Go Pokémon Go

LATE PAST MIDNIGHT on Monday, once everyone at home had gone to sleep, Lhendup G Bhutia walked into the guest room of his matchbox apartment that he liked to call his study, climbed a wooden stool which he had stacked atop a white plastic chair at the centre of the room, and, looking up at the ceiling fan, strung a rope around it with a noose large enough for the job at hand.

The following morning, when well-wishers asked his partner why he had done what he had, and if she had noticed anything suspicious, she confirmed that he had indeed been behaving oddly for the last few days. “He’s been stepping out a lot these last few days,” she said. “Not sleeping, like. Not talking. A little cuckoo really. Just smiling into his cellphone.”

In the last few days, Bhutia had indeed been behaving oddly. For, just like the world around him, with his face buried deep in his cellphone and a grin across his face, he had discovered Pokémon Go. Every morning, he would fill a flask with warm water, pack a portable charger, a sandwich, some crisps occasionally, and a raincoat in his backpack, and with an umbrella in one hand and a cellphone in another, he would head into the great wilderness of Mumbai to catch Pokémon. He ditched his car for the train. For cars are too fast to catch Pokémon. And train stations have many Pokéstops. He discovered the virtues of slow-moving buses. He began to visit small temples, dargahs and churches. He was seen attempting to break into a Parsi fire temple, forbidden to outsiders. He walked along the coastline, sprinted under flyovers, trudged through Dharavi, stood by large drains and spent hours at malls. He began to take long routes that involved more gardens and lakes. And he kept odd hours—to catch more Pokémon. He even asked his partner to drive slowly around the city so he could visit the Pokéstops he couldn’t reach on foot.

When asked about his obsession, the 31-year-old would reply ambitiously, “I want to capture all the Pokémon that have been released by the game.” He moved rapidly through the online game, jumping from one level to another, once he got a hang of it, reaching Level 7 in a matter of days. And then the weekend arrived. So he joined forces with several Pokémon Go groups to cover two different parts of the city on foot—Bandra at midnight, where traffic would not come in the way of finding Pokémon, and Marine Drive by evening, where the Arabian Sea lashing by the coastline would hopefully throw up a number of rare ones that could not be found onshore. And then, the servers, overloaded as they were, crashed across the world.

Bhutia never really recovered from that depression, it appears.

TO SAY POKÉMON Go has taken the world by storm is to understate the obvious. On 1 April 2014, Google released, as a part of an April Fool’s joke, a video on YouTube called ‘Google Maps: Pokémon Challenge’. Mashing its maps utility application with the popular videogame franchise Pokémon, it jokingly showed people hunting these fictionalised critters using the app. The video was so widely viewed that Niantic, a software company that was then a part of Google, began developing it into a mobile video game. Two years after that April Fool’s video, Niantic, in collaboration with the Japanese company that owns the right to the characters of the media franchise, The Pokémon Company, released Pokémon Go.

This is an Augmented Reality (AR) game that places little animated virtual creatures in the real world that can be seen on your screen. Gamers have to move around town looking for Pokémon, which are to be powered up and ‘evolved’ to fight battles against the Pokémon of other players. The game has become an overnight sensation.

It has not yet been released in India, although it is available online through several third-party sources. In the US, it has overtaken Tinder and Twitter in its number of users. According to many surveys, its US users spend more time here than any other online social network like Facebook or Snapchat. According to SurveyMonkey, the US has around 26 million users playing the app on iOS and Android phones. Reports say the market capitalisation of Nintendo, one of the three companies that is part of The Pokémon Company, has more than doubled since the game’s release.

Although AR has long been the stuff of science fiction, it is only now that the concept is gaining mass popularity with this game. Here, your real environment is ‘augmented’ with computer- generated images of Pokémon, which you go about gathering and can be used to battle one another. In Halo or Grand Theft Auto and other such first-person games, we move around in imagined cities or fictional locations modelled on places like San Andreas, but Pokémon Go plugs us into the actual world around. By overlaying an imagined scenario on our real world, it blurs the boundary between what is real and what is virtual.

Where this game, future iterations of it or other AR games will take us, only time can tell. But the direction appears to have been set by Pokemon Go, which has turned the old gaming experience on its head. Players are not asked—unhealthily to many mental health researchers—to sit by a gaming console for hours on end. It instead pushes people to go outdoors, explore landmarks, and to ditch the car and walk for hours (for Pokémon eggs can be hatched only if you walk for several kilometres). Using GPS and augmented reality to hunt and catch Pokémon, many people are now discovering for the first time the great wilderness of their cities. Some have injured themselves, walking into closed doors and lampposts, but then, as others have said, these are mostly nerds out in the urban wild for the first time.

