The most ‘IT’ thing to do last summer was to play Pokemon Go. If any of you were living under a rock and didn’t know about this extraordinary game to have ever been developed, let us be your quick guide. The game retained the basics of Pokémon games from the past — catching Pokémons, battling at Gyms, using items, evolving your creatures — with a crazy twist: You would be doing it all in the real world. That means instead of tapping or using a directional pad to tell your virtual avatar where to go to find Pokémon, you’re actually walking. In the real world. On real streets.
And in this edition for TBP, we spoke to the very talented and the finest Pokemon Go players in our college. These guys shared their experiences and the challenges they faced, with us. Forget the hard core and tiring practises for football or basketball, Pokemon Go players worked out in ways more than you can dream of. These guys are the real MVPs. These guys have walked around the city, searched the entire campus and entered their classes, for God’s sake, to catch ‘em all.
One of the students, Param (name changed to protect the identity of our source), remembers how he walked around Gopinath market in Delhi when an ABRA spawned there and it took him 30 minutes of full concentration and composure to catch it 15-20 pokeballs later. Lack of pokeballs and hardly any pokestop nearby posed a huge challenge for our players but that didn’t stop them from walking until they found a pokestop.
The players developed a sense of self-motivation to carry on playing the game just as how Vedika Sood from the 4th year even dressed up like Ash whenever she went out hunting and often playing the theme song to help her to stay in the game.
Catching a Pokemon has always been exhilarating for our players and if they happened to catch a rare pokemon, they’d be over the moon for quite a few days. Manubhav Sharma from the 2nd year tells us how he explored many new places, all thanks to Pokemon Go. He has caught Pokemons in Delhi, the basketball court in the college, Kumbra, Sector 17 in Chandigarh and Dharamshala. Manubhav also managed to catch a Pokemon near 7, Race Course in Delhi, where our beloved Modiji resides.
They tell us how they even have to walk to hatch the pokemon eggs and how they waited until nightfall to catch the ghost Pokemons. We believe our readers can learn dedication and patience from our players. And if you happen to speak to any of these guys, you’ll see how their eyes sparkle when they share their experiences. How this game could spark an interest in the minds of the ones who don’t play it? The answer is simple, as Shivanjay Yadav from the 2nd Year tells us, he would show them his collection of Pokemons and tell them about the other astonishing features of the game. Any person who has been a huge fan of the series, as a young kid, would definitely fall for it.
Sadly, not everyone was quite satisfied with the game’s quality. “The game for a matter of fact had a wonderful start but it didn’t maintain the hype it gained. They didn’t give routine updates and removed things we loved about the game. For instance, the Pokemon tracker in the beginning was good but they removed that feature and it’s still not working well. They could have handled the game better”, says Bharat Hippargi from the 2nd Year who ONCE loved the game but not anymore. He was also disappointed with the fact that in spite of having such an amazing rise, the game started to deteriorate in his eyes. “I wasn’t ready for this thing!” says Param Chahal while expressing his disappointment when a really good Pokemon was located inside the girls’ hostel after hours and he couldn’t enter the premises to catch it.
Proving Bharat’s suspicions right, the game unfortunately lost its glory. It isn’t ‘cool’ anymore. “Pokemon Go as a game served its purpose. The game had its time. It wasn’t even officially launched in India” said Revant Mahajan from the fourth year, to the TBP team. He was disheartened because he believed that the game would last forever but it all went in vain. Others relented their feelings by playing Table Tennis in the college.
“It was heart-breaking to watch Pokemon Go burn to the ground. It had completely changed my life; I was living a happy, fit and healthy life where I walked 10 km every day. It helped me in avoiding friends and family who couldn’t support this passion of mine, because “I can’t catch pidgeys during a funeral”, or “play games made for children” or “distinguish between fantasy and reality anymore”. It even worked better than Tinder as I could meet eligible men at obscure pokestops at 3 am. Now it’s all gone. I don’t know what to do with the spare 9 hours. I’ll just go for the Harry Potter augmented reality game, I guess.” – Pooja Chandran, fourth year.
Shaurya Gulati, a student from the first year, said that it was shameful on the part of Niantic (game developer), that if they had not messed up, people would still be playing the game. But with a little bit of optimism left regarding the game, he said how the makers can still bring the players back to the game with new updates.
Just as how it goes that all good things must come to an end to give space for new things to come forward, Pokemon Go had its time and ended to give way for games which are better developed and people have found a new purpose in their lives. So till the time anything else like this comes up, we’ll have to face the reality and fall prey to the so-called sports.
This write up was submitted by Parika Bhardwaj from the II year.
