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Pokemon Go: There's a level 200 Squirtle in this think piece

John Birmingham

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a fad in possession of a following must be in want of a think piece, and there is no fad bigger this week than Pokemon Go. Having opened our think piece with an overused classical reference for the old people who were paying attention, it is time to move on to the lucrative click bait which drew the much more valuable young people here like a Pokemon Go addict to a secluded car park in search of the rare cartoon thingies.

Note the elegant segue into our hot take about the Pokemon Go thingies. It was very well done. But not as well done as this second paragraph scare with which we can now scare you because with so many people talking about the Pokemon Goes right now, the Pokemons are being used by violence gangs to lure people who are just like our readers into traps. Analytics tells us there is an 83 per cent chance you are just like our readers so it could be you trapped by a violence gang who used a Pokemon to trap you. In a secluded car park. Scary.

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From Planking to Pokemon Go, people continue to go crazy for whatever is the latest popular sensation sweeping the globe.

Nonetheless, no scary think piece about this current Pokemon craze is worth the pixels its written on without data, because calling the same old thing data journalism is way more sexy than calling it plain old journalism which isn't hot or sexy and the Pokemon kids today are all about the modern sexy things. Does this mean our kids could be using their phones to have Pokemon sex with each other? Any legitimate think piece must say yes.

Brisbane Times girl reporter and verified young person Ms Amy Remeikis agrees, having been inconvenienced to the point of tweeting about it by an unknowable number of Pokemon Go addicts pointing their sex phones at things and getting in her way in the mall yesterday. 

Pokemon have taken over our streets.
Pokemon have taken over our streets. Photo: Kayza Grenfell

"People have lost their minds," she wrote. "They are standing around the mall pointing their phones at things and yelling."

Some of the things they were were pointing their sex phones at and yelling about may even have been a dead body, because that actually happened and was widely reported.

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"I just got up and went for my little walk, a walk to catch Pokémon," said 19-year-old Shayla Wiggens, a young girl who found a dead body while looking for Pokemon. Initial reports did not initially indicate Shayla found the body in the Queen Street Mall but it makes you think, doesn't it? That's what think pieces do.

Increasingly, we live in a world where commentators are forced into ever more ridiculous comments by the need to posture on the latest thing. But this Pokemon Go phenomenon is the most serious issue I have ever commented on late Monday afternoon as deadline loomed. 

Finally, here in the last par, it would be appropriate to make a knowing reference to Pikachu, but I don't actually know what that is.

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