Our Pokémon Go hype

We already knew Pokémon a bit from YouTube movies and/or on Netflix. So the children knew the main characters from cartoons and since a year Beertje has a Pikachu stuffed animal in our home. When he goes to school and I'm homeworking, I'm assigned the duty to take care of Pikachu, which I do with great care of course. 

Early October we visited Jan's brother. Kabouter's  nephew was so kind as to introduce the game Pokémon Go to Kabouter.  A new world opened to Kabouter: in an app on a phone he could play games, walk outside and find in virtual reality weird creatures that are apparently pokémons. There are hundreds of types that are logged in some Pokémon encyclopedia, the Pokédex.  

You walk around with the app which has the map in it, and these creatures appear. You throw on your mobile phone balls to them to catch them.  When you run out of balls...you visit a pokéstop in your neighbourhood to get some new balls.  You have a buddy Pokémon walking along in the app and he gets happy the more kms you walk together (and when you feed it in a virtual reality screen or when you take a picture...hence now my picture feed on my phone regularly has some sort of Pokémon in my living room or on the street now...crazy life it is.).

Some Pokéstops are "Gyms" in the neighbourhood and there you can battle and train pokémons to fight each other. Don't worry, nothing bloody, they practise attacks to each other and when effective, they faint. A little potion in your accessories revives them and all is back to normal...unless you are out of potions but guess what: you can also find some new ones when you visit a pokéstop.  

Since we wanted to help Kabouter to get started on one of our old phones, Jan and I also created an account since we can send him gifts once a day.   As a result all 3 of us are currently playing ;). 

The big advantage was that Kabouter is all of a sudden eager to do 2 walks a day.  We've walked an incredible amount of kms during the autumn vacation in the Ardennes. Often we walk around the village (or nearby our house in Leuven) a couple of blocks to pick up balls. All of a sudden he's my eager partner in crime to join me outside on walks.

He can't play all walk (the battery of that old phone doesn't support it either) and the advantage is that there's not much Pokémon in the wild nature...there are more in urban areas. So once we are off in the woods, the phones need to be in the pocket for a while. Nevertheless, we walk and catch these creatures a bit. And we bond together in trying to figure out the game, the rules, the points etc. At the dinner table we now discuss which gym has been conquered by which colour, whether we still have a lot of poke balls or potions in our backpack and how hard it's been to evolve a Pokémon to a higher transformation. 

Greetings from my personal Charmender Pokémon buddy in the game,  who always wants to play with me. 

Phoning for support with his nephew on one phone and checking the game on the other