Pokémon, Stay

I am a little figure on a big green map.

I’m wearing an orange jacket and a luchador-style wrestling mask with pointy ears, the outfit of my avatar in Pokémon Go, the augmented-reality smartphone game in which you catch, collect and evolve tiny monsters for points and prestige.

All around me, stretching to the horizon, there are no-go zones. The grocery store I should avoid because of social distancing. The playground where parents are being advised not to let their toddlers touch the equipment. The city park where Brooklynites craving fresh air have been coming too close for comfort.

My avatar radiates a small circle around it, denoting the distance at which you can activate in-game features. (Suddenly, the concept of having a circle radiating from your person — six feet to be precise — is universal, and a lot less whimsical.) The figure stands on a single, long rectangle, the house I live in. And that, pretty much, is where I stay.

If you’ve ever played Pokémon Go, you know the problem here. Unlike so many video games, this one was designed to get you off your couch, make you move and bring you into the world. If you want to advance and find rarities, you need to wander and explore. To get the balls, potions and eggs you need (I could go into detail; I won’t), you visit “Pokéstop” stations and “gyms” placed at local landmarks.

If you don’t go anywhere, you don’t get anywhere. “Go” is in the name, after all. And yet here we are, in the era of Stay.

Before Covid-19, my continuing Pokémon Go habit was just a mild embarrassment. It was the ultimate dad move to still be playing a game that became a pop-culture sensation in 2016, when Hillary Clinton joked about getting voters to “Pokémon Go to the polls.”

Now the app is one more reminder of what we’ve lost — the casual ability to just go places and have real-world experiences, including the ones mediated by an augmented-reality game.

Pokémon Go had been a constant low-key part of my life, an ambient presence in the back of my head as I moved about the world. On city bus rides to school, I would pass off my phone to my son so he could catch Drowzees and Eevees for me on the trip. I do not hand around my phone so casually anymore.

I’d open the game while on a morning run or at rest stops on family road trips. When I traveled, it was a kind of alt-GPS that I would use to discover new cities. I collected Pokémon the way other people would collect souvenir snow globes. A trip to Miami for a book fair netted a region-specific Corsola. Visiting Mexico City to give a lecture in February, I went running in Tlalpan National Park and finally nabbed a long-coveted Heracross.

The game even has a social aspect of sorts, a “friends” feature that allows you to trade in-game “gifts” with other players. I have friends in New York, elsewhere in America, in Europe and Asia. I hope they’re doing well; the game allows for no communication except gift-giving.

Lately I don’t go out and collect many gifts, so I don’t send many. The world, once a delightful bounty of serendipity and lucky finds, is now a scary place to retreat from.

One silly game experience, of course, is hardly humankind’s greatest loss at the moment. But this is part of what the pandemic does: It makes even harmless, time-wasting aspects of life into ominous, sad triggers.

Before our great sheltering, people would often bemoan that screen entertainments were replacing “real” experience. If anything, this has firmed my belief that virtual experiences are, in their own way, absolutely real. When you lose them, along with the physical world they’re layered over, the loss is undeniable.

Once upon a time, the makers of Pokémon Go mainly had to worry about reminding ardent users not to trespass or crash the car while on the hunt. Now, they’re making it easier for us suddenly homebound players to amass a stash of balls, hatch eggs with less walking and lure critters while sheltering in place. A recent news alert in the app promised “updates to Pokémon Go features and experiences that can be enjoyed in individual settings.”

It’s nice. It helps. It also helps that there are ways of playing without leaving home, like a “battle league” feature that allows you to pit your Pokémon against other monster teams from around the world.

But that’s not the game. The game is catching them all, hunting, exploring, moving. My weekly progress meter — which measures my walking for in-game rewards, in communication with my Apple Watch — would regularly log over 50 kilometers in a typical week. Last week I barely cracked 20. (Mostly, I assume, nervous pacing.)

Still, I play. I see what creatures are lurking near my house. Occasionally, I see if the coast is clear and dash down the block to spin my local Pokéstop. In a stressful time, even the attenuated game is a distraction and a comfort.

But it’s also a reminder of what Pokémon Go used to give me, and the one thing it can no longer deliver no matter how much it tweaks its code: the whole wide world.