On a recent Sunday afternoon, a crowd only slightly smaller than the one a few miles west at the Pitchfork Music Festival formed around the Bean in Millennium Park for a Pokémon Go meet-up that made the days of Pac-Man fever resemble a mild cough. More than 9,000 people RSVP’d to the event’s Facebook invite, but on-the-ground estimates ranged from 3,000 to 5,000 fans, from teens to the middle-aged, some clad in bright yellow Pikachu hats and furry Pokémon-themed costumes. They roared at the sight of homemade color-coordinated banners representing the game’s three competitive teams and sang in unison to the anime cartoon’s theme song like a Wrigley Field crowd warbling along to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
Certainly Pokémon Go can be an addictive distraction (take it from me—I’m level 18), and it’s more than a little annoying that corporations are leaping into the fray with Pokémon-themed marketing. But does this game really deserve the kind of fear and loathing usually reserved for the Donald Trump campaign?
In an era when high-minded moralizers now lament the decline of reading, it’s ironic that even the novel was a source of moral panic in the 18th century. The sudden spread of mass media in the form of written fiction had cultural commentators labeling them “fevers” that might lead readers to lose touch with reality and identify with characters to the point where they’d adopt their behavior. Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was blamed for a series of suicides.
Sorry, Neo, it’s too late. We’re all trapped in the simulation. v
