I'm sure you've all heard about Pokémon Go by now. It's the mobile game that has you going out into the world to find Pokémon.

It's pretty fun. At it's heart, it's mostly all about catching them all, less about the RPG elements of the main games of the series. If you like geocaching, this is right up your alley, it's just Pokémon you're finding instead of muddy containers. If you played Ingress you'll feel right at home. It's made by the same developers, Niantic, and all the points of interest in Pokémon Go are the same. They already had all this map data, so why recreate it right?

I managed to get up to level 6 without even leaving my apartment. This area is But alas, I ran out of Pokéballs. To get more, you either have to pay for coins to buy more, or go out to Pokéstops. As it turns out, I needed to run some errands today so I decided to add some stops to my trip.

Now, the title of my post was not about how fun the game is, it's about how important it is. And this is where the importance comes in.

I noticed the mall next to the store I was in had three Pokéstops and someone had used a lure to get rare Pokémon to come around. There was a little lounge area in the mall where you could reach two stops and the lure, and there were thirty people or so all gathered around chatting and getting items. Pokéstops reset every few minutes, so between resets people would walk around the mall, getting in steps to help hatch their Pokémon eggs (incubators require you to walk a certain distance to hatch eggs).

Even discounting this experience, I saw dozens of people walking around with their phones out, talking with people. A friend of mine has even made some new friends by running into groups of people playing.

So, this is important for two reasons:

First, ARGs like this have never caught on to this extent. There were a lot of Ingress players, but this is orders of magnitude higher. This seems to be the game where ARGs become an established genre.

Second, this finally fulfills the Pokémon Company's goal. For years, each new game has gotten more and more social, and more and more active. There was a step counter for one game set that let you level up your Pokémon by walking around (or attaching the step counter to your dog's collar). Finally, a Pokémon game is bringing together massive groups of people and getting people active.

I'd encourage anyone with a smartphone or tablet to check this out. Smartphones would be worlds better, because you really need a data connection for it, and unless your tablet has mobile data, the areas you can play are very limited.

And even if you haven't played Pokémon games in the past, don't let that stop you. This really requires no experience with previous games, and doesn't even play like previous games.

And join the Blue Team! :D