Many claim the game has made them healthier by encouraging them to go out. Pokémon eggs can be hatched only if you walk for several kilometres

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The craze seems to be redefining our relationship with technology. Whether or not it was intended, the game is also becoming a major group activity. People are gathering for organised Pokéwalks and Pokécrawls. They activate ‘lure modules’, a feature of the game which lures Pokémon to the vicinity. Whenever one is spotted, players alert their allies of the location. In Mumbai, for instance, people are sharing online excel sheets of various Pokémon seen in different parts of the city. Some are reporting that the flooding in cities like Mumbai and Delhi have revealed water Pokémon. A few days ago, the appearance of a rare Vaporeon in New York’s Central Park, which was captured on video, led to a scene that made a user tweet, ‘I honestly am wondering if we’re on the verge of a global breakdown.’

In Mumbai, Pokémon fever is palpable in other ways. Eshita Dharia, who along with Pawan Shahri runs a nightlife portal, Latenight Mumbai, is planning what she calls a PokéGo Bar Crawl across Mumbai’s Lower Parel region on 29 July. “It’s great, isn’t it?” asks Dharia, who, after admittedly walking into closed doors, is now trying to limit her time spent on the game. “People are getting to meet with each other over a game and become friends,” she says.

The game has found its way into the social political scene as well. Just last week, after Brexit led to Theresa May replacing David Cameron as Britain’s prime minister, pictures went viral online of Cameron’s car driving through a Venonat and the appearance of a Zubat at May’s first press statement.

There have also been reports of people engrossed in the game having got injured or mugged. Instances have been reported of robbers waiting at lonely Pokéstops, or activating lure modules to draw unsuspected victims looking for the creatures to lonely spots. But there are a lot of positive stories too. Many say the game has eased people’s anxiety and depression by motivating them to go out. One player at a Pokémon walk in Mumbai speaks of how his spirit has been lifted by the game after the gloom of terror attacks across the globe. “There may be many bad people with different ideas and [ideological] affiliations,” he says, “but it shows you that there are good people too. And if we try, we can all get along.”

ON A RECENT Sunday afternoon, where the sky threatened to submerge Mumbai in a torrential downpour, Lhendup G Bhutia met a group that had gathered at one of the city’s largest railway stations, Churchgate. A Pokémon walk scheduled the previous night had to be cancelled because of a server crash. Today, it was up and running. The group was large, most of them school and college kids. Some, like an anime character, had their hair coloured white with fluorescent green highlights. Some boys had stitched a white cloth on red caps in honour of Ash Ketchum, a popular Pokémon character. There were several older players too who sought others in their age group to hang out with. One of them, having recently moved from the Philippines to Mumbai on work, was using the game as a way to explore the city and make new friends.

The face of the organiser of the event, a pleasant college student with an Afro hairstyle, emerged from a curtain of corkscrew curls to inform Bhutia that he was on level 18. Many of the players, far more dedicated than him, he realised, were already on levels 22 and 23. What an enviable feat, he thought, given the poor data connections here.

Azam Sebastian, an engineering student who downloaded the game hours after its US release, had always dreamt as a child of a world improved upon by Pokémon. “I would always think how great it would be if there were Pokémon in the real world,” he said. “And now, who would have imagined [it], this has come true.” After Sebastian began looking for Pokémon in his neighbourhood, he took a cab from his house in Goregaon to his grandmother’s in Thane, catching rare Pokémon and claiming ownership at various virtual empty Pokémongymns. “All these places were empty. Nobody had staked claim to them,” he said. Within just a few days, he had 21 gymns under him. He reached level 14 within weeks, only to be laid low by the flu for a week. When he returned to the game, all his gymns had been taken over by others.

The group split up into batches and walked from the station for several kilometres along the shoreline, but the server, having crashed yet again, refused to restart. Too many people were onto it, apparently. The rest of the time was spent showing one another various Pokémon players had captured and evolved. Some shared tips and tricks. And one of them explained a recent discovery: that certain Pokémon appeared not just at certain locations, but at specific hours. When Bhutia expressed his inability to hatch Pokémon eggs, one of them whispered a trick to do this in his ear as though he was sharing a secret family recipe.

Past midnight on Monday, with server support still patchy and Bhutia’s level shamefully still at seven, he walked into the guest room of his apartment, the part he liked to call his study. He climbed a wooden stool which he had stacked atop a white plastic chair at the centre of the room, and, looking up, strung a rope with a noose around the ceiling fan. In this noose, he strung his cellphone. Someone at the walk had told him that if one attaches a phone to a ceiling fan and allows it to spin slowly, the game often mistakenly registers this movement as steps, and hence allows eggs to hatch.

Bhutia turned the dial to its lowest speed, and switched the fan on. Within a few seconds, the cellphone flew out of the noose, crashed into a wall, bobbed at a cupboard, and came apart. When he put it back together, both the device and the game still worked, but the egg had miraculously disappeared.

Some players, according to reports, had found a naked woman vandalising a church in Connecticut. One player found a dead body floating in New Hampshire. And several apparently found robbers waiting for them. But Bhutia didn’t find any of these. Instead, out in the great monsoon outdoors of the Maximum City, in the companionship of his cellphone, to exaggerate a bit, he found himself.

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Lhendup G Bhutia

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