Discussion: pokemon go

Apparently, it is doing pretty well, millions of downloads. Looks like a never-ending score-O on your phone. It does show a map and your avatar on it, which is a good thing. At least, that's how much I figured out based on my five minutes with it.

Tons of my Facebook friends are playing this and posting about it. Obviously once the newness wears off, it might not be as popular. From what I saw, I'm not sure that the game map corresponds to the real world except for which general direction to go. One guy was playing at work during his lunch break and showed me the map, which showed grass, but the pokemon was in the lunchroom sink. I did say maybe we could get all these people orienteering if we just put out pokemon instead of controls ;-)

We had a sprint meet today at a city park and saw lots (even more than usual ;-) ) of people walking around the trails looking at their phones. Apparently, they were playing Pokemon Go, which is advertised on their website as a way to sightsee in a new city, but it didn't seem to me that the players were seeing anything but the screen of their phones.

Creating a new kind of accident; people falling in holes or walking into posts while playing Pokeman Go.

My kids (23, 22, and 12) are obsessed with the game. Since the 12 yo doesn't have his own phone, that means I've gotten to spend plenty of time playing it with him. We rode 12 miles today on local paved bike trails and the map corresponded well to the roads, trails, and parks around us. He was thrilled to be out catching Pokemon, and I was thrilled to have a complaint-free bike ride with him.

An article in Kotaku brings up an interesting point: Pokémon Go Could Be A Death Sentence For A Black Man. Orienteers in the US are overwhelmingly Europeans; I wonder if African-Americans or Middle Easterners would have different experiences running off trail or in urban settings.

...it didn't seem to me that the orienteers were seeing anything but their maps... Creating a new kind of accident; people falling off cliffs or walking into trees while orienteering...

Pokemon Go was the name of one of the teams of students at today's University of Michigan Campus Sprints

Warnings from St Louis area.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-court...

For those of you who (like me) have very little clue what Pokey Man Go actually is, NPR's "Here and Now" will be doing an explanation this hour.

Or is this something about a slow fruit? (pokey mango)

I believe it's called a lychee.

Starting a book on when Pokemon Go morphs to Pokemon Gone.

Might be a good way to get rid of some of the stupid people on earth.

Heeeey!!! :(

Pokemon orienteering may be a lot of fun for some people.
Load an orienteering map and course on to a tablet or phone. Your GPS linked icon appears and you start on the course. Naturally the feedback about any mistakes is pretty immediate - you are heading aaway from the control, you took the wrong trail, etc The particpant still has to do the navigating but the feedback is more immediate than navigating with map and compass alone. It is proving a popular way to do navigating contests in the cities. Perhaps it would be a hit in the forests.

I saw some kids in my local park today who might have been doing Pokémon Go...
All looking at one kid's phone, but moving -- and not on a path (a field though; not woods).

Hmmm. If we could get the game developer to put a Pokemon at each control of a course we designed. Hmmm.

You can buy Lure Modules which you can place anywhere, so if you were an enterprising orienteering club, you'd put a Lure Module at your orienteering event.

Hmmmmm, indeed...

I mean, you could also ask the developers, too. But, uh, they are really really really busy with requests right now.

Thanks Pink. Not sure what a "lure module" is. Is that a way to create your own "course" or place your own Pokemon targets? I guess if I wanted to pursue this, I should actually get the app and explore it a bit... But I have to express that I have very, very minimal interest In chasing imaginary critters or playinng virtual reality... Maybe i can convince one of my juniors to try it. Pika pika.

Many of those top mobile games have tournaments, timed events and time bound from - to activities.
This very nicely fits the street-scramble and score formats.

Haven't see Pokemon Go yet, but if there is a way for affiliates (read 'enterprising orienteering club') to create time events, purchase and place those 'lure modules' and provide the top achievers some high value in game stuff, it might be a well worth the effort.

So I take it JPOK is on the cards for the very near future to capitalise on its popularity?

Ha, just installed it. Its build by the same guys Niantic - a Google startup that made Ingress in 2010. By all your descriptions of this Pokemon Go, it seemed similar premise to Ingress, so I am not surprised. They got themselves the know how of the augmented reality tech for 6 years and now they found an iconic game to apply their platform against.

Do I detect a bit of a sniff at this johnny-come lately that's doing well? What's orienteering if its not an augmented reality game with less (but increasing) flair?

This just in: There will be a demo pokemon go race at Rio Olympics, insiders say chances are good for regular event status for the ones 4 years from now.

