It was a gloomy overcast Sunday in Mumbai, and threatening to pour just about any time, but that didn’t stop over 470 gaming enthusiasts from converging at the Hiranandani Gardens for fitness tech venture GOQii’s Active Sunday session.

Except, this time, the massive crowd cutting across age groups didn’t come in search of fitness advice from GOQii’s coaches. Instead, they walked around in search of new and unseen Pokémons.

Yes, GOQii had harnessed the power of Pokémon GO, the game that has the world glued to its smartphones, to get people off their couches and onto the streets and parks of Mumbai.

Just about everywhere you go, someone’s either playing, talking about or hearing about Pokémon GO. I honestly can’t remember the last time a video game, leave alone one on a mobile platform, captured the public imagination and so completely dominated the global conversations on social media and in real life as this game has in the past couple of weeks.

Just consider. Pokémon GO has topped Twitter’s daily users, and the app sees more engagement than Facebook! Heck, forget the usual suspects, the regular gamers, this is a game that’s getting people who don’t usually care about games talking about where they last sighted a Jigglypuff. Walk out onto the streets of many big cities today and it’s hard to go places and not see people playing it. This truly is a phenomenon, an impressive feat in the world of gaming and in terms of what it can get people to do.

If you’ve avoided the insane amount of attention the game’s gotten in the recent weeks, or just crawled out from under a rock, here’s a quick primer.

You must remember the Nintendo-owned Pokémon, which was hugely popular with kids back in the 1990s? Today, with the Pokémon GO, you can now search for and see virtual Pokémon scattered throughout the real world.

Using your phone’s GPS, the game shows you Pokémon that are physically close to you via the very nifty augmented reality technology — the game overlays the creature on top of the imagery from your phone’s rear camera, so it appears as if it’s there in the real world.

See a Pokémon, and you can try and catch it by swiping an on-screen ball at it, with the aim of “catching ’em all!” Of course, catching them all will involve you travelling outside your locality, because different creatures are scattered across the city and beyond. As you get better and level up, you visit virtual “gyms” to train and evolve your Pokémon and hit up popular city spots (temples, big buildings, malls) to seek out PokéStops where you can replenish your Poké Balls and other useful in-game items.

The low-hanging bait of its somewhat simplistic gameplay seems to be working, and the game’s all the rage. Ask folks why though, and the reasons are part nostalgia and part the thrill of (re)discovering the city around you. Nikhil Bijlani, a 25-year-old marketing professional says that “it brings out the childhood fantasy of running into a Pokémon in real life” and as an added bonus, the game has “helped him get off his chair and explore the surrounding areas to hunt for Pokemons”. Bijlani has walked 30km in one week just to improve his Pokémon GO chances!

Others, like Sahil Sharma, a regular gamer in his late 20s and a working professional, are enticed by the social aspects of the game, of “meeting and discussing with new people who are also as excited about the game”.

Or, look at Archana Sudarshan, a copywriter with an advertising agency who uses the game to “learn about places around me, and to discover areas I didn’t know exist. Finding PokéStops and gyms around my desk-bound office job is a big motivation to make me move from my seat every now and then.”

The stories don’t stop there. Stories of US policemen playing alongside civilians, of the game helping autistic children socialise and get out of the house, of massive crowds walking together in search of a rare Pokémon and ending up sharing a sense of bonhomie, or even of a Pokémon GO-based dating service. And sure, there are stories of mugging incidents around the game (a little less playing in desolate neighbourhoods after dark is just pure common sense!) but for most regular folks like you and me, the game’s getting us to get out and about a lot more just in the off chance we’ll find a new Pokémon to add to our Pokédexes.

It cuts across age, race and gender lines at a time when these lines seem more deep-rooted than ever, and fosters a sense of community. Not bad for a mobile game and a cute bunch of pocket monsters.

POKÉFLAWS

That’s not to say game developer Niantic, previously responsible for the geo-tagging game Ingress, have hit it out of the park with Pokémon GO. Far from it, reckons Pranav Dixit, 28, writer and executive editor at a technology media start-up. Says Dixit: “While the gameplay is unique, it’s quite repetitive and can get old really quickly. Add to that the fact that the app is not officially available in India, so you have to jump through multiple hoops to get it.” A common complaint is that the app is buggy and crashes constantly. And, according to Archana, the app is a victim of its own popularity with recurring server problems. With the gaming having caught on more in bigger cities, you have a situation where you could see two PokéStops separated by as little as half a kilometre in a city like Bangalore, whereas smaller cities like Indore have only 10 PokéStops across the whole city! Beyond these teething troubles, there’s much more that Pokémon GO needs to address to ride the wave of popularity it’s seen in July. At the moment, for example, you cannot battle against your own friends in the game and even the battling that does happen at the gyms is more a function of how high your Pokémon’s combat power is, and not which Pokémon (with its own signature moves) you deploy to battle. Sharing achievements to Facebook or Twitter is sorely lacking, and the app could do with several basic fixes, such as a basic notification system which will pop up if your phone detects a Pokémon nearby. Sure would beat keeping the app open constantly and eating up precious battery life.

technocool@kanwar.net; follow me on twitter @2shar