This was something that was discussed recently in one of the Pokemon Go FB Messenger groups I'm in. The group is mostly people in their 30's and 40's, and some of the people don't have any friends outside of the group. The game has basically brought them a network of friends that they didn't have before. And because "raids" (in-game battles of giant Pokemon) require multiple people and for you to physically go somewhere, you end up seeing your Pokemon friends a lot. You may even spend an afternoon driving around town, chasing raid battles. Sometimes it's just saying hello and battling, but other times you strike up a convo, laugh, etc. Lots of people feel the game is dead, or think I'm weird when they find out I still play it, but there's still an active player base, and it's methods of trying to get people (usually anti-social people) out and being social, have definitely hit upon something.
I'm not surprised at all... because the same thing happened with Ingress - the previous game from people behind Pokémon Go!
I was only part of the local community of players (green team in my city) briefly, but it was enough to learn that people in it talk to each other all the time (via Hangouts at that time), they see each other every evening, play together and then hang out together. That's one of the strongest friendship-making activities I've ever seen.
Unfortunately, once you stop playing, there's a big chance that all of this goes away.
Side note: I'm surprised how in both Ingress & Pokemon GO, friendships cross team boundaries; you can be adversaries and friends, like in any respectable sport.
When I unexpectedly found myself single after a long-term relationship imploded last year, I did the Tinder/OKCupid thing for a bit. One of the more amusing experiences was when I had planned a date with a girl and was telling a friend about it. At one point after describing the girl's profile, my friend stopped me and asked about some detail before pausing and telling me "she's a smurf! I know her!"
(For those unfamiliar, Ingress players have tongue-in-cheek epithets for the opposing team. Green team are "frogs" and blue team are "smurfs".)
The date didn't lead to anything as I don't think she had any romantic interest in me, but it was definitely a funny point when during a lull in conversation I paused and gravely asked if it was OK for her to be on a date with a "filthy frog" and she busted out laughing.
Was going to post something similar here. I've got plenty of friends from prior to playing PoGo, but I see my PoGo friends more frequently because PoGo provides a common reason to meet up with them / be in the same physical location.
It's definitely a somewhat unique phenomenon, and I like both the effect (seeing friends more regularly) and being able to experience it from the inside.
It does, however, give me the feeling that I should put more effort into getting together with my other friends. But life provides any number of excuses to delay it.
The unique part, for me, is having to physically be in a specific place to engage in parts of the game, and the places are 'anywhere around the world'.
Reading the sentence I just wrote it still just sounds like sport, where you have to go to an oval or arena or whatever. But with Pokemon Go it's sort of 'anywhere' and yet specific at the same time. It's a particular place at a particular time. The difference may just be that it's a virtual / digital game rather than a physical one.
You forge friendship through common struggle. You need to offer one another something or you just introduce yourselves and let one another drift off in opposite directions without any bond forged.
You form your first friendships really early on with an extremely strong commonality - the hugeness of the world and your lack of information about it. Literally everything is in common with your peers circa age 2-4 because nothing is established yet. If it weren't for how our society has a habit of breaking these kids up constantly throughout their childhoods I would think those relationships would form the most iron clad friendships you can get if they survive to adulthood. Too bad about 90% of the kids you meet in daycare you never see again after you start school.
School is the next big one, where for most kids they will struggle alongside each other for 13 years straight. The mixing up of classes year to year again hurts the likelihood of strong friendships forming, but you can also just have kids your age in your neighborhood as a strong peer group. You have massive amounts of commonality at that point - you are taking the same classes, you live in the same area, you know the same people, you are subject to the "same" pop culture of your school.
That is where those high school clicks emerge from. The most bonded peer groups of before specialize as they age.
The same hold true into college, but I definitely don't see the same commonality and uniformity there. Going through puberty is really the cutting off point where divergent personalities specialize your interests enough that finding commonality becomes much harder, and you start having much less to offer your peers over their cumulative experiences and engagements.
