Pokébarf

So there’s this game for mobile phones called “Pokémon Go,” and I’m pretty sure it’s a signal that the endtimes are finally here.

In case you’ve spent the past month making wicker baskets with mountain Sherpas in a Tibetan village, the game involves following your phone to real-world locales in search of the titular Pokémon characters, most of which look like the offspring of an obese housecat and a flying squirrel. When you find one, you look through your phone’s camera at, say, the mailbox on the corner of Main and Elm, and on your screen, you see the Pokémon superimposed over reality -- his virtual hiding spot digitally revealed. After that I’m a little fuzzy on what happens. I think you capture him or something. I’d look it up, but I don’t give a steaming turd.

If that description of the game only makes half-sense to you, don’t worry. It’s a mark of your sanity. Judging from the sheer masses of people who have embarked on this virtual treasure hunt, sanity is in short supply these days, supplanted instead by this latest digital annoyance. It would be one thing if you looked through your phone’s camera and it superimposed Scarlett Johansson’s face over everyone else’s (especially mine), but no, game developer Nintendo has other things in mind. Like making sure nobody ever makes eye contact again.

Before employing my few remaining linguistic skills in ripping Pokémon Go a new one, I have to admit that not everything about the game is entirely odious. It’s been quite the hot topic at my office lately, with more than one parent reporting that the app has helped them bond with their children. I can see that. As a child I was among the original users of the NES, Nintendo’s first home video game console, and I remember being particularly close to my mother around this period, as she developed an obsession with Super Mario Bros. that bordered on manic. In fact, if I’d been an adult back in 1988, I might have been concerned for the psychological health of a woman whose chief hobby, for a time, was chucking radishes at egg-regurgitating ostriches.

The parent-child bond isn’t the only benefit, it seems. Since the game involves finding these critters out in the real world, reports are that adults and children alike are chucking their sedentary lifestyles and doing a lot more walking. It’s not often that a video game inspires physical activity; usually they promote just the opposite. In an old-fashioned game of word association, the phrase “video game session” makes me think of cold basement couches, stray pizza crusts in half-empty Papa John’s boxes, and a Mountain Dew bottle so large you could dress it in a coat and hat and take it to a screening of “Finding Dory.” Stepping outside and feeling the sun on your skin feels like a step in the right direction.

That’s a pretty weak comfort, though, because buried in the promise of increased physical activity is the knowledge that we used to trek outside under our own desire and will. We didn’t need to be chasing down fictitious characters to catch a breeze on our collective faces.

By “we,” I mean “people of a certain generation” -- those of us who grew up with video games but weren’t dominated by them, who could put down “NBA Jam” to go play on the swings without feeling withdrawal headaches. Those old gaming consoles were married to our television sets, so when we went outside, we were cut off, forced to interact with the world by crumbling dead leaves in our hands and poking at bugs with sticks. It was no-frills, but it was reality. Not the virtual kind, but actual, tree-bark-and-grass-blades reality.

This is what smartphones take away from us. Pokémon Go is just the latest manifestation of a larger problem: the virtual world’s encroachment on our non-virtual selves. The internet is a wonderful thing, not least of all because of the convenience; in five seconds flat I can be watching video of naked people rolling around on a giant chocolate cake, all of it set to major-key banjo music. That’s pretty special. But the internet used to have dividing lines. It required a giant computer with a connection piped in from the wall, and when you got up to go to the bathroom -- or to work, or to school -- it couldn’t follow you there. You were restored to a world of physical things that you had to look at and touch.

Now the ’net’s in your front pants pocket, along with the naked cake people and all the rest. All boundaries have dissolved. Pokémon Go is the perfect illustration of that: Pedestrians are getting hit by cars because they’re hunting down cartoon characters. Muggers are planting “lures” to draw players to sketchy areas to strip them of their valuables. Just the other day, the president of Massachusetts General Hospital had to issue a memorandum to all of his employees, requesting that they stop playing the game and focus on treating patients. You know, that minor annoyance.

I liken the game to cigarettes. It may give you a pleasant sensation at the time, but quit altogether and you’ll feel a whole lot better.

But is that even possible now? To date I’ve resisted the urge the buy a smartphone, but like the internet itself, they may one day become necessary, as integrated into our lives as socks and underarm deodorant. It’s part of a larger trend of human and machine melding into a singular being. Forty years from now I’ll be the curmudgeonly old man railing against the evils of neurological implants, saying things like, “Back in my day, we had to Google things with a computer!” Hell, give me a tweed jacket and an underweight cat and I’m halfway there already.

If you play the game, do me a favor, ’k? When a cartoon critter manifests itself on my head or at my feet, just leave it there. It’s a new game I’ve invented called Pokémon Go Away.