I’m an adult with a wife and two grown kids. I have a full time job, a mortgage, and am, by all outward appearances, a well-adjusted member of society.

I also play Pokémon Go, a fact I’m not particularly proud of.

To be clear, Pokémon isn’t even from my generation. I’m Gen-X, baby. I never owned any Pokémon cards. I had a binder full of Star Wars cards, with a few random Superman and Ghostbusters cards thrown in. In the late 90s when Pokémon cartoons started airing in the US, I was already married. Remember back when your mom referred to every videogame console as either an Atari or a Nintendo? For an entire decade I thought all Pokémon were named Pikachu.

I can’t remember everything kids considered cool when I was in school but I can tell you a pair of Ocean Pacific jams, a radical Trapper Keeper, and a killer boombox with all the bells and whistles would get you pretty far. For my kids it was a Game Boy Advance, followed by the Nintendo DS. Not only did they had to have the console, but it had to be a specific color. At daycare there was a physical separation between the haves and the have-nots. While a few kids sat on one side of the room playing Connect Four or thumbing through paperback books, every other kid sat huddled in a corner playing Pokémon.

I couldn’t tell you anything about those early Pokémon games because I never played them. While my kids were playing Pokémon I was grinding my way through Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 and Ghost Recon. I know they played Pokémon games on the Game Boy Advance, the Nintendo DS, the GameCube and maybe the Wii. I just wasn’t interested. The minute they started talking about Charmander and Bulbasaur I tuned them out the way my parents did when I started talking about Greedo and Bib Fortuna.

And then came Pokémon Go, in 2016. I had a teen and a tween by then who one day, out of the blue, begged me to take them to the park. Their mother had to check their temperature. Were these our kids? I loaded our trunk with a Frisbee, an old metal detector, and a set of vintage lawn darts and off we went. A trip! To the park!

And that’s where I learned about Pokémon Go.

For the uninitiated, Pokémon Go is a location‑based game played on mobile phones. In the game there are places where kids battle Pokémon, places where they battle each other, and missions they have to complete (including following walking trails) to unlock elements of the game, but the takeaway is that all of this is played in the real world. The game uses your phone’s GPS to display the roads, buildings, and locations around you. Local churches become gyms where Pokémon battle. Parks become routes where players can walk their Pokémon and earn experience. If you launch the game while sitting in your living room you’ll see a map of the roads that make up your own neighborhood. You might even find a Pokémon or two in your own backyard waiting to be captured, but the game is pretty smart and all the action takes place “elsewhere” out in the real world.

As a parent of two Pokémon Go players that meant driving kids to parks and parking lots and then listening to podcasts while they played Pokémon.

Back then I didn’t fully understand why my kids would occasionally shout from the backseat for me to pull over into our local Fire Station’s parking lot or drive around the block a few times before pulling into our driveway, but frankly there were a lot of things kids that age did that I didn’t understand. I had to explain to one of my kids that microwaving an iPhone extend its battery life and tell the other one not to eat Tide Pods. Walking around the park looking for Pokémon was one of the less weird things they did.

Like most fads, Pokémon Go came and went. My son got a job and my daughter got a boyfriend. Life moved on.

Fast forward to the summer of 2022. I, like most Americans, was just starting to stick my head outside my house, finally convinced that this new airborne virus wasn’t attached to every letter in my mailbox or the box my pizza was delivered in. I was looking for something to do, a reason to get out of the house and back into nature, and while talking to some online friends I discovered Pokémon Go.

Curse those friends. Curse them to hell.

It’s a bit difficult to explain how Pokémon Go is played because there is no ultimate goal. It’s an open-ended game; “winning” Pokémon Go would be like “winning” at playing LEGOs. That being said, there are a few objectives that become obvious during your first day of play. You’ll start off as a Level 1 trainer and so it might seem like the goal is to simply level up your trainer. But soon you’ll catch your first Pokémon which gets added to your Pokédex (kind of a virtual binder) and then you might think, “Aha! The goal is to collect them all!” But all those Pokémon can be both powered up and evolved into other Pokémon and it seems like that might be the ultimate goal. Then there are battle levels and achievements and medals and lots of other things to unlock and do and eventually it becomes obvious that “all of it” is the goal. And you’ll never do “all of it.”

Adding to the madness is that while the game can be played for free, it’s easier if you spend money. For example, as a new player you can collect up to 300 Pokémon. Currently the game has more than 1,000 species of Pokémon, and that’s just the beginning. Some Pokémon are available in different colors. Some have better attacks than others. During Halloween, several Pokémon appeared wearing witch hats. There are thousands and thousands of unique Pokémon to capture. To expand the total number of Pokémon you can own you’ll have to expand your backpack, which costs 200 coins. There are two ways to earn 200 coins. Without going into too much detail, you can either spend multiple days attacking different gyms which eventually earns you coins (you can only earn 50 coins a day), or you can spend $10 and buy 1,200 coins.

Of course it’s not just storage. The entire game is one big balancing act. You’ll need Pokéballs to capture Pokémon, Pokémon to battle in gyms, and healing items to revive your Pokémon so they can continue to earn Pokéballs. Everything is related and all it takes is one slight misstep to get things out of whack and bring your progress to a halt. Early on I captured every Pokémon I found and ran out of Pokéballs. As you might imagine, you can get Pokéballs a few at a time by spinning Pokéstops or… yeah. Real cash.

There’s another way to obtain Pokéballs and other items needed to play the game, and that’s by exchanging gifts with friends. To do this, you need (a) gifts and (b) friends. There’s no central lobby where you can find other players; if you’re under the age of 20 you’ll meet them at school or parks and if you’re older than that, there’s Reddit. Gifts are obtained by spinning Pokéstops, but you can only have 20 friends and hold 20 gifts which means to get anywhere in the game without spending real money… well, you’ll be spending real money on gasoline as you drive around town like an insane person, parking outside of churches, police stations, and other buildings with your car in park and your phone in your hand.

When I first started playing the highest level a trainer could reach was 40. Going from Level 1 to Level 2 takes 1,000 XP, which I think is what you earn by the first time you capture a critter each morning. To go from Level 2 to Level 3, you’ll need 2,000 XP (that’s 2,000 more, not 2,000 total). Going from Level 10 to 11 takes 10,000 XP and… I mean, after your first Pokémon of the day each additional one will net you 200 XP, give or take. If you hated grinding in games like World of Warcraft and Diablo, imagine driving around in your car to do it. Feeling beat down yet? Going from Level 33 to 34 takes 1,000,000 XP. That took me six months, playing every day.

I guess someone smart caught on because the game was “recalibrated” and the highest level changed to 50. Shortly after I reached level 39, the game was recalibrated a second time, which felt a bit like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. The highest level in the game is now 80 and I’m currently Level 55. I need 2,500,000 XP to go to level 56 — a goal I’m hoping to reach by March.

And while all the heavy lifting in this forsaken game is done outside the home, all the maintenance stuff — the pruning of the herd, the leveling of Pokémon, the whole gift exchange process, the sorting of items — can all be done at home. That’s what I do during commercial breaks. And in the bathroom. And in between meetings. And at stoplights.

It’s goddamn maddening. The game is like crack.

Every time my wife goes to the grocery store I ride along so I can spin Pokéstops along the route and catch Pokémon in the parking lot. I bought a Bluetooth “Poké-Spinner” which automatically spins every Pokéstop you pass and automatically catches Pokémon. I trade gifts with half my friends in the morning before work and the other half in bed before falling asleep. This game is killing me. Also, this game will kill your phone’s battery. It demands access to your location at all times which I’m sure is being used by the Chinese government and I can’t leave the house without a charging cable because if my phone’s not about to die, my Bluetooth Poké-Spinner is.

And there’s no end. Even if I were to reach Level 80 (which at my pace should take me 12-15 years), I still wouldn’t have all the Pokémon, all the medals, all the shiny everythings. And yet I can’t stop. It’s like being addicted to chasing a carrot on a stick while detesting carrots.

I dislike this game, and I dislike playing it. And that brings me to the point of this article.

Will you please friend me? Mewtwo and Darkrai currently control the fountain outside the church down the street from me and I cannot advance until I can defeat them in a raid.

Please help me.

Please, please, help me.

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Flack