Have you ever gone somewhere you usually know to be isolated, only to find it suddenly filled with people? This was my experience when I went for a run in a nearby park, expecting to see the usual couple or two strolling about and instead encountering an unlimited amount of focused walkers. Now, this truly wouldn’t have mattered to me much. It was a beautiful day, hot but not too hot, sunny but not too sunny, one of those summer gems that everyone wants to take advantage of…but something felt off.
After carefully contemplating the unsettling atmosphere that seemed to infect every area of that park, it hit me. Going to this usually isolated place and finding it suddenly filled with people wasn’t at all disconcerting; it was the silence.
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The soft crunch of feet against gravel became the only proof of the crowd’s existence. No one talked, no one laughed; everyone stared down at their phones and moved in zig-zags beneath the curved oak trees. To see all those people in the same place, saying absolutely nothing, was subtly yet indisputably terrifying.
Don’t get me wrong; Pokémon Go’s sudden explosion of success makes sense in a simplistic way. The game’s ability to generate childhood nostalgia while simultaneously fulfilling a fan’s fantasy for Pokémon to inhabit the “real world,” is undeniably impressive. I’ve heard many “goers” explain how the game transports them to their early years, reviving positive memories of adolescence that accompany this passion. Nevertheless, it makes me wonder how a game’s capability to bring gamers back to what once was, could also be in complete opposition to that pre-existing era. From what I remember, my childhood consisted of endless summers playing outdoors, laughing uncontrollably with friends, running, swimming, never looking down but always looking up at the endless complexity of the world
But that’s all we seem to be doing now, looking down. Looking down to check the next message, like the next post, update twitter followers on what we’re supposedly “doing” that moment, and now, silently zigzagging through crowds of people in order to “catch them all.” Maybe I’m being dramatic, maybe the sun was too sunny that particularly day, maybe I should stop watching zombie movies which label people who function with zero interest in their surroundings as the walking dead…but then again, maybe this is our new reality.
At least in today’s Pokémon-filled world, finding a usually isolated place suddenly filled with people no longer promises a chorus of overwhelming laughter, overlapping conversations, and passing “hi, how are you's?.
In this world, our world, we don’t seem to be doing much talking anymore.
