Gotta Catch 'Em All... well a few anyway

At first, I thought it was clickbait, then maybe a satirical post, but it gradually dawned on me that the person writing about how the Pokemon GO craze might actually be important to churches, was serious, and more than that, they might be right... maybe... well probably not, unless you have people willing to hang out in front of your building and be creepy with passing young adults.
Allow me to explain, actually just read this.  The situation is that churches and other public spaces are being used in the expanded reality of the Pokemon GO game as Pokestops and Pokegyms, and well, I've caught like five different kinds of Pokemon on my way to the bathroom from my office.  Oh yeah, I might have downloaded the app, and made myself a character (RevRend18).  I might be on level four and working towards level five, where the stuff can really start to happen.  It all started because I was just curious about whether or not Good Samaritan Presbyterian Church is featured in the game, (it is, our sign is a Pokestop). The big Brethren Church next door actually has a Pokegym, even though I'm pretty sure their official position would be that Pokemon is some sort of devil worship (I suspect they don't know, the app doesn't actually have to ask permission to use your spot in a virtually rendered digitally expanded reality).
I'm too old to actually have been involved in the original Pokemon craze of the 1990's, so I entered the world of Pokemon GO a complete neophyte.  I do know what a Pikachu looks like, and that that little yellow dude is a total badass, but beyond that I'm pretty clueless of the difference between a Meowff and Squirtle.  If none of that makes any sense to you, don't worry, it means you're a well adjusted adult without children raised during the Poke-Epoch.
Me on the other hand... I have no excuse, I'm kind of having fun playing Pokemon GO.  My morning loop around the lake at Gilbert Run has three Pokestops and yesterday morning I captured like six Pokemon, as well as accruing enough walk distance to hatch my first Pokemon Egg, but being new I didn't know that you had to put the egg in an incubator before you start walking, so next walk for sure I will be the proud papa of some kind of new Pokemon.
Of course this game is huge right now, it's servers are crashing from over crowding, and it is generating all sorts of hater-ade from the interweb, which is kind of interesting, because everything that gets popular goes through that.  It's the human reaction to new things put out there in meme form.  Oddly enough though the haters have actually kept me in it.  I figure, if Pokemon is being mocked by a bunch of grumpy old trolls, it might just be something to keep a finger on.
Honestly, I don't see myself ever getting that wrapped up in it.  I'm not trying to "Catch em all" or take over a Gym, I am really treating it sort of like a little scavenger hunt, which is kind of fun for now.  I go places and walk a bit as it is, I always have my phone with me anyway, and I have observed that tuning into the "expanded reality" of Pokemon GO helps you understand what certain other people around you are doing.  I have seen people pulled over in cars at odd places, you guessed it Pokestops.  Yesterday as I was collecting some Pokeballs from the Pokestop at Gilbert run, I saw a lady get out of her car and come strolling down the hill towards me with her phone out like a tricorder from Star Trek, I knew what she was up to.
Of course, some ne'er do wells have figured out how to lure people into out of the way places and rob them, and a few people have been injured because they were paying too much attention to that Pidgey they were trying to catch and not enough to the oncoming traffic, but at long last something inter-webby is getting us outside. We need to deal with the dangers of outside a little more often I think, or else we're going to end up in a Wall-E situation sooner than you think.
What I think I like about Pokemon GO, as opposed to Ingress, another expanded reality game that I dabbled in because it came pre-installed on my phone, is that you don't have to take it very seriously.  My Ingress days were over the minute I got an email from two actual people, not the game server autobot, telling me to check with them before I did things in the game, that creeped me out and I was done.  They seemed awfully intent on trying to control what I did with their imaginary forcefield thingies and I was not down for that kind of drama.  I heard that actual confrontations have broken out among Ingress players, in the really real world, so I'm thinking that I was probably wise to bail.  Anyway, I'm like three days into Pokemon GO, I have spent no money on it, I will spend no money on it, and I'll tell you, on these terms, I don't hate it.