Tag: pokemon

After 9 years of playing Pokémon Go at varying intensities, it is now Pokémon gone (the pun is obvious, but I had to take it!). While I enjoyed the game a lot during its early years, over time its frustrating or overly-monetised aspects overtook its enjoyable ones enough that playing it no longer made much sense.

Writing out my thoughts on deleting the game made me think more about “forever games”, and how weird it is that you can now measure the active life of major games beyond just “years” and instead into “meaningful fractions of a person’s lifespan”. I do wonder how that time-maths affects people’s decisions about what games they choose to keep playing, and whether it allows games to hold on to players through the sunk-cost-fallacy or through inertia to a greater extent than in the past.

But for now, here are more words than I expected about my many years playing PoGo, and about deciding to stop playing it.

Starting Out

When I started writing this post, it was a couple of days after the 9th anniversary of PoGo’s release. Although I first opened the game, and so technically started playing, on day one, the only device I could use was my Nexus 7, which did not have working location access. So I couldn’t actually catch any Pokemon until I revived a spare rooted Android phone about two weeks later. (That’s just reminded me of how much I liked the Nokia Lumia I’d had at the time, and that the main reason I stopped rooting my phones was because Niantic started barring rooted devices from PoGo).

My delayed real introduction to the game had one advantage; because I hadn’t been able to catch any of the default starters on day one, I had seen the secret starter Pikachu spawn. Once I could play, I was able to choose Pikachu as my starter.