("No, I'm not objecting to this marriage, I'm just here for that Gabite. Mazel tov!")
I love this line so very much
Another scary thought: your wristband buzzes you awake at1 am. You pick up your phone, and see Mr Mime at the foot of your bed.
And I love this line, too. Although I'm sure they'll have do-not-disturb functions.
If pokemon are climate-specific, I really hope there's some kind of marketplace for trading.
See, I can understand your point of view here, and it's certainly not wrong, but I feel differently. I don't see this as a single-player "catch 'em all" experience where 100% completion is (relatively) easy, but instead as an immersive, real-world, semi-competitive semi-cooperative massively multiplayer experience about exploring and finding.
Having an easily-accessible marketplace would damper that aesthetic and make the exploration of somewhere new and far-out into more of a grind (in the sense you'll be grinding for as many of a rare Pokemon as possible just to go trade them in the marketplace). On the other hand, if I finally manage to take the trip to Scandanavia that I've dreamed about, and I manage to see a whole bunch of Pokemon I have
never seen before because I live in Florida... that would just add another wonderful element to the joy that is travel.
...basic rules of decorum which I think would be pretty well agreed upon. Things like, no challenging players on public transport, no leaving dinner to catch pokemon, no playing in traffic, and definitely no violating private property or private events. ("No, I'm not objecting to this marriage, I'm just here for that Gabite. Mazel tov!")
...
And will we have kids sneaking out at midnight to catch ghost and dark types?
See, there are a lot of things here that I hope
will be broken (at least in part) by this kind of experience. I'm going to get a bit philosophical here, but our world is far too antisocial for its own good; people are too shy to make healthy interactions and if you gauge the mood on a city metro or a dentist's waiting room, it is an unhappy atmosphere and it really doesn't need to be. This is the rare game that has the potential to cut across ages and classes and mindsets and encourage interactions that would have never happened before; this is the once-in-a-decade game that can really mix things up and hugely impact the real world. This is the game that can play exception-to-the-rule and get kids outside in the fresh air to explore the real world instead of sitting at home in front of a TV screen (which I also think merits; the right TV and games are fantastic teachers but missing out on "the real world" for them isn't healthy) with helicopter parents.
Do we need to combine it with a bit of common sense, like your examples of playing in traffic or breaking into private property? Of course. Hopefully they are smart enough to not spawn Pokemon around Korea's DMZ. And would it be better served with some parental controls? Perhaps. But personally, I really hope that this game is very ubiquitous and very loud. I hope it encourages people to break a ton of social mores that are just dulling our lives in the first place. I hope it gets the world out of its comfort zone.
Lofty hopes, but the promo video implied that they're aiming to do a lot of this. Nearly every single person in that video was drawn, by the game, to somewhere they wouldn't normally be. Here's hoping it's not just the fever dreams of an overzealous marketing intern.