While orienteering, I've run into a few marijuana grows, but NZ Pokeman Go beats that: Pokémon Go leads New Zealand players to gate of Hells Angels club

What's orienteering if its not an augmented reality game with less (but increasing) flair?

An actual reality game that's a lot less likely to get you run over?

Random Tuesday, a few hundred people cruising around on a map in my town. Never thought I'd see it!

PG is awesome. Teaches map reading, orienting the map, just great. All these kids will be orienteering-ready.

Who says you have to leave the house? I have caught two pokemon in my lounge room and one in my kitchen already ;)

Not sure what's so scary about the gate of a Hells Angels club - my regular bike commute took me right past one for 17 years.

I only saw anyone go in or out of the place twice (one of them a pizza delivery), but did give the area a wide berth the morning the police paid them a "visit" (although as it turned out, the only thing they managed to find to charge them with was failing to have a liquor licence for the clubhouse bar).

PG is awesome.

Well, we already knew that...

(And ditto on the Hell's Angels thing... they're a motorcycle club, not a crime organization.)

An actual reality game that's a lot less likely to get you run over?

I've come close a few times in Metro events.

Great description by Bike Snob NYC today: a game that replicates the effects of LSD while harvesting (your) valuable user data.

Just got a quick demo of the game from a co-worker who plays (and who now walks to work instead of biking in order to play on the way). It doesn't seem like there's really much map reading required -- you just keep your head down and move towards the shiny thing.

There is a map and you orient it.

Right, but you don't actually need to read the map and interpret your surroundings to find thingies. Of course you could (people like us would), but you don't need to -- you can just watch the screen and move in the right direction towards the thing you want.

It would be great if people are actually developing map-reading skills from it, but it seems more likely to me that the people who already can read a map are doing it and those who can't are just finding shiny things by moving in the right direction. I'd be happy to be wrong.

[edit to add: of course, with millions of users even a small fraction actually learning map reading skills is a good thing]

It was described as "an orienteering game" by the Tasmanian police, but I suspect that wasn't an endorsement.

I am not an experienced player, but to get to the resources or a gym, I am pretty sure you have to read your map.

If all you do is walk toward the shiny thing, you quickly realize that there can be large obstacles, such as buildings, in your way. The buildings are shown on your screen, as are the streets you need to traverse to get around the buildings. I'd call that map reading.

Ok, I don't want to get into a long discussion about how much map reading people will be learning because I do think that people who are so inclined should absolutely jump on capitalizing on the *popularity* of the game, regardless of the impact of the map aspect.

YES! Cristina is right! Pink Socks, please tell us how we capitalise on this pronto!

I'm wondering if my club's facebook needs a "what is orienteering" explained by comparing it to PoGo. But maybe in a month or two when we have another event coming up.

Does the map auto-orient?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2016/07...
I can think of a few uses of this

If running while playing Pokémon Go counts as orienteering (someone was doing this at my cross country practice), then did we just get 15 million more orienteers in the world in 5 days? If so, awesome!

Seems there have been a few car accidents in our city from people playing this game whilst driving, even though driving whilst using your phone is illegal (for this exact reason). You just can't take the stupid out of some people.

I played yesterday, definitely used the map... Couldn't really figure out how not to, but I am still a newbie.
Also, thanks to Hillary Clinton, I learned that you can buy lures, and I then wondered if we could have a race based on setting lures (that last for 30 min each) at different pokestops around a park. It's like having a control with a time window, a format I've thought would be fun to do more of.

BAOC has an event on Sunday. I posted a comment on the Facebook Event page, "It's like Pokeman Go without a smartphone." That got a spike in the People Reached plot of about 150 people.

I finally broke down and installed it. I won't have much time to play until after the event, for which I'm the director.

Writing an app is not a sure thing. As Pink_Socks mentioned there are already several apps that do exactly what a score-o event is with the set of checkpoints as QR codes or questions to answer, time bound etc... Even allya'll orienteerers here, how many of you have heard of them? Also the Niantic team have been running Ingress which has a similar premise, augmented reality, following around on maps, getting to portals locations without much success.

So it took Niantic to join an iconic name brand to make their augmenter reality game hit, not the map use or the crappy "augmented reality" UI.
Also Google had pretty strong marketing push 5 years ago with Ingress yet no one aside from some geeks got interested in it .

The geocachers are jumping on this.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/forget-pokemon...

And Colorado Democrats:
http://www.denverpost.com/2016/07/31/colorado-poke...

So, we go to Pokestops and hand out orienteering schedules? :-)

Hopefully the programmers aren't stupid enough to have pokestops or whatever out on the track or through the marathon or cycling courses because I can see what would happen.