Pokemon Go finds success with bar crawl, interactive learning
Southgate senior Tyler Goudreau enjoys a drink while playing Pokemon Go at the Blue Gator Sports Pub and Grill in Mount Pleasant, Michigan on September 8, 2016. Goudreau serves as the co-president of the Mount Pleasant Trainer's Club.
It was nearing 2 a.m. and music blared from the Fabiano Botanical Garden on Central Michigan University's campus. More than 20 students huddled together, enthralled by the Pokemon Go game that was the pop culture hit of the summer.
That was in July, when the mobile application was first released, totaling 7.5 million downloads within the first week.
While the game's popularity has dwindled this fall, players have found new ways to creatively hunt, including Mount Pleasant bar crawls and incorporating the game into an honors biology course at CMU.
“Since I started using Pokemon Go in the classroom, I had a few educators contact me and want to know how I did it,” said Bradley Swanson,a CMU biology professor. “There were some people who didn’t think it a worthwhile activity. I don’t think they understood it. Most of the people were excited and thought it was a useful way to integrate games into learning.”
Pokemon Go, a phone app combining the animated creatures from the popular late-90s television show and video games, requires players to physically move around to capture Pokemon. Once getting close to the geocached location of the Pokemon, the phone camera can activate, showing a virtual-reality image of the character in the real world.
Half of the Foundations of Evolution and Diversity honor course students were already playing the game. They never expect to bring it into their labs.
Swanson told his class to download Pokemon Go before explaining the rules — the students had to pair up and could go anywhere to hunt Pokemon as long as it was on campus.
He said the game can be applied to his course because there are two aspects to diversity: the number of species and the equitably of the species. Within the Pokemon realm, there's several that can be found almost everywhere while others can only be found at certain places at certain times.
“That’s how it’ll be like with trees,” Swanson said. “There will be a lot of common ones that can handle many different habitats. But then the rarer ones can be the ones that are more interesting and show signs of pollution or are indicator species. We can use Pokemon Go that way.”
After the hour-long hunt ended, students created graphs displaying the diversity of Pokemon on campus.
It was the “perfect way” to teach students how to make a graph, make a key and mark an axis, Swanson explained.
“It gives us the opportunity to connect these intense concepts that would normally be ambiguous or hard to wrap your mind around because you can compare them to the video game,” said Ann Arbor freshman Chandler Ray.
The class was split into the three official Pokemon teams — Valor, Instinct and Mystic.
The teams did have a competitive edge to them because they were ranked at the end of labs, said Swanson. The end ranking of the labs was Team Mystic in first place, Team Instinct in second place and Team Valor in third place.
Team Loyalty
Outside of the classroom, the competition isn’t always as friendly. Each team battles their Pokemon for control over geocached gym locations throughout Mount Pleasant.
A geocached gym is where users battle their Pokemon against other teams until one team claims the gym or location.
The three teams in Mount Pleasant created their own Facebook pages as a way to share their catches, announce their gym takeover and to post a location where they can meet up to Pokemon hunting together.
“Team Mystic is a family. No other team can say the same,” said Mount Pleasant native Will Hall. “The amount of support I've seen since the beginning of this game is absolutely unreal.”
Players aren’t difficult to spot. They are the people you often see walking around with their phones raised, fingers carefully swiping up the screen to throw Pokeballs before turning to their friends in either happiness for their catch or disappointment from Pokemon running away.
Joking insults are commonly tossed between the teams.
“Players are either ego-driven for Team Valor or the popularity of Team Mystic, but nobody wants to be considered the underdog (with Instinct),” said Zachary Strozewski, a Mason senior and Team Instinct member. "We are able to rise against the challenge, everything we do has relevant importance and our hating rate is higher out of the three teams."
Remus native Logan Snyder, 19, of Team Valor disagreed. He said Team Valor is what "Pokemon is all about."
“At its heart, Pokemon is about having the whole world staring you in the face and replying, ‘Bring it on,’” Snyder said. “It's about picking yourself and your team up off the ground for the umpteenth time, training endlessly, and then finally toppling the gym that's held strong for days. Valor is what Pokemon is all about, so why would I choose anything else?”
Alcohol-FueledPokemon Safari
Even with the competitive edge attached to the game, players manage to find ways to bond over the game including evolving the childhood game into the adult world through an alcohol-infused Pokemon hunt on Sept. 8.
Lures were set at downtown bars by the Mount Pleasant Trainers’ Club, a Pokemon-focused club at CMU. At 7 p.m., about 20 players gathered and wandered to the bars together. They walked through the streets, celebrating their captures as people continued to join their ranks at each bar.
“Pokemon has a nostalgic feeling to it,” said Southgate senior Josh Simms. “It almost felt like we were too old. But with Pokemon Go, it’s like we can show you we aren’t too old. We can drink and play Pokemon.”
Several establishments were stops in the PokePub Crawl, including Marty's Bar, The Bird Bar and Grill, Blue Gator Sports Pub and Grill, Dog Central and the Pineapple Express food cart. Marty’s Bar even sold a special drink,“The Pikachu,” which was a combination of red bull, orange juice and vodka.
“During the first week that Pokemon Go came out, my Fitbit said I walked more than 30 miles,” Simms said. “With the bar crawl, I want to make connections. We are incorporating two great things — Pokemon and alcohol.”
The bar crawl turnout was more than expected, said Southgate senior Tyler Goudreau.
“I didn’t expect it to be so popular. We had negative comments on the event page when it was first made because people said it would be dead,” said Goudreau, Mount Pleasant Trainers’ Club co-president. “People are just excited to drink, talk and hang out with people who are just as into Pokemon as them.”
