Mandy Nolan’s Soap Box: Poke Me

Mum, I am just going down to the hospital.’

When your 15-year-old son says this to you, it’s hard not to panic. What’s wrong? Has he accidentally removed a limb trying to cut gluten-free bread? Have the 20 cushions I’ve placed on his bed created a soft-furnishings-induced anaphylaxis? Is it the dreaded meningococcal?

I’m not a calm mum. If there is something wrong with the kids, I freak out. When I gave birth it never occurred to me I’d spend the rest of my waking hours keeping them alive. The world is a scary place. Sharp edges. Creepy perverts. Sudden drops. Disease.

‘Charlie – are you okay? What’s happened? I’ll drive you. That hospital doesn’t work any more. We have to drive to The Farm. If we get the exit wrong you’ll be getting kale infusions instead of blood. I’ll get the keys.’

‘It’s okay, Mum. I am going to Mullumbimby Hospital. There is a Pokemon down there.’

Bloody Pokemon. So Charlie goes. I resist the urge to emasculate him even more by making him wear a helmet. He is walking after all.

Twenty minutes later he’s back. ‘Did you catch your Pokemon?’

‘No, couldn’t find it.’ He’s a little despondent. ‘Probably hiding in the asbestos.’ ‘You didn’t touch the asbestos, Charlie?’ Charlie looks at me in the way children look at you when it’s clear you’ll never be formally diagnosed, but when they recount stories of you to their peers they’ll start it with ‘Mum was nuts’.

For two weeks our family has been gripped by Pokemon madness. Fortunately the game’s launch coincided with the advent of school holidays, so no parental engagement or those tedious parent-led activities were required. The good people at Pokemon GO took care of that. This school holidays involved Pokestops, Pokeballs, learning how to be a Pokemon trainer in your virtual gym and almost walking into oncoming vehicles while looking at your iPhone.

So for those of you totally out of the loop – Pokemon GO is a thing. It’s an interactive augmented reality game that has attracted more downloads and activity than Tinder or Twitter. You would have seen the Pokemon people. They’re walking through town, or your backyard, staring at their iPhones, intently hunting something. Small groups have been gathered outside the Mullum pool all week – that’s a major Pokestop. That’s where you get balls. You see, when you play Pokemon GO you have to refill your ball supply. You need balls to throw at other Pokemon. Because you need to capture your Pokemon so they can battle other Pokemon.

Pokemon can be anywhere. As the game is kind of randomly generated it can create some inappropriate hunting locations. Such as the Holocaust Museum in Auschwitz which had to ask players to go elsewhere. It’s hard for people to pay their respects when some dickhead is trying to catch ‘Krabby’. While some businesses are taking advantage of the new phenomenon with ‘Pokemon pub crawls’, the consensus of cranky old people, who refuse to partake in anything more complex than the ON/OFF button on their aircon unit, is that it’s stupid.

But hey, weren’t we complaining that the kids just weren’t getting out enough? Now they’re everywhere. Walking the streets. Even visiting museums. Paedophiles must be delighted. Luring kids into public was getting to be problematic. Now they’re everywhere! It’s probably why they call ’em Pokestops. (Too far?)

They’re even in your backyard looking behind your bin. In the US some trigger-happy redneck ended up shooting at a couple of Pokemon hunters because he thought they were intruders. He heard young voices, with one asking the other, ‘Did you get anything?’ So he shot at them. Fortunately he missed. The consensus was that this was the fault of the kids.

However, I think if you are shooting at your intruders then you are possibly way more dangerous than Pokemon GO users could ever be. You’d be part of a game we’ve all been playing for years that’s become especially more relevant since the advent of Pauline Hanson and her merry band of supporters. (If Sonia Kruger wore a burqa, she wouldn’t need so much Botox. Just sayin’.) I am waiting for someone to bring out Redneck Go. (Can’t we capture rednecks? And send them back? Please?)

What a great defence Pokemon GO would have been for Oscar Pistorius. When he shot Reeva through the bathroom door it wasn’t just an intruder. It was a Pokemon hunter. And what about this weekend at Splendour? I can only imagine that for tens of thousands of those early adopters of technology that it wasn’t about the music so much this year; it was all about the splendour of green leaves (means a Pokemon is close by). So after floating blue cubes turned into circles, I reckon there wasn’t just splendour, there was a whole lot of Pokemon in the Grass. As for me, I’m a bystander, I’m strictly Pokemon NO.