The original trading card game taught kids strategy and how to do math in their heads, quickly.
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Shhh, it’s getting kids up and moving. Don’t question when they’re actively excersizing.
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Are you sufficiently an Old old enough to have played marbles? And tried to collect all the different types by battling your friends? I’m not quite that old myself (I’m on the older side of GenX and did have a few marbles as a kid, but it was clearly on the way out in the mid 1970s).
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Yeah, I played marbles, but not for keeps. I wouldn’t have lasted long. Didn’t have enough money to buy enough marbles to burn through until I got good enough to win.
Hmm. I must have been poorer than I thought, if I had to conserve marbles.
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It doesn’t show up in my apps on the dashboard either. I’m using the “burner” gmail that I have for things that either are not important or will probably spam me. So there’s nothing in that Google drive/photos and the contacts are all gonna be things like “sign in with google to read this article” bs.
And I assumed it wanted contacts to add friends but … there doesn’t seem to be a way to add friends so that’s probably wise to turn off.
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I’m pretty sure that I too had marbles when I was a kid, but I seem to have lost most of them.
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Funny thing is, Niantic’s other augmented reality game, Ingress,requires only basic google account permissions. I wonder why they changed that aspect for Pokemon Go… the two games are functionally very similar, (portals in Ingress are gyms and pokestops, XM spawns are pokemon), so what’s with the need for extra access to the account?
“I just don’t understand why a game I’ve never played and know nothing about could be fun!”
I think I found your problem?
Okay, try this, since you actually do seem to know video games in general: Pokemon (the regular versions, at least, I dunno about Go) is a turn-based RPG where you build your party from monsters that you’ve fought and defeated. You could replace the cute li’l critters with beholders and manticores and shit and it would still be fundamentally the same.
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I’ve been playing it a lot the last few days. The spots you go to to collect things are selected because they have some interest. I visited two murals, an interesting old well I didn’t know about, a statue that I always meant to check out, and a few other spots I always liked visiting by my favorite trail near a local creek. It gamifies going out to sites of interest nearby you may not know exist. Tonight at the local park my wife, son, dog and I hit the spots to catch Pokemon and collect things. There were like 50-80 nerds aged 20ish-50ish going to the spots, trading tips, and just having a nice time wandering around the park with their game. The procession from collecting Pokemon, to items, to developing enough to get to the gym is nicely paced and transitions well. For all that the software is a bit buggy and the servers are massively overloaded, it’s the first game I’ve liked enough that I’m totally wiling to forgive it since it’s really that fun. Also it makes the grocery store more interesting. And I saved a turtle this morning who was walking into the road because I was going to a spot.
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The original Pokemon was pretty much a standard (and fun!) jrpg with the exception of a few defining traits:
Tactical based fighting system as pokemon were grouped by type and would be weak/strong against other types, (Colecting pokemon was part of the strategic gameplay)
Limited battle commands, a Pokemon could learn new fighting moves but would need to “forget” some previous command in order to make room. (This made spell casting accesible to people who were not normally rpg fans)
Gotta catch em all! Some pokemon are rare, which means capturing them would give you bragging rights among your peers.
Cute characters, cartoon tie in and shitloads of merchandise.
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Monetization of your data. Obviously.
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My boyfriend and I walked over to our nearby park tonight too–I’d say at least half the people there were also playing 
We spend way too much time sitting on our asses in front of our laptops; this gives us a little extra nudge to get out the door.
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There’s also the CCG. Which let you battle with your friends IRL, as well as league play. It gets pretty expensive, and when I was a kid, I didn’t really care about making decks and battling because I didn’t have that many friends. So I was mostly a collector, going after the holographic, 1st Edition, Fossil, Star-marked and Japanese printed cards.
Exactly.
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My friends were never into the card game back then (thank goodnes!) I would have probably spent all my money just trying to get a gyarados! 
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Ugh.
I don’t play computer games to interact with other people. Sounds horrible. 
But then again I am one of the olds who never understood what Pokemon was anyway.
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My brother and I pooled resources for it.
We were always trying out get rich quick schemes and arbitraging Pokémon cards seemed like a good idea after the beanie baby market collapsed.
#90s Kids
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Inevitably…
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"We recently discovered that the Pokémon GO account creation process on iOS erroneously requests full access permission for the user’s Google account. However, Pokémon GO only accesses basic Google profile information (specifically, your User ID and email address) and no other Google account information is or has been accessed or collected. Once we became aware of this error, we began working on a client-side fix to request permission for only basic Google profile information, in line with the data that we actually access. Google has verified that no other information has been received or accessed by Pokémon GO or Niantic. Google will soon reduce Pokémon GO’s permission to only the basic profile data that Pokémon GO needs, and users do not need to take any actions themselves. "
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The problem isn’t that Niantic is asking for these things. Who can blame them? The problem is that Google doesn’t return blank results unless you specifically approve the access.
