Believe it or not, Pokémon Go is 10 years old this month. The wildly successful smartphone game, which allows you to track down lovable creatures in the real world using GPS and augmented-reality technologies, has reportedly been downloaded 800m times across 150 countries and regions. A trillion Pokémon have been caught so far – and I have been responsible for a modest percentage of that figure.
When the game was first released, my sons and I spent many happy hours wandering the streets and parks of Frome searching for Jigglypuffs and Charizards, and the game’s social element, which lets you take on gym battles with other players in your vicinity, offered my autistic son a route to communicate with other children in a way he’d never been able to before.
My boys have grown up now, but I enjoy the fact that the game is still seducing new players into searching their local shopping centre for Machops. There’s a part of me that never really let go of this compulsion, although it’s now evolved. I have a folder of apps on my phone that I have ready whenever I go out for a walk, or visit an unfamiliar town. Seek is a free app that uses image recognition to help you identify plants, trees and animals, and it lets you collect species badges to celebrate new discoveries. The accuracy can be a little variable, but it has given me a new interest in wild flowers and trees, and, being a nerd, I like to imagine which particular species would win in a Pokémon-style battle. How would red valerian fare against field bindweed? What would be the special attack of the common dog violet?
Another favourite is the Merlin Bird ID app, developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It lets you identify birdsong wherever you are in the world, and provides a “bird of the day” to look out for. My wife and I use it competitively, sending each other screenshots of unusual birds we’ve heard on our travels. I can now fairly confidently identify at least 10 bird songs, and I have to admit, I do associate certain birds with specific Pokémon. Pikachu? The yellow hammer, of course. Corviknight is the raven. Pidgeots are self-explanatory.
Alongside these, I also love Flightradar24 and MarineTraffic, which track airplane and ship movement respectively. I like to know where things are going and why, and to play Top Trumps with the vehicle data, pitting nearby cargo ships against each other in imagined naval battles based on their size and carrying capacity.
I’m not sure I’d be using any of these apps if its wasn’t for Pokémon Go. It opened up in me an understanding of the natural world as a vast playable space, filled with beautiful little signs and systems. When you explore a new game world, everything you encounter is potentially interesting. You have no filter of expectation – in terms of executive function, it’s like being a toddler again. As you get older, you lose that fascination with the minutiae of the world around you – you go for dramatic vistas, rather than the patches of weeds along roadsides; the dawn chorus over the solitary songbird in your garden. Sometimes you need a little prod to bring that back.
During the summer of 2016, and for a few seasons after, every walk we took became an adventure. Mundane places we knew well suddenly bristled with possibilities, boring landmarks became battlegrounds, strangers became allies. I just took all that and applied it to the real things around us – the birds in the woods near where we live, the weeds in our overgrown garden, the planes overhead. I’m not alone in this. Inspired by Pokémon Go, Brisbane student Kris Norris has created a social discovery game based on leaving messages on payphones around the city. Hydrologists in Colorado used a Pokémon Go-style app to discover and track small streams.
I’ve also discovered other location-based experiences along the way, that I might not have thought about otherwise. The fitness game Zombies, Run! was better for me as a running tool than Couch to 5k; Pikmin Bloom is a delightful floral walking game, and Geocaching, where you track down real-life caches hidden by other players, has tricked me into a few long hikes.
What I have learned, or at least had confirmed, since playing Pokémon Go is that all video games have the potential to open new intellectual doorways – new ways to envisage the world and how it works. No time spent in play is wasted. Wonder is a transferable skill.
What to play
Mystery games are having a real moment, but brothers Tom and Adam Vian have been quietly perfecting their Detective Grimoire series for more than a decade. I’ve eagerly awaited The Mermaid Mask, in which the titular detective and his smarter sarcastic sidekick Sally try to solve a locked-room murder aboard a submarine, and it does not disappoint.
I always recommend playing these games with a loved one – not because they’re difficult (the puzzles are about as taxing as you’d want for a cosy evening) but because the fully voice-acted, laugh-out-loud script makes them just as fun to watch (and backseat drive) as to actually play. Jordan Erica Webber
Available on: PC, Switch/Switch 2, PS5
Estimated playtime: 10 hours, best enjoyed over a few evenings
What to read
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Last year, Paramount signed up to make a Call of Duty movie. Now, the studio has confirmed that it will take place in the Modern Warfare universe – which means contemporary weapons, hi-tech espionage and geopolitical slaughter. But who will play moustached SAS hero Captain Price? There are rumours Pedro Pascal is up for the role, but surely it’s got to be Henry Cavill?!
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So now it’s all over, it turns out EA Sports FC correctly predicted the World Cup winner for the fifth year in a row. The development team ran a simulation of every group and knock-out match in the competition, where Spain emerged as the victor. I wonder if it also predicted that England v France would be the most video game-like match of the tournament?
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On Saturday, GamesRadar ran a feature interview with senior figures at Xbox, who confirmed the importance of exclusive games to the console. “There has to be a reason for people to buy an Xbox,” said chief content officer Matt Booty, accurately. Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution will be the first titles to be affected by the withdrawal from the multiplatform approach that saw titles such as Forza Horizon 6 and Sea of Thieves head to PS5.
What to click
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Apple Crumble: a tasty Knives Out-inspired mystery that lets you snoop on your own family
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D&D players raise millions in real-life campaign against ‘corporate elite’
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Denshattack! – time to get on board with kickflipping trains | ★★★★☆
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Splatoon Raiders – Nintendo’s inky shooter fades to grey | ★★☆☆☆
Question Block
This week, a philosophical question from Richard:
“What genuine life lessons have you learned from games? I often think of Verso’s advice to Lune in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, that the only voice that should be in your head is your own. Bonus hard mode: not just life lessons from dialogue or other ‘narrative’ parts of a game, but from the gaming action itself. The hours I spent trying to beat the last level of Super Mario Odyssey taught me a lot about my flaws: panicking in the face of new situations, and stumbling over bits I had done umpteen times before because I contemptuously thought I’d mastered them.”
One lesson I took from platform games such as Impossible Mission and Jet Set Willy and later from stealth games, was to stop and observe any complex situation before leaping in. That has saved me a lot of trouble. I’ve also picked up little snippets of practical information that I’ll never get to use in real-life – I discovered the Scandinavian flick playing World Rally Championship (it’s a driving technique, not a haircut) and the Coriolis effect while playing the famed assassination mission in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Finally, as a novelist, I learned plenty of things about comedy writing from The Secret of Monkey Island – specifically the importance of understatement and how to set up a gag and then keep it running. The line “That’s the second-biggest monkey head I’ve ever seen” will always stick in my head in relation to both of those skills. I should have it crocheted and framed on my wall.
If you have a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us at pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