It only gets worse from there. The more years into life you are, the more interests and specialties you have as a person that makes finding compatibility all that harder. People force themselves into relationships and marriage out of societal pressure. Nobody forces you into friendship nearly as much, so over that hump the lack of compatible people drops to near zero. Its why I think most marriages fail - they are trying to force the highest degree of friendship, when the older you get the harder it is.
Pokemon Go, and video games in general, are extremely effective ways to get people a commonality to force them together and interacting in ways that can build meaningful bonds. A common challenge is essential to bonding. The more passionate you can be about it the more likely it works.
But even then the 30 year old comes with baggage. They already have their favorite movies and musicians. Likes and dislikes. Hobbies and things they want to avoid. Because they have experienced so much more a fraction than they would have as children they are that much more set in stone. The adage of how you can't change a person applies here - even children demonstrate dramatically declining malleability as they gain experience in life. As you gain magnitudes more life experience your flexibility personality wise declines by similar magnitudes. It is trying to fit together puzzle pieces - if the pieces are made of clay you can mold them to fit. If they are tried out and set in stone they are rigid and it is much harder to find a match, and those matches are much easier to fracture and break.
The commonality and struggle are the prongs of a puzzle piece. The more impactful on your life, the happier it makes you, the more passion you can have for it the more pronounced those prongs can be. Early on you only need the simplest commonality as being the same age or living near one another to forge bonds - as you get old and your piece gets more defined and nuanced, it takes larger struggles and stronger forces to bind pieces together.
There's a beautiful passage in All The King's Men that makes, to me, a similar point:
"The friend of your youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you...and perhaps he never saw you. What he saw was simply part of the furniture of the wonderful opening world. Friendship was something he suddenly discovered and had to give away as a recognition of and payment for the breathlessly opening world which momently divulged itself like a moon flower. It didn’t matter a damn to whom he gave it, for the fact of giving was what mattered, and if you happened to be handy you were automatically endowed with all the appropriate attributes of a friend and forever after your reality is irrelevant.”
>There's a beautiful passage in All The King's Men that makes, to me, a similar point:
"The friend of your youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you...and perhaps he never saw you. What he saw was simply part of the furniture of the wonderful opening world. Friendship was something he suddenly discovered and had to give away as a recognition of and payment for the breathlessly opening world which momently divulged itself like a moon flower. It didn’t matter a damn to whom he gave it, for the fact of giving was what mattered, and if you happened to be handy you were automatically endowed with all the appropriate attributes of a friend and forever after your reality is irrelevant.”
Great answer. I would just add: the bigger the struggle, the stronger the friendship. Military friendships are the extreme example of this. I've seen war comrades crying like children after decades without contact.
Great friends don't need to talk constantly to remain close friends. For various reasons, I lost contact with my best childhood friend for a while. It was 10 years, but it felt like nothing, we instantly clicked again.
I think you're definitely right in your observations, it is so much easier to kids to make friends, because they're still so open and malleable, and not set in their ways yet.
>You form your first friendships really early on with an extremely strong commonality - the hugeness of the world and your lack of information about it. Literally everything is in common with your peers circa age 2-4 because nothing is established yet. If it weren't for how our society has a habit of breaking these kids up constantly throughout their childhoods I would think those relationships would form the most iron clad friendships you can get if they survive to adulthood. Too bad about 90% of the kids you meet in daycare you never see again after you start school.
This is exactly my experience as well. My best friend and I originally met before we can even remember, we must have been 3 or 4 years old. There are pictures of us running around in pajamas and bowler hats, play fighting with plastic pirate swords, stuff that I can't really remember now.
We actually didn't really get to see each other more than once or twice a year, because we lived so far apart, so I guess we bonded even more intensely for the couple of weeks we had every summer. We lost touch around the 6th or 7th grade, and didn't really see each other for 10 years or so, apart from sporadic chats on Facebook and such.
But we finally got back together in 2014, and it was almost as if no time had passed. We had burgers and a few beers, and talked for 6 hours straight. Completely separately from each other, we've both become huge metalheads, so now we go to concerts and festivals all the time, and he invited me to join his music quiz team. We're annual champions for three years running now, and the guys have become my closest friends.
