Pokémon Go: augmented reality game goes viral

Pokémon Go, it turns out, is no game in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Ruslan Sokolovsky discovered that the hard way this week when he received a 3.5-year suspended sentence for testing the limits of Russian tolerance for pranks and church mockery — and, yes, video games.

Someday you’ll likely be able to slip on a pair of special glasses and see realistic digital objects — from cartoon monsters to your friends’ faces — superimposed on the real world.

But that vision may be years away from coming to fruition, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to wait. So on Tuesday, he announced that Facebook is taking a shortcut: creating software that gives ordinary smartphones sophisticated augmented-reality capabilities. Zuckerberg envisions users holding their phones in front of their faces to see virtual objects superimposed on the physical world.

When the augmented reality game Pokémon Go launched last summer, it was instantly deemed a health fad.

Unlike most games, which only engage your thumbs, Pokémon Go requires you to walk, run, and even jump — all great forms of exercise. Fans and observers offered anecdotal evidence that the game was causing a surge in physical activity, leading to a “pandemic” of sore legs. Some even suggested Pokémon could be the solution to the obesity crisis. The cheer was spurred on by the game’s creator, John Hanke, who said he designed the app with health in mind, hoping to encourage exercise among users.

You may have heard stories of people hunting down Pokémon on their office desks, in hospital rooms, and even in bathrooms. One teenage girl even found a dead body while looking for Pokémon. And police in Missouri claimed that four suspected robbers lured in victims with a chance of catching Pokémon in a new game called Pokémon Go.

What the hell is going on? What is Pokémon Go?

As you go out into the world of Pokémon Go, you may be wondering what Pokémon you should be looking for. Thankfully, I’m here to help. With extensive research and science, I have created the definitive ranking of all 151 Pokémon in the game.

This is not a list of which Pokémon is strongest. (The answer is always Mewtwo.) You can find something closer to that at Smogon, the competitive Pokémon website, for the handheld games. But we simply don’t know enough about all of the creatures in Pokémon Go and their in-game traits to create a definitive power ranking for that.

Unlike many mobile video games, the goal of Pokémon Go is pure and simple: to catch ‘em all — with “all” being all the Pokémon. How you go about doing that is up to you, and once Nintendo launches an upcoming feature that will allow Pokémon trades between players, the process might become slightly easier. But until then, there are several basic steps that you need to implement in order to catch Pokémon:

The most basic way to find Pokémon near you is to wander the vicinity and use the locator map. The “nearby” function often works well to alert you when Pokémon are within catching distance. If there aren’t any Pokémon nearby, you have three obvious and easy options:

Pikachu and Joe Biden don’t have a whole lot in common.

One is an electric mouse that paralyzes prey with thunder bolts; the other is a silver fox who melts hearts with a smile. One was born in 1996; the other in 1942. One battles Bulbasaurs and Zubats; the other negotiates federal spending levels with cranky senators.

Pokémon Go is a massive cultural phenomenon. If you don’t believe it, just watch the 41-second video above, taken by Woodzys in New York City’s Central Park, showing the madness that broke out when a Vaporeon spawned. Literally hundreds of people descended on the area, moving in a massive crowd, just to catch the elusive Pokémon.

In fairness, Vaporeon is pretty awesome:

Pokémon Go is an inescapable force of nature. Building on the giant video game franchise created in the ‘90s by a Japanese insect collector and game developer, Pokémon Go has become a phenomenon that takes advantage of our nation’s ADD nature, our reliance on smartphones, the warm fuzziness of nostalgia, and our human thirst for escapism.

In a way, playing the game is like giving your brain a warm, relaxing bath. Pokémon Go makes just one simple and non-aggressive request: Gotta catch ‘em all. There is no time limit. There are no consequences. The worst thing that can happen in the game is that a Pokémon escapes a life of living inside a Poké Ball.

Pokémon Go, the massively successful location-based augmented reality game, has barely been out a week, but Hillary Clinton’s campaign is already using it as a campaigning tool:

The game, which came out on July 6, encourages users to walk around and visit PokéStops where they can acquire items for the game like Poké Balls, and “gyms” where they can fight against other players. PokéStops and gyms are real locations in the real world. For instance, there’s a gym on a small traffic island by the Vox DC offices, and the Embassy of Iraq is a PokéStop and a reliable source of Poké Balls.

Pokémon Go is already one of the most popular smartphone apps ever, but the adults you see walking around on the street aren’t just college kids and recent graduates.

More than 40 percent of the adults who downloaded the mobile app are older than 25, and about one in three adult users are women. This is according to data from StartApp, a company that tracks 600 million users for downloads and social usage. The company didn’t provide data on users under 18.

Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game. It’s also a huge health fad right now.

Since launching last week, the app has exploded in popularity. Free to download on your iPhone or Android, it uses location data from mobile phones to help users chase fictional Pokémon characters around their environs, which are displayed back on their phones. In one week, the app has already become so popular that it’s rivaling Twitter in terms of the volume of daily active users, Vox’s German Lopez writes in his indispensable Pokémon Go explainer.

