Pokémon Go is the break from reality we all need

There will no doubt be a Pokémon Go scare story soon. Yet it’s important to remember that for a short time in July 2016, there was tangible proof that our default setting is open, curious, childlike and really quite silly

Pokémon Go may be silly - but it is exactly the kind of silly our world needs right now (Getty)

"This whole Pokémon hunt is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen, and I have lived through hammer pants and The Macarena" said a sign attached to a fence, written by one ‘irate’ but funny resident complaining about trespassing Pokémon Go players. The sign, stuck up somewhere in Canada, quickly flooded across the world via social media, where millions of joyous players hunted – yes, completely stupidly – for Bulbasaurs, Squirtles and Jigglypuffs. It was a welcome moment of laughter. Like many, I’ve lost my capacity for stupidity somewhat over the last six weeks, around the time of the Orlando massacre and Jo Cox’s killing moving dourly through other miseries to Bastille Day in Nice.

But scenes of a euphoric Vaporeon stampede at 11pm in Central Park, New York, this weekend made me laugh. It was a balmy night, cars sat in the road abandoned, as excited onlookers and jubilant Pokémon Go hunters swarmed through the park in Pied Piper-style processions. Armies of momentarily carefree humans simply tried to "catch them all". Just like The Macarena, where ‘line dancing’ met the nursery classic ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’, or like hammer pants when the world temporarily believed trouser crotches looked sexiest worn at knee level, there is no predicting our capacity for flagrant, harmless silliness. But we need pointless joy right now, more than ever before. If it’s found during a seven mile urban ramble in search of a nigh-mythical pink fluttering Mew, then so be it.

Pokémon Go is a particularly ‘good news’ story as, according to the mood of constant peril we live in, it really should be a very bad one. This is a free-to-download augmented reality game which is so intoxicatingly hewn and prettily presented that it compels people to leave their homes and wander in a zombie-like stupor, out in the fresh air, into areas they’d never normally go. Sounds dangerous doesn’t it? Risky?

They end up in cemeteries, meadows, back alleys and unfamiliar housing estates. Pokémon Go even provokes conversation with strangers! It leads to inter-generational, mixed-gender, interracial, cross-cultural willy-nilly mingling! I have seen the pictorial evidence. And it often happens after dark! Yet as country after country was given access to Pokémon Go, there was not a vast global outbreak of theft, pillaging, mugging, child abduction, sexual violence or other signs of the four horsemen of the Pokémon Go-related apocalypse.

In fact, aside from a few stories of absent-minded enthusiasts walking off cliffs, it appears much of the world simply left their homes and had a lovely time. They walked pointlessly (with added occasional monsters) for entire mornings. They enjoyed the sun on their backs, they saw architecture they’d never noticed in a decade, they even ended up helping strangers and reported back that it felt good.

This weekend, anecdotal evidence on social media about the Pokémon Go effect felt oddly moving. I read about autistic children so entranced by the app it let them break free of their rigidity over routine. And refugee children in Germany reportedly finding common ground with local children. And mothers walking miles to hatch eggs for their disabled kids. And an American ex-servicemen with PTSD wrote Facebook updates admitting this was the first time he’s went into a public space and made small talk for years.

There will no doubt be a Pokémon Go scare story soon. The vast numbers of players globally make it statistically unavoidable. Yet it’s important to remember that, for a short time in July 2016, here was tangible proof that across the world the human’s natural, default setting was open, curious, childlike and really quite silly.

It’s common parlance following every terrorist act or example of abject cruelty that we cannot let these dark forces change our lives. Except they do. They do every single day we do not laugh, or when we hide in our homes, or when we mistrust all strangers, or we feel the world is simply naturally rotten.

One of the lovely things about Pokémon Go, just a silly game with a pointless outcome, is that it indicated that we are all still open to happiness. Dark clouds dog us right now, making it difficult to see our true natures. But we are still here; still trusting, still laughing, still being stupid and right now, we’re just really bloody determined to "catch them all".