parks after hours to catch Pokemon, and I’m left wondering how people can be so completely braindead as to think the rules that keep society together suddenly stop mattering when playing a game.
No surprise, the media is fanning the flames and absolving people of the blame, painting the game as some malicious outside force making people do all these ridiculous things. Headlines shout that Pokemon Go made some people fall of a cliff, that Pokemon Go makes kids walk into busy roads and get hit by cars, and that Pokemon Go is the sole thing responsible for car accidents.
Nothing could be more patently absurd and far from the truth. Pokemon Go didn’t make someone walk into a busy road, people being so incredibly stupid as to think walking into the middle of the road was a good idea is what’s to blame.
Pokemon Go isn’t responsible for a single thing that people do while playing the game, the final responsibility lies in the people choosing to make stupid decisions in the first place. I’m not going to say that people shouldn’t play the game, but people need to realize that just because they’re playing a children’s game doesn’t mean they don’t have any responsibility to act like adults anymore.