Pokémon Go is 10 years old this month. The smartphone game, which uses GPS and augmented reality to let players find creatures in the real world, has been downloaded 800 million times across 150 countries and regions. A trillion Pokémon have been caught so far.
A Personal Journey
When the game first launched, the author and their sons spent many hours searching for Jigglypuffs and Charizards in Frome. The social element, allowing gym battles with nearby players, helped the author's autistic son communicate with other children in a new way.
Evolving Interests
Though the boys have grown up, the author still uses apps inspired by that same curiosity. Seek uses image recognition to identify plants and animals, awarding species badges for new discoveries. The accuracy varies, but it sparked an interest in wild flowers and trees, imagining Pokémon-style battles between species like red valerian and field bindweed.
The Merlin Bird ID app, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, identifies birdsong worldwide and offers a “bird of the day.” The author and their wife use it competitively, sharing screenshots of unusual birds. The author can now identify at least 10 bird songs and associates certain birds with Pokémon: the yellow hammer with Pikachu, the raven with Corviknight, and Pidgeots are self-explanatory.
Other Apps and Insights
Flightradar24 and MarineTraffic track planes and ships, letting the author play Top Trumps with vehicle data, pitting cargo ships against each other based on size and capacity.
The author credits Pokémon Go with opening an understanding of the natural world as a vast playable space. It rekindled a fascination with minutiae, turning mundane walks into adventures. Others have been inspired similarly: Brisbane student Kris Norris created a social discovery game using payphones, and hydrologists in Colorado used a Pokémon Go-style app to track small streams.
Other location-based experiences include Zombies, Run!, Pikmin Bloom, and Geocaching. The author concludes that all video games can open new intellectual doorways, and that wonder is a transferable skill.