They've also gotten me into pen'n'paper roleplaying games, and introduced me to further new friends through that.
It is definitely harder to make friends as you get older, you have to hit just the right shared interests to make it work.
I think this is pretty nail on the head. It also implies that the answer is to just be really open minded about what you like and don't like, and why the people you're meeting like x, y, or z, and you'll end up making a lot of friends you wouldn't have expected before.
I agree with your overall point, but wanted to point out that most marriages don't end in divorce—that's a myth. The highest rate was 41%, and it's been declining ever since.
I wonder, however, whether that's a positive improvement or reflects a reluctance to marry in the first place.
If two people living together for years split up without being married in the first place, it improves the divorce statistics but doesn't really change the underlying reality.
> Pokemon Go, and video games in general, are extremely effective ways to get people a commonality to force them together and interacting in ways that can build meaningful bonds
Isn't this also true when you join any group of people who sharing the same goal?
For example: A soccer or football team or gym? Or maybe a book club even.
I think it comes down to psychology more than anything, albeit I'm not a psychologist. Games are designed for immersion. When you play the best kinds of video games that can get you really invested in them most people can express the feelings of struggle, victory, and defeat they can project through their narratives and interactivity. So psychologically if you "save the world" or "catch / slay a monster" with complete engagement with others your brain can really impress that in your brain with that degree of impact. Personally I will never forget the first time my guild beat Ragnaros in World of Warcraft back in 2006, and I still keep in touch with a lot of the members of that guild despite substantial divergence of interests and lives since then because it was such a well articulated accomplishment at the time.
Sports and books respectively are missing an element of that formula. Sports aren't immersive. The obstacle is always just a game, for fun. Except when it isn't. There is a reason major sports professionals form lifelong bonds amongst each other while a volleyball club doesn't have as profound an impact. Your brain doesn't create a mountain of importance out of the sport.
For books, there is no common enemy to struggle and persevere against. You can get really immersed, but that makes the book memorable, not the people you talk about it with. In the same sense it is better than nothing and can produce friendship, but its not nearly as effective.
The trick is that none of it can be forced. You can't "make" yourself care, and nobody else can. It has to be a legitimate struggle with legitimate engagement and sense of comradery. Kids in school can feel that sense. Immersed gamers can feel it. If you are passionate about game development you can feel that with your codevs. But you need both pieces for the magical result.
This is realistic for the 'life narrative' ™, but I find it cynical and lacking in the free will department. If you want to make friends, truly, at any age, work at it and you'll figure it out!
I met a lot of acquaintances playing Tekken, so I can absolutely believe in the idea that a game would bring people together, even though Pokemon Go is not my thing at all.
I've also similarly made many friends through playing Tekken offline. I believe the local aspect of fighting games (as opposed to most online games nowadays), and the depth of its mechanics is very conducive to making a wide variety of close friends (old and young). I recommend people check out fighting games or games that require person to person contact to make more friends.
do you have a resource (blog, youtube video, etc) where one can get a quick overview of Pokemon Go? When I played it there was not much you could do, so I dropped it completely. I may still have the app installed though.
I'll list some sites below. Though the new main focus of the game is "raids". When you open the game you'll encounter gyms at various locations. 2-3 times a day a gym will have a Raid Boss (you'll know a Raid Boss when you see it, because you have to use a raid pass to fight it - you get 1 pass a day, though you can get more by using coins, which you get by taking and staying in gyms, or by paying for them). The boss will be rated from 1 to 5 stars (1 being easy - a single player can take it down; 5 being the hardest, requiring several players, though defeating a level 5 Raid will earn you the possibility of catching a legendary Pokemon).
The hardest part of the game is getting enough players to take down a high level boss, which is why people have taken to joining chats to coordinate raids. Though this may be different for highly populated areas, and it's still possible to just randomly show up at a raid and find people waiting for it to start.
