BENGALURU:
Sandeep Joshi
has found a unique way to exercise while waiting for the metro at
Mysuru Road
station. The 24-year-old techie hunts for Pokémon. "I walk up and down the station hunting and sometimes walk in the train too. People who know what I am doing nod at me so I know I am not the only crazy one," he said.
Pokémon Go mania has caught up in Bengaluru and like Joshi, many are downloading the augmented reality game, an upgrade of the version that was a craze in the late 1990s. Pokémon Go uses your phone's GPS to detect where you are and make Pokémon characters appear around you on your phone screen so you can catch them. So you might have encountered people ‘catching' Pokémon on the staircase, in the office canteen, or on the street.
People staring at their phone screens and wandering around trying to catch elusive creatures can be dangerous but that's not deterring the gamers. "I realized I was too close to the edge of the platform when the guard began whistling," said Joshi. "I should be more careful. On my way back home, it is difficult to play because the station is crowded but I try to squeeze through."
To make a long journey less boring, Emilien Conquard, CEO of Scalers, a Bengaluru-based startup, downloaded Pokémon Go while travelling from
Puducherry to Bengaluru last week. "I had my head out of the car all the way and caught a lot of Pokémons," he said. "It is quite addictive and forces you to go outside and play. I spend about half an hour on the game every day," he said.
The original Pokémon games take place in a fantasy world of creatures, and ‘trainers' travel the globe to catch them. Pokémon Go, essentially, brings these creatures out of a console and into a simulated version of the world inhabited by the players.
When
Sadhana C
, 22, met with a bike accident last week, the doctor advised three-week bed rest but that didn't stop her from playing. "My house is infested with Pokémons," said Sadhana, who has caught 45 so far. "I caught a Vulpix (fox-like Pokémon) in my room. There was an Aerodactyl (flying dinosaur-like Pokémon) in my hall but it escaped," she said. Being confined to the house for the next three weeks doesn't seem so bad anymore.
Tanvi K
, 20, downloaded the game on Sunday morning to get away from her relatives at a family function. "I must have spent two hours finding Pokémon and my parents were annoyed, but now my father has also downloaded it," she said.
Recently, Moinak Pal, 26, an analyst, saw a guy loitering around the parking lot of a tech park at 10pm as he found Pokémon there. "The term ‘catch them all' has a whole new meaning. I have to physically move around and catch Pokémon creatures unlike the earlier games when we sat in one place," he said.
For Sweta Surbhi, the game brings a childhood dream to life. "It was my favourite TV show and my brother and I used to watch it after school. With Pokémon Go, I can finally find all the Pokémons and make a team of my own," said the 26-year-old engineer. "It makes me feel like I am a Pokémon trainer."
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