Pokémon Go's 10th Anniversary: How the Game Transformed My View of the World

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.