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Top Comments: Gotta Catch Em All, Family Activity Edition [1]

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Date: 2023-03-20

Meet Kyogre, the Pokemon I caught after a fierce battle at the Mall!!

Way back in early July 2016, Casa Brillig was getting ready to attend Netroots Nation in Saint Louis. This was the first one that we ALL attended. We were looking for something that would help occupy K2 and also for us to do as a family while sitting in the airport or wherever. Lo and behold, a new interactive game had rolled out onto the App Store just the previous week and therefore we all downloaded Pokemon Go onto our phones. It is an augmented reality game involving (at the most basic level) catching pokemon as you are out and about in the world, interacting with fellow players, and trying your best to live up to the motto “Gotta Catch Em All!!”

I asked K1 if she remembers and she instantly replied “Yes!!! We were taking pictures of our pokemon at the City Museum!” Nearly seven years later, Mr. Brillig and I are regular players, although he’s more knowledgeable than I am and is a couple of levels higher. During the pandemic, game producer Niantic made it a LOT easier to continue playing without having to be near people, and Mr. Brillig and I did a LOT of walking around our town to spin pokestops and collect pokemon. I won’t confirm or deny that we’ve occasionally chosen a table for dining out (often outdoors) based on whether or not it was a good Pokemon location. There are days I’ve walked an extra mile or two just to get to a Pokemon Gym so I could complete a game task and earn rewards. We have friends from all over, some who are personal friends (and who I’ll be trading Pokemon with at Netroots Nation this summer!) and some are people I do not know (no messaging in game is allowed, to protect minors) but who live in faraway places and we help one another complete region-specific tasks.

Pokemon Go is how Mr. Brillig and I found ourselves at a local mall on Saturday, February 25th. It was a big game event day, with the opportunity to band together with other players to defeat a super-powerful Pokemon. We had three hours to kill while K2 was at a soccer thing, and thought we’d go to the mall where there were multiple places to battle this Pokemon, and just maybe we’d find another group of people doing the same.

Well. We didn’t find just *A* group of people. There were SO. MANY groups of people that looked just like us… walking slowly, chatting amongst themselves, then leaning against a wall and making the distinctive hand motions indicating an attempt to catch a pokemon. There was evidence of dozens of individuals playing the game, and when we looked for a “raid” (the opportunity to battle the big powerful creature) we ended up battling with seven or eight others. It was SO much fun!!

We told K1 what we’d done and she immediately said “can we all go tomorrow?” And when your 24yo adult child ASKS to spend time with you, you go to the mall again. We laughed, we groaned when a specific pokemon ran away, we got bubble tea, and had a blast!!

Fast forward two weeks, and I got a message over facebook from someone I’d first ‘met’ on a Community Group for my city — she’d been asking if anyone else played Pokemon Go in the area. Turns out there were a bunch of us, and would we like to meet at the local Dog Park at 11am because there was another of these big powerful ‘mythical’ creatures to battle and we could do it all together! At least 11 of us were there, couples and singles and one family with their two kids in the backseat excitedly hoping Mommy and Daddy won, and it was a social blast!

Yes, it’s geeky. Yes, to some it looks like my family is ignoring one another and is “on their phones instead of being social”. But rest assured we’re all doing exactly what we want to do… spending time together in a shared activity!! Do you have anything you do that people might not understand from the outside, that it’s not what it looks like? Let us know in the comments, after tonight’s Tops.

(Oh, and if you play Pokemon Go and want to friend me, send me a kosmail and let’s swap Trainer Codes :))

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