Fathers, daughters and Pidgey

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/07/2016 (3078 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After clouds finished dumping rain on The Forks like a pot of spilled water, my dad and I went out walking together.

We take these strolls often, whenever we can find time. It’s not always easy. A writer’s life is a balancing act of panicked writing binges and naps. Meanwhile, my dad, a retired academic and freshly turned 77, finds his days jam-packed with such endeavours as reading the Washington Post and the sport he dubs “old-guy yoga.”

They warn us about this part of adulthood, when grown-up days sneak away and take tiny pieces of our hearts with them. “New job’s a hassle and the kids have the flu, but it was sure nice talking to you,” and that sort of thing. Still, we know what it means to make time, and so time gets made: for a weekday lunch, a Saturday brunch or a walk on a stormy Sunday.

“So here’s something,” I said, as we drove to The Forks. “I downloaded Pokémon Go.”

It’s difficult to say this without offering a conciliatory laugh, aware you have just admitted capitulation to the almighty Nintendo brand. So torrential is this fad it threatens to soak the world in Poké-prefixed lingo. You don’t just take walks anymore; you take Pokéwalks. You throw Pokéballs. You gloat that there is a Pokéstop within GPS range of your home.

(The Free Press office, alas, exists in the game’s equivalent of an Antarctic wasteland. But it is worth a laugh, too, that this fact, utterly meaningless to we Pokéwriters less than two weeks ago, is suddenly a matter of no small aggravation. “This place sucks,” I grunted to a colleague and fellow player. No further explanation needed; he just nodded. “I know.”)

Many words have been spilled about Pokémon Go, which was made by software developer Niantic. The game itself isn’t revolutionary; in fact, it largely put a cheerful cartoon skin over a previous Niantic title, the sci-fi-themed Ingress. That game had a dedicated cult following, though there were many of us who tried it and quickly lost interest.

So if nothing else, it is the sheer uptake of Pokémon Go that is stunning. The first-blush reactions were bemused, then largely glowing. The game was hailed as a literal life-saver for a sedentary generation. It looked poised to solve a hitherto confounding question: how do we get ourselves back out in the world and connecting?

That wave of surprised praise was followed by surges of scathing critique. Advocates for people with disabilities pointed out Pokémon Go is severely inaccessible; privacy watchdogs were aghast by the amount of personal data to which the game demands access. Hyper-focused teens started blundering into robberies, bodies of water and military installations.

One of the sharpest critiques to me came from Jacobin Magazine, where writer Sam Kriss pointed out Pokémon Go is another iteration of how modern entertainment conspires to snuff imagination. After all, Kriss pointed out, the game simply slaps a rigid fantasy map onto the real textures of the world; following it, he wrote, “must be resisted.”

“Childhood play figures the world as an adventure,” Kriss wrote. “Here there is only one: all routes are already set, all eventualities accounted for, all points of interest marked and immutable… the power to actively impact this augmented reality belongs only to the company’s executives.”

All of these arrows are aimed true, they don’t miss. And yet, at a time when the world seems so fractured, a part of me wants to believe Pokémon Go could usher in something better. Maybe it’s the alarm that finally wakes us from the stupor of sedentary culture and gets us exploring again. It is a fool’s hope, no doubt. It is still appealing.

In fact, as my father and I took a Pokéwalk around The Forks, you could almost believe it. The paths that tickle the edges of the river were bursting with people. There were dozens, in as diverse an arrangement as can be imagined. International students from China traded tips with 40-something American tourists; groups of blinking teens made awkward introductions.

We kept walking. Near Oodena Circle, we paused to let a father and daughter go past. She was aged about eight and wore a T-shirt with ruffles. He hunched his lanky frame to hold a phone closer to her. “There’s one over there,” she squealed, and they dashed off together, hunting a Pidgey or Zubat or a two-tailed cartoon bison with fearsome antlers.

The Pokémon hunters thinned as we circled behind the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, near where the bridge straddles the Red River. Mostly alone, my dad and I looked away from the Pokémon dancing on my phone and towards other things of note: a clutch of birds singing in a bush. A tour boat loaded with people, gliding south towards The Forks.

“Do you remember that?” my dad said as the boat drifted by. “How we used to take the paddlewheel to Lower Fort Garry? We’d buy bread there, and on the way back you’d sit on the stern, tearing off chunks of the loaf with your fingers.”

Oh, I still remember the feel of the spray on my toes. “We did a lot of fun things when I was little,” I replied.

It’s true, you know. We rode paddlewheel boats. We fed the sheep they used to keep at the University of Manitoba’s agricultural science barn. We built a terrarium for caterpillars and watched as they swaddled themselves in a cocoon and began to transform. We pulled on rubber boots and searched the Seine riverbank for frogs.

In that moment, I saw it: the universality of Pokémon Go may be novel, but its story is as old as fathers and daughters.

As my dad and I strolled by the river, that little girl and her dad hunting Pokémon was us, just 27 years younger. In three decades hence, maybe they, too, will wander The Forks, affirming the bonds that began when she was little. Maybe they will laugh to remember when she wore T-shirts with ruffles and sprinted to find Digletts lurking in bushes.

All the most precious things in life are just a pretext to put us on a path together. They can be used the wrong way. They can be mishandled. Or, they can be recognized as the frame of the picture, giving it shape but not blocking the image. A stand for the sculpture, a melody to lyrics: to like someone for always and love them forever.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca