Pokémon Go’s popularity is fading. Inertia is winning. All gaming is about making psychological problems more tolerable. But the games where you sit and poke a screen or a mouse only create an illusion of solving these problems. A game where you’d go out and actually move held a possibility of a real solution or at least a partial alleviation of the psychological burden.
7 responses to “Inertia Wins”
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“What is intrinsically problem solving about movement?”
- Even something as simple as an enhanced oxygen supply to the brain is very helpful.
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“What is intrinsically problem solving about movement?”
I’m guessing metaphorical movement, getting off your butt and doing something physical and when that doesn’t supply the immediate rewards sought then apathy sets back in.
I’m reminded that supposedly one of the most …. precarious times in therapy is when it starts working because the person being treated realizes they could have done this a long time before and doesn’t want to allow the idea that they wasted a bunch of time being miserable into their head.
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“I’m reminded that supposedly one of the most …. precarious times in therapy is when it starts working because the person being treated realizes they could have done this a long time before and doesn’t want to allow the idea that they wasted a bunch of time being miserable into their head.”
- Absolutely. This often ends up being a huge stumbling block for people because nobody wants to feel like an idiot.
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Or it could be a fading of the initial hype put together with frustration over technical issues.
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Decreased hype after the first month or so is predictable, though. It’s common with big-name games with loads of mystery and hype surrounding the initial release. Especially because it’s free to download–most Pokemon games are console games, and tend to cost somewhere in the area of 30-40 dollars. Their initial audience was huge–it’s bound to stabilize quickly.
On top of that, there have been huge issues with data caps and associated fees. A family with multiple players may be insanely active at the beginning of the month, and then use up enough data to cause them to stop playing at the end of the month. Not to mention issues like phones becoming too hot or an absurdly high power draw.
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Even so, the game has both reached and changed, even in a small way, the day to day lives of groups of people who had difficulty engaging with commoner forms of mental health therapy.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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