Hello! By public demand the Father & Sean blog will come to you in English as of now. The format will remain the same and represent the opinions of Sean and myself. The topics will range from video games, movies to hardware and music – in short: All the things that Sean and I enjoy and talk about. Have fun!

Well, Pokémon Go. What more is there to say? Pretty much every aspect about this phenomenal success has been covered. Please spare me! I will, except for one thing I would like to address: Envy. Others may call it news business.  One trick of the trade is to build up stars and once they reach their stellar height, to shoot them down. For Pokémon Go it didn’t take long to be the target of bad news. Hey, the game got downloaded more than 75 million times within a few weeks. Lots of writers predicted the end of Niantic‘s hit and titled “The hype is over” or “Here is why I’m giving up on Pokémon Go“. The hype may be over by Pokémon Go standards, but if a free to play game rakes in $200 million in 30 days to me it is pretty much on a role. If the makers play it right and they have a good head-start with Ingress, then we have only seen the beginning. The potential is huge as well as the temptation to misguide this large community.
A close cousin to the tabloid envy is the ignorance and arrogance of non-gamers – sometimes they go hand in hand. In a flustered frenzy a woman told me, that she can’t believe, that so many people take to the streets for this – meaning of course hunting pocket-monsters across town. There are far more important things in the world than this, she continued in disgust. Why don’t they go out and vote, she asked. Instead they run after stupid virtual monsters.

This us and them kind of thinking is hard to swallow, especially if it is based on a pseudo-intellectual mindset. I am not saying that everybody has to play games, but please don’t judge people on things they enjoy and especially if you don’t understand them. To understand games you need to play them. Similar to books, games require (inter-)action to explore their content. As much as you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, you should not talk about games, if you only have seen screenshots, videos or «read about them». Here endeth the lesson…

After about one month the mobile game Pokémon Go had already more daily users in America than Twitter. But why?
In the mid-nineties Pokémon went pretty big and a lot of people liked it. Now they get to experience it on their phone. There are a lot of problems because people don’t look on the road and get seriously injured. 10 percent of American cell phone users have Pokémon Go on their phones! Many people move a lot more because they go outside and search for Pokéstops. Some stores don’t like it that they have people in their shop searching for Pokémons, so a crafty man said, „If you want that Pokémon in my shop, you have to buy something.“ On the other hand some stores or hotels pay for Pokéstops.

I personally like the fact that you have to walk around to achieve something. There are always photos of where the Pokéstops are which can be very interesting to see parts of a city that you didn’t see before.