If you’ve been on the internet — or, um, outside — lately, you may have noticed that a game called Pokémon Go is suddenly taking the world by storm. It may have you wondering, especially if you were born before 1984, just what the hell is going on.

Pokémon is a Nintendo franchise that launched in the 1990s. In its world, “trainers” travel the world to catch varied monsters called Pokémon — rats, dragons, swordlike creatures, and more — and use these critters to fight each other. The trainer’s goal is to “catch ’em all,” as the franchise’s slogan suggests, and become a Pokémon master by defeating prestigious trainers known as gym leaders and Elite Four.

Pokémon Go has taken over our lives, and in the process it’s also struck fear into our hearts and shaken the foundations of even our sturdiest societal institutions — at least if the media is currently to be believed.

Not only is the augmented reality mobile game leading us to dead bodies all across the world, but judging from the sheer amount of chaos, lawlessness, mayhem, fake viral news hoaxes, and law enforcement hand-wringing it’s reportedly causing, it’s priming those of us who aren’t actually dead yet to wind up as nominees for the 2016 Darwin Awards.

It may not be at the front of everyone’s mind as they play Pokémon Go, but the idea behind Pokémon is a bit odd: Humans are essentially enslaving animals and then using them to fight one another.

So where did the concept come from? It actually comes from bug catching, a popular activity — especially among kids — in Japan, where Pokémon originated.

In the past week, Pokémon Go has taken the world by storm. The augmented reality mobile game, which allows you to look through your smartphone camera to “see” Pokémon in your surroundings, has brought the franchise back into America’s cultural consciousness for the first time since the ‘90s.

Back then — the first time Pokémon was popular — augmented reality games were still a long way off. In the ‘90s, the hot new trend was virtual reality, or VR, and the difference between the two is subtle but important.

To make progress in Pokémon Go, a mobile game that’s taken over America in the past week, you can’t just sit on your couch. You have to get out of the house and travel around town. Some Pokémon can only be found in watery locations. Others are only available at night.

When you find a Pokémon, the game shows the creature superimposed on your actual surroundings. Move your phone around, and the animated image moves too, making it appear as though the Pokémon is located in the real world.

As Pokémon Go continues to break download records and hearts as players all over the country try to catch ‘em all, one of the most fascinating things to come out of the phenomenon has been an ever-growing list of bizarre — and sometimes inappropriate — places where Pokémon have popped up.

There’s plenty fun to be had with the game’s locations, to be sure. Reports of Pokémon lurking in offices, nightclubs, and everything in between have inspired some pretty hilarious screencaps. And when I spent an afternoon at Universal Studios the day after Pokémon Go launched, I got to watch people in line keep Zubats and Gastlys from taking over Hogwarts in real time, an event I’d never even considered possible even in my wildest adolescent dreams.

If you’ve been awake at any point in the past few days, you’ve probably heard of Pokémon Go.

Within days of its beta release, Nintendo’s new augmented reality mobile game — which lets you catch adorable Pokémon in your own real-world environment — has essentially taken over society. Nearly as soon as it began rolling out to Americans on July 5, Pokémon Go became so popular that the huge demand to play it started to break the game and ultimately forced an international release delay. It’s been present in news headlines and social media conversations ever since.

In the beginning, there was Pokémon Go. Then there was the wall-to-wall coverage of Pokémon Go. Now we’re in the backlash to the wall-to-wall coverage. This has all happened in, oh, about a week.

About a year ago, I tried the Oculus VR, and it blew my mind. I had thought we were a long way from inventing virtual reality. But as I stood in a flat, bare room, only to have the headset flicker on and convince my body and brain I was teetering on the edge of a skyscraper, I learned I was wrong. As I jumped back, I realized we’d already invented VR. Now we’re just perfecting it, making it cheaper, better, more addictive.

Last week, two things happened that will have long-lasting impact on American society and the global economy. First, the yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to a record low of 1.366 percent. Second, Nintendo released Pokémon Go, a mobile game that in a matter of days has become a viral sensation.

These two developments are more closely connected than it might seem at first glance. Obviously, it would be ridiculous to claim that Pokémon Go is singlehandedly responsible for recent macroeconomic trends. But technology-based products like Pokémon Go explain a lot about the current state of the global economy.

There are an astounding number of 30-year-olds who, when we were 10-year-olds, wanted nothing more than to catch all 150 Pokémon. This was back in 1996, when the first Pokémon game was released on Game Boy. Most of us didn’t get there — because it was tedious and frustrating, and we ran out of AA batteries. But now we’re getting a second chance.

To understand why your friends are sitting in a bar trying to catch a cartoon Pikachu — and why the game is on pace to have more active users than Twitter and Tinder — you need to understand where this fandom comes from.