Pokemon Go: Nostalgia drew us in but community took over

In 1997 my father downloaded a glitchy Game Boy emulator on to our huge, blocky household PC – a salvage job he made himself from odd parts bought or bargained for from here and there. Among the poorly translated, pixelated hacks of videogames sat a file called “Pocket Monsters: Blue”. I clicked in and embarked upon a tiny adventure. I was almost immediately in love.

Later that year, the Pokémon games would drop on European handheld consoles: for Christmas that year, I received a Game Boy Colour, my first handheld computer. It was purple, and came with a yellow Pokémon game.

By this stage, trading cards and the anime television show had swept Ireland’s playgrounds: adults were rolling their eyes, older teenagers figured we were nerds (maybe we were). Sure, weren’t these as bad as Pogs, only a waste of money, a passing fancy designed to gouge money from parents?

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A gamer playing Pokémon Go in Haarlem, the Netherlands. Photographs: Remko de Waalepa

Regardless, I still loved the rise in Pokémon’s popularity. More people understood the adventure I had gone on in the boxroom of my house. I had more people to talk to about catching creatures and exploring fictional lands. Isn’t that what storytelling, in all its forms – books, videogames, cinema – is about? Connecting with people?

Flash forward 19 years, and I am standing outside my housing estate with my husband at 11pm, both of us holding our smartphones in the air, distorting reality as we go. There’s some major Pokémon activity in the area, so we step out into the summer night and see what we can catch.

There’s a parked car nearby with another couple perched over their smartphones. CB and I exchange glances: they’re playing too.

A young woman emerges and lights a cigarette. She’s definitely playing. We catch local Drowzees together, a trio for a moment; she and her fella are driving around different neighbourhoods to pick up loads of different types.

There’s a rake of electric ones near Poolbeg, she tells me – which makes sense, considering it’s full of factories. These little digital creatures appear in places that relate to the type of creature they are.

The moment goes and she and her partner drive off: a brief and lovely connection of a Saturday night.

Bees and jam jars

For me and many of my friends in the 1990s, playing Pokémon was a largely indoor pursuit, despite Satoshi Tajiri’s initial concept for the game, which came from his childhood spent catching insects in his neighbourhood and exploring. Who among us didn’t catch bees in jam jars back then?

The Game Boy was designed to be portable, but in those days it was far less typical or acceptable for people in the street to be glued to a screen. The internet and the smartphone have changed all this. So the next natural step for the franchise was to make it on to the smartphone, but it carried a risk: taking something so ingrained in our childhoods and transferring it to the day-to-day mundanity of the phone screen.

Those lagging servers that players experienced globally during launch week speaks to this: Nintendo and Niantic were vastly under-prepared for so many players wanting to hop on so quickly.

I'm not surprised. Millennials, the main demographic playing Pokémon Go, are unusually susceptible to early-onset nostalgia. We came of age in an analogue era. We caught bees in jars, played tip-the-can, legged it around estates from dawn until dinner, then out again until the sun set. If it rained we watched television, sure, but there was no internet for us.

Until, with the roll of the late 1990s, there was. We watched the internet fizz into life with shrill dial-up codes and whopping phone bills if we stayed online too long. Brick-like Nokias found their way into our pockets. PCs became laptops became smartphones. Technology leapt forward in an incredibly short period of time, and we participated all along the way.

Like forced perspective in cinema, where cameras are angled to make things nearby look far away, our childhoods seem further in the distance because of the drastic uphill leap of technology. We even cover the snaps of our daily life with Instagram filters to make them look more like the Kodak moments of our childhood. They seem more flattering, somehow; more authentic.

The times before constant surveillance and self-surveillance seem impossibly far away. The word "nostalgia" comes from a compound of the Greek nostos – homecoming – and algos, meaning pain, or ache. The implication is a feeling of being unable to return to someplace long departed: you can't go home again.

As a generation, millennials experienced this quickly and sharply – technology thundered into our lives so fast that even old 16-bit and 32-bit videogames feel further and further away, let alone the games we played in the streets, the sweets we ate, the clothes we wore.

Classic done wrong

Hollywood knows this about us, rebooting franchises and TV shows much beloved by children 20 or 30 years ago, causing anything from celebration to outcry on social media when viewers feel their childhood classics were “done wrong”.

The recent gender-swapped feminist retelling of Ghostbusters is a perfect example of this. Despite being a box-office hit and a roaring, warm spree of a film, many male viewers feel robbed of their childhood experience by the idea of the Ghostbusters as women, and have been hugely vocal online to that effect. It's forced nostalgia at work again.

The risk of Pokémon re-emerging on our smartphones was that it would be a fizzle, a cute moment or two fawning over adorable cartoon figures of times gone by and nothing more. Rather than this, Pokémon Go has been a triumph. In the smartphone, Pokémon has finally found its true platform.

You can’t really play unless you go outside: neighbourhoods and cities are littered with pin-drops on the digital map for players to visit and collect items. These tend to be cultural sites: in Ireland, from pubs to statues of the Virgin Mary to street art to Busáras are hubs of activity within the game. The phone-camera breaks the fourth wall of the game, and reality intersects and synthesises with the magic of the game world.

Pokémon lure

In Searsons bar the other night, we dropped a Lure Module – that is, an in-game feature designed to attract more Pokémon to your locale. Think of those big sets of bushes that housed bees nests in housing estates: a thrum of activity. Think of kids with empty jam jars full of leaves, holes pierced in the lid, capturing bees only to examine them and set them free by nightfall, greeting each other, comparing catches.

We sat and had some pints with friends, caught Pokémon, all the while clocking other folks coming in and out of the smoking area to take advantage of the activity. More kids with jam jars. There’s a quiet, cheerful sense of community in this: far from the rainy-day-bedroom experience of gaming in our childhood.

Maybe the experience we get from playing Pokémon Go isn't purely nostalgia, although that may be what clicked the download button in the first place when the game first dropped. Maybe we don't need to go home. Maybe, instead, what we're experiencing is delight. Maybe we can go out into the world and play there instead. This is what we've been waiting for.