Last Friday, I was scrolling through the App Store on my phone looking for another dumb game that I could download to help waste time. That’s when I came across the app that everyone in the world is talking about, ‘Pokémon GO’. I first heard about the game this past winter when developers were dropping hints as to what the game would be like, and had forgot about the game completely until now.

Now, if you’re someone like me, who’s entire childhood was based off of collecting Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, playing Pokémon Red and Blue on my Game Boy and Nintendo DS, and watching the original Pokémon TV show all the time, you’re probably just as excited as I was to find out that Pokémon GO came out.

For those of you that don’t know what ‘Pokémon GO’ is (where have you been this past week) it’s a new app that is based off of the Pokémon franchise, where not only are you playing a character who catches and battles Pokémon, but in order to do so, you have to walk around in the real world to catch them in real-world locations. The idea itself is pure-genius, getting millions of people off their butts and have them walk miles everyday, while playing a videogame at the same time, the best of both worlds.

I myself have been walking miles everyday in the hope of crossing paths with a Snorlax or a Pikachu, and so have all my friends. Multiple times this week, my friends and I have gotten together just to go out and catch Pokémon. So not only is this app getting people to walk outside for once, but also it’s having people socialize more with friends, and strangers. Every time I go out to go catch Pokémon I meet new people who are doing the exact same thing that I am doing. We share our recent catches and tell each other where some good Poké-stops are. It makes me smile every time I see another group of people looking around with their phones out, because nine times out of ten, they’re playing ‘Pokémon GO’

Though I do love this game, it can get pretty frustrating. Many times the game will either crash or freeze right in the middle of me catching a Pokémon, and many times the Poké-stops that I haven’t even been to will be unavailable, and sometimes I cant even get into the game because the server is down, which makes my friends and I unreasonably angry. But at the end of the day, we laugh it off because even though it’s just a game, it truly is fun to play with your friends and it stinks when the app that brought us closer together isn’t working.

In the bigger picture, it truly is refreshing and nostalgic to see so many people loving a little world that I myself have always loved. And it also makes me happy that even in a time of such hate and sorrow, the world still finds little ways to bring people together and to make people smile. :)