As the parent of a 16-year-old and a 12-year-old, I'm not usually one to laud the merits of yet another video game on the market that buries kids' faces even deeper into television screens or mobile devices.
Then I found out about Pokemon Go.
Meet the changing face of tourism, thanks to Nintendo.
For the uninitiated, Pokemon is a game that has been around for decades, both in playing card form and a video game format. Now the company has introduced Pokemon Go, where the worlds of reality and virtual reality align. The premise of the game is to collect the myriad characters that make up Pokemon by physically having players walk, run or drive to real locations (reality) to capture one of the characters on their smart phones (virtual reality).
It's brilliant.
Does it have drawbacks? What doesn't? There have already been stories about Pokemon Go seekers trespassing on private property, as well as chasing down the elusive characters in some sacrosanct places such as the 9/11 Memorial in New York City and the Holocaust Museum in Washington. One man walked off a cliff in San Diego; another walked into oncoming traffic in Nashville.
Some of that is incumbent on the game's designers; some of that is incumbent on the game's users.
Yet even including those obvious flaws, every parent in America can and should seize on this phenomenon. If ever there was a teachable moment - a truly teachable moment - this is it. Example A: when my children found out that the local newspaper in our area was a Pokestop and asked me to drive them down there, I quickly said yes - and used the car ride and our subsequent arrival to tell them how the paper was the oldest in New York State, show them where the old printing press used to be, how the building itself was on the National Register of Historic Sites and how the adjacent post office was commissioned and dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
I've driven past both buildings hundreds of times and never uttered a word about them. Something about this game compelled me to do so and it's happening around the country.
Stripped bare of hyperbole, tourism, in the end, is all about engagement. It's like any other business - how do you engage the consumer? How do you draw them in to your establishment?
"We think (Pokemon Go) is an interesting way to explore the city and see parts of the city you might not see otherwise, but people need to stay safe and aware of their surroundings," a Los Angeles tourism spokesperson told Fortune magazine. "At the end of the day, it's an interesting way to see landmark attractions around the city, assuming people are paying attention to their surroundings and not walking into oncoming traffic."
Even a city like Las Vegas, which has few problems luring tourists to Sin City, is exploring its options with Pokemon Go.
"It's something we're taking a look into," Molly Castano, communications manager at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, told Fortune. "It's so new and it happened so quickly. We have people that are definitely playing it all over the place."
Pokemon Go has made travel and tourism suddenly transformational. The amount of chatter on social media has been overwhelming, with players tweeting that they are discovering everything from landmarks to art to architecture that they blithely walked by every day.
And that's never a bad thing.
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