Don’t think for a second that what you’re seeing here in New York’s Central Park is a contained incident. Pokémon Go is drawing tremendous crowds to the parks and piers of cities across this once-great nation as smartphone-wielding adults venture into the concrete wilderness under the cover of darkness to capture rare collections of pixels.
It’s happening in New York. It’s happening in Santa Monica. Nostalgic young adults are amassing in Boston, Bellevue, Provo, Des Moines, and Chico. Pokémon-themed bar crawls are slated to suffocate the downtown areas of New Orleans, Minneapolis, Portland, San Fransisco, Miami, and Milwaukee. Yelp will even tell you if your destination is within an appropriate distance of a PokéStop, should you need to go outside during the day.
This is the dawning of a new age, or the collapse of society as we know it. I welcome the void.