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One of my best memories of 2017 (one of the only memories I have from that year, really, which was otherwise punctuated by deep depression) is of my first Moltres raid.

This is a long story.

My wife and I had been playing pokemon go in the evenings in the area around our apartment, which had two pokestops and a gym spaced out enough that we could walk between them in about the amount of time it took each one to reset. So we'd go walk through the park and do a few loops before dinner.

Nothing major, I was not a serious player. It was just a thing we did together in the evenings.

But one day at work, my boss walked through the break room during the middle of tea time (see: https://retro.social/@ajroach42/112239102375537434 but the gist is that ~25 of my coworkers were standing in the break room drinking tea, and everyone above my boss's level *hated* that we did this for between 15 and 30 minutes at least once but sometimes as often as three times a day.) My boss didn't hate Tea Time as much as the rest of the company. He probably would have joined us, even, if he thought he could get away with it. But he was middle management, he was precarious.

On this day, though, he walked in while we were having tea. Everyone got a little tense, because only about 10 of the thirty or so of us in the room reported directly to him, and all most of the folks there knew about him is that he was pretty vicious as a code reviewer/QA person.

He doesn't engage with anyone, he walks to the cabinet and surveys the teas. (By this point, we had *a lot* of tea varieties, it took him more than a minute to select one.) He really slowly and deliberately washed a travel mug, and made a cup of tea, and just kind of stood there awkwardly. Most of us were new hires, most of us didn't know him very well.

One of the few old hands, Tim, speaks up and asks him what he's been playing recently. He was a long time Nintendo fan, and talking Nintendo was a sure fire way to get him to loosen up.

My boss, Shahdy, actually does a quick double take, and finally says something like "Mostly breath of the wild and uhh... Pokemon Go" and then he kind of smiled.

Tim, I later learned, had been coached to say the things he was saying. This was all planed.

Tim says to the room at large "anyone else play pokemon go?"

These were not people who knew each other well. I'd been with the company for almost a year, Tim for 5. A few of the other folks standing there had been there for between 12 and 18 months. Everyone else was under 6 months.

Tea time was our only "socialization" really, and we mostly talked about work.

A few people say that they do. No one really seems excited.

Time says, again to the room at large "there's a pokestop you can hit from our side of the office. Anyone play during work hours?"

No one says a word. Everyone assumes they're being set up (they were, but not like that.)

Finally Thomas breaks the silence.

(Aside: Thomas and I would go on to work together for the next 6 years)

"I keep my Pokemon plus in my pocket all day. I'll play on lunch. There's a gym that's just up the sidewalk."

Shahdy grins. "A gym? Really? Where?"

Thomas pulls out his phone and zooms out the map to show everyone where the gym is.

Tim, playing his part "Wait, why is that egg silver? I thought all the eggs were pink and yellow?"

The trap was set.

Five or six people answer all at once that they'd just added the silver eggs, and that you could get Lugia or Articuno from them.

This one had about 10 minutes left on it's timer.

Shahdy: Wow! And it's only a few minutes from here. We could just walk over there!

Tim: Do you think anyone would mind?

Shahdy: I know for a fact that I'm the highest ranking member of the company currently in the building.

Suddenly everyone had their phones out.

People scattered from the break room to fetch other people. There was a flurry of people throwing back the last of their tea or swapping it to a travel mug or furiously typing out "we'll have to reschedule this 1:1, something has come up" messages on their laptops.

Within 5 minutes, 4 elevator loads of people had descended on the lobby to the building and were walking in a big mob across the parking lot.

The gym in question was a statue in front of a Tiffany and Co. The well dressed man in the window seemed absolutely Aghast at the sight of this gaggle of slobbish nerds descending on his store.

But! we weren't alone.

The egg cracked. A giant fire bird stood atop the gym.

Folks started to join the lobby, but Shahdy talked them out of it.

"Just wait"

Within a few seconds, another gaggle of office workers came shuffling out of another nearby building.

And another.

And another.

And then a couple of cars pulled up, and even more people piled out.

By the time everything was said and done, we had three full raiding parties.

We finished the battle in no time flat. A solid 9/10ths of the gathered crowd managed to catch the giant invisible fire bird.

Shahdy and Tim started exchanging discord handles and IRC rooms and email addresses for organizing future raids.

The whole excursion only took about fifteen minutes.

Shahdy looked at our crowd and said "guys, it's just about lunch time. There's another egg about to hatch at the Mall."

It wasn't a question. About 3/4s of the group from our office, and about half of the rest of the crowd just started walking towards the mall.

It was about 3/4 of a mile from where we were, sidewalks all the way. A nice walk, aside from the fact that it was the end of July in Northern VA.

Several of the party stopped along the way to catch various monsters. A few people took a detour to hit a cache of pokestops along the way and resupply on healing items.

By the time we got to the mall Lugia was already standing tall. We took him down quickly. The stragglers arrived and they took Lugia down as well.

Folks made plans to do more raids together. Shahdy arranged a back channel to alert the members of our company to raiding opportunities, and a couple of ways to quietly slip out so as to cause less of a scene when we all leave at once.

The unlucky few who hand't managed to catch the phoenix or the dragon got together and set out in search of one more raiding opportunity, the rest of us returned to our offices.

I played the game heavily until 2020, when I moved back to Ellijay.

There are a few places to play around here, but not enough people to make it a social thing.

So that was a long story! but it was really the setup for an entirely different story.

The things that made Pokemon Go great were that it was a social game played around a physical location, which meant that you could 1) play with friends 2) meet people while playing 3) learn about and explore your community.

But Pokemon go was also a surveillance machine bolted on to a microtransaction casino.

What might an ethical alternate reality game look like?

What might this kind of ARG look like if it was built for a small town?

I think step one is to make it a web app.

I think step two is to make it mostly about exploring the town, with a secondary goal that requires getting groups of people together for timed events.

I think it'd make a lot of sense to theme it around local celebrity Bigfoot and his friends.

I don't know what the specific game mechanics might look like, but I think photography or the idea of photography should be pretty central.

In this town specifically, there are a few landmarks and tourist locations (the world's largest squidbilly, the waterfall, the overlook, the wall at fort mountain which is commonly attributed to the "moon eye" people) and a lot of local businesses that would benefit from more attention.

Making, for example, the Visitor's Center and central location for the game I think makes sense. The art gallery, the history museum, etc.

I fully expect that we could get the local Chamber of Commerce to fund the thing to the tune of a few thousand dollars, but we'd need a mostly functional prototype to pitch to them.

I also expect we could get local businesses on board with a Paid Feature option, which confers some kind of in game benefit to people who visit that location IRL in exchange for that business giving X dollars every Y months.

If the whole thing is open sourced and easy to self host, then it just becomes a matter of defining your locations and critters, customizing it to your locale.