Maybe You Should Uninstall “Pokemon Go”

By Alec Killoran

Are you experiencing shortness of battery life?  Do you exhale sharply and mutter “nice” when you see an Electabuzz in your town?   Have you been putting aside your worldly responsibilities on a daily basis because Team Mystic controls the Safeway parking lot?  If you or a loved one has recently downloaded Pokemon GO and is experiencing any of these symptoms, you may be entitled to compensation.  Don’t let “the grind” rule your life any longer.  Give us a call at 1-800-UNI-NSTAL. Terms and restrictions apply. Do not uninstall Pokemon GO if you are having fun.  The author of this article is not a good role model and recommends that you see your doctor immediately if experiencing Pidgey encounters for more than 4 hours.

Allow me to preface this article: if you enjoy Pokemon GO, then by all means keep playing it responsibly!  Do not drive and play!  It’s dangerous and the application is not always good about recognizing when players are driving; it buzzes with new Pokemon even at 35 mph.  Nothing is worth the lives of you or others—not even a wild Dragonite (gasp!).

Now that Father Alec is done with his “holier-than-thou” sermon on mobile Pokemon farming catching safety, I will explain how a nostalgic 23 year old who loves Pokemon felt compelled to uninstall Pokemon GO after hardly 48 hours.

In short, Pokemon GO is a parasitic game.  I only know it because I dealt with a similarly parasitic game before, and I quickly recognized that I was engaging in activities unhealthy for me.  That other game was League of Legends (more on that later).  I don’t doubt that many people can play Pokemon GO responsibly and in moderation while still enjoying it, just like League.  But I am not one of those people, and I’d be willing to bet the Dratini that was in my collection a few hours ago that I’m not the only one.  There are signs that you are like me, and it all ultimately ties back into the game mechanics themselves.

I described the game as parasitic because that’s exactly what it is—a game that demands more attention, never goes away, and begs at you to just catch one more.  Consider the manner in which players interact with the game.  You catch a Pokemon, and to power it up you need to catch more of that Pokemon or others in its evolutionary line.  Each of your Pokemon have a power level.  This comes into play when you choose a team (Red, Yellow, or Blue) and fight at a Gym.

As of now, fighting at Gyms is the only way you ever actually do anything with your Pokemon that you catch, evolve, and level up.  The more Pokemon you catch, gyms you fight at, or Pokestops you visit (real life landmarks programmed into the game to give you small gifts of items and experience), the higher level you attain.  As you attain a higher level, so too can your Pokemon become stronger.  The inherent mechanic here is that in order to compete with the other players at gyms, your level must be sufficiently high.  In order for your level to be sufficiently high, you must continue to catch Pokemon, often multiple copies of the same one.

Interacting with the game becomes impossible if you fall behind the other players in your area.  What you have will not be enough if other players do more.  If you’re unable to defeat any gyms, you cannot functionally interact with the game except to continue farming until you can do so.  This is colloquially known as “grinding” or “laddering” and it’s a dangerous mechanic that sucks players into a vortex of anxiety and relentlessness.  There is no point at which a player can play “enough” of the game.

Playing devil’s advocate against myself, I must point out that getting kids to walk around outside is hardly the worst kind of grinding or laddering in a game.  There is a real social phenomenon surrounding Pokemon GO, and it is undeniably fascinating to see a video game bring complete strangers together in common interest at a local park.  It isn’t without merit, and I’m sure Niantic will be rolling out new content to further enhance the social aspect of this game at some point.

But today my friend and I decided to skip going to the gym (with weights and treadmills, that is) for the first time in a while.  We woke up early to explore the creek near my house where I’d found the Dratini, and later drove my car around the neighborhood just to hatch our eggs.  Then my phone buzzed, and I pulled over to catch another Pidgey.  Then it buzzed again, and there was a Weezing (!) but nowhere to pull over.  So I stopped in the middle of the street with no other cars around and caught the bastard.  After I dropped my friend off and came home, I knew that I was very quickly falling into the grind.

I can’t handle the grind.  Maybe you can handle the grind.  I can’t do it.  I shirked responsibilities.  I endangered those on the road willfully and without scruples.  I felt inadequate because the Raticate I put in an unclaimed gym was drop-kicked out by a higher level Jolteon within an hour.  The only solution to my problem was to play more, but needing to play more was my problem. 

When problems in a game cause problems in my actual life, I draw a hard red line.  And all of this was after just a couple days.  Never before had I been so quickly sucked into the vortex of blinding consumption that is “the grind.”

I threw away so much valuable time and squandered opportunities I’ll never see again because I wanted to play League of Legends.  I needed to raise my rank.  It was a measure of me against a whole world of players, and we were meticulously ranked and separated into divisions (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond).  No matter how high I ranked, it was never enough.  And these games aren’t even that fun in and of themselves!  People who have played World of Warcraft know better than anybody the moment of crippling dread and realization—when you get that next piece of gear with a friend, you both dryly chuckle after choking down Doritos and Mountain Dew, and say “heh, nice”. In that moment, you’ve realized that the game you’re playing isn’t actually fun (at least the way you’re playing it).  You are simply a slave to the grind.

The day I decided to uninstall League was a turning point in my life.  That’s how important it is to not fall victim to the grind.  It uses your competitive nature against you.  It gives you ways to spend a little bit of money to make the grind somewhat quicker.  It’s a parasite, and it will never stop feeding.  I was fortunate and experienced enough to disconnect Pokemon GO from my lifeblood before it took permanent hold (read as: before my Dratini evolved).

Alec just took a Wailord-sized shit on your casual craze–but most of you probably don’t even know who Wailord is.