Have You Pokemon Go-ed Yet?

It has been overly mentioned that Pokemon Go has taken the world by storm.

And it has taken my family by storm too, starting from the first day it launched in Singapore.

I downloaded the app to find out exactly what it is to make the Australian man Sunny Truyen lose his job. Apparently, he had sworn on Facebook that Singapore was 'a piece of fxxxxxx sxxx country' to vent his frustration over the fact that Singapore did not have Pokemon Go before getting himself fired over the post. 

I tried it out and found out that it was a very simple game at the basic level. You only need to flick your finger at the Pokeball over the head of the appearing Pokemon to 'catch' it. It's quite idiot-proof for a technophobic like me.

Very quickly, I learnt how to obtain more Pokeballs from the Pokestops, how to transfer the Pokemons that have lower combat power (cp) to the ones with higher cp, how to evolve a Pokemon and so on. I even joined a few battles without knowing how I managed to win. What's even more incredulous is I battled three Pokemons and took over a Bishan Gym! 

Then today, I learnt that the reason why we are able to catch tonnes of Pokemon at home is because we have two to three Pokestops right below our block that happen to allow players to apply Lure Modules on! And the players in this estate are apparently very avid players. One lure after another has been applied to the Pokestops. We would all stop what we were doing, including ironing, and start playing Pokemon Go! It was uncanny that William and I said,"Like that no need to do work already lor!" at different time of the day!

 

The pink leaf-like shapes are an indication that someone has applied the Lure Module to 'lure' Pokemons to the area and players in the area would benefit from the luring. 

To think I had thought that my house naturally had a lot of Pokemons!

The first night I learnt about the need to cover distance at a maximum speed of 20km/h in order to hatch the eggs, I asked William to go out and walk with me around the neighbourhood, to search for Pokemons and allow the eggs to hatch at the same time, at 11pm when the girls were supposed to be asleep.

As we walked, William commented that this game is more effective than any healthy lifestyle campaign because people want to walk by themselves. In fact, they are happy to walk without anyone compelling them to do so! 

I agreed.

However, I think the game is very bad for the eyes. Just two days of long hours of staring at the screen is causing my vision to become more blur than ever!

I have allowed Coco to play Pokemon Go for at least these few days as I think it is impossible to hide the game from her. Her friends are playing it and she would be extremely curious about it. I also feel that it is unfair to impose restrictions on her when her parents have problems controlling their screen time on the phone for Pokemon Go. So I told her I would allow her to play the game these few days - mainly to satisfy her curiosity and her desire to belong. The whole world is playing it for goodness' sake!

A friend shared with me that she was considering deleting the Pokemon Go app as she was frustrated that she only captured a grand total of five pathetic Pokemons in her house and the only Pokestop was a long way from her house.

To prove her point, she whatsapped me a picture to illustrate what she really meant:

 

Naturally, I invited her to my house to do the catching.

She was more than happy to do so. After five hours at my house, she went home a contented woman, having caught many new types of Pokemon she didn't see before she came.

William said perhaps we should start charging players for coming to our house to catch Pokemons.