I played Pokémon Go between classes on campus and paused at several stops to collect more of those balls for catching Pokémon. I noticed that if you click on the stop and an image doesn’t surface, you generally won’t be able to collect any items. Sometimes you have to wait for the image to appear before swiping the phone screen and then tapping the bubbles of berries or potions. I’m not sure what the potions are for.
While I walked from class to my apartment, I was transporting a box on my scooter and playing the game at the same time. It didn’t really work, I couldn’t catch Pokémon and walk with the scooter at the same time. I had to stop every so often to catch one of the creatures or go out of my way to reach a Pokémon stop. In order to play Pokémon Go effectively, it seems like you need to go out with that as your only activity while walking.
Under the lens of aesthetics from the article “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research,” this game has a fantasy and a competition component. The player engages with creatures that don’t exist and eventually fight other players in the gyms. I personally found this game interesting because of the diverse, changing amount of Pokémon. I noticed that whenever I consecutively stopped at a Pokémon stop or captured my first creature of the day, the app would tell me that I was continuing a four-day (or more) streak. I think the app could improve by including some sort of reward after a certain amount of streaks. The player could receive a bunch of golden coins (I don’t know how to collect those, perhaps they need to be purchased) and that would make the game more fun. Pokémon Go would be a lot more fun if the crashing issues could be fixed since they affect the accessibility as well as the mechanics of the game. They deter me from trying to play Pokémon Go more often.