Pokémon GO Invades Wesley Chapel

On a cloudless and sweltering summer day with temperatures in the 90s and humidity suffocating enough to melt your shirt, the Shops at Wiregrass mall is abuzz.

Children, teenagers and even adults walk down Paseo Dr., heads down, staring at their cell phones, eyes darting back and forth, fingers poised. It’s more crowded than on a regular weekday afternoon, and a large group of kids gather at the Wiregrass stage to exchange info.

“Gotta love Pokémon GO,’’ says Shops at Wiregrass general manager Greg Lenners.

In just a few weeks, the augmented-reality gaming app has players of all ages out hunting for Pokémon in droves. The magical animated creatures, wildly popular since the day they were created by Nintendo 20 years ago, can be found just about anywhere, if you look hard and far enough. You just need the free Pokémon GO app and a cell phone. Using GPS, a map is overlayed on the surrounding area so players can locate the coveted critters on trees, sidewalks or even your kitchen counter.

“It has been real crazy,’’ says Gavin Olsen, 19, a student at Pasco Hernando State College and part-time photographer at TSS Photography of Wesley Chapel. “There’s never been a mobile game like this, where you go outside to see people playing it. It’s everywhere.”

Gavin started a Facebook page — Wesley Chapel Pokémon GO — that now has almost 100 members where players share their experiences and talk about the game. It is one of a handful of new pages devoted to Pokémon GO in the Wesley Chapel and New Tampa areas.

The goal is simple, as they say — Gotta Catch ‘Em All. You do that by throwing Pokéballs at the Pokémon — sometimes bribing them with a virtual Razz Berry helps make that task easier — and adding them to your Pokédex, or catalog. Then, you “train” them and help them evolve into newer, stronger characters.

Pokéballs, raspberries and other goodies used to catch Pikachu and Crew can be found at virtual Pokéstops — designated points on Google Maps chosen by the game developer Niantic Labs, and the mall has at least four Pokéstops — and you can battle other trainers at the nearest “gym.” (Note-Niantic, the Google spin-off, also built the popular augmented reality game Ingress. Nintendo, which created Pokémon, owns a stake in Niantic.

Since its release, Pokémon GO has surpassed Snapchat, Instagram and even mighty Twitter when it comes to active users. It has been downloaded more than 20 million times and interest in the game has doubled the value of Nintendo’s stock.

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The impact of the game can be seen almost anywhere you go in Wesley Chapel these days. Shopping areas, like the local malls and other retail centers, are a popular spot for game players because of the Pokéstops and gyms, and it’s also not uncommon to pass a handful of players while driving around your neighborhood.

The Shops at Wiregrass, according to a number of Facebook pages created to track Pokémon in Wesley Chapel, is prime hunting ground and has nine Pokéstops. The Grove at Wesley Chapel isn’t quite as bountiful, and the scene at the Tampa Premium Outlets is mixed. Parks and post offices in the area also are popular sites for Pokéstops.

Wesley Chapel’s Shawn Doscotch, a mother of two teenagers, is out shopping for the afternoon, and is instantly struck by the sight of so many people staring down at their phones.

“What is going on?,’’ she asks.

The scene, she jokes, is like something out of the popular AMC zombie apocalypse series “The Walking Dead.”

“Do we really need more teenage zombies?,” she quips, as two teenage boys and a girl walk by, intently focused on their cell phones.

Doscotch had fleetingly heard about the game before she went to the mall. One of her children had mentioned downloading it, but she had no idea it had caught on so wildly. The zombie scene gave her pause.

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And, teenagers aren’t the only ones playing the world’s hottest game.

George and Jessica Navarro, a pair of married 25-year-olds, are pushing 1-year-old Alise down the sidewalk as they hold up their phones, looking for Pokémon.

George says when he first read about the game on a blog, he thought, “that’s kind of dumb.” He had grown up, like so many his age, playing Pokémon on a Nintendo Game Boy and collected the playing cards as well, but this was something very different.

He and Jessica, however, were hooked the moment they downloaded and opened the app.

“Like most people, I got addicted,’’ George says.

“It’s bad, and I usually don’t get addicted,’’ adds Jessica.

The first weekend the game was released, the Navarros went driving with friends to look for Pokémon, with one of them holding both phones and the other serving as the DD, or designated driver.

The pull of the game for many adults is simple, says George — it mixes the cell phone, the most popular piece of modern technology, with catching Pokémon, arguably the most popular video game from his childhood — and the childhoods of millions of millennials.

“I think it’s a definitely a nostalgia thing,’’ George says.

The game, however, has not been without its controversies.

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Pokémon GO has come under scrutiny for the amount of personal information it collects from players. It also has received a significant amount of bad press for some of the dangers affiliated with the game.

The first weekend it was released, one player stumbled upon a dead body while searching for Pokémon. A group of teens were robbed in Lake County, IL, according to the Associated Press, by two men who set up a Lure — a module in the game that players can set up within a Pokéstop that attracts Pokémon, thus attracting players who, in this case, were robbed.

Despite a warning on the game’s start screen to watch where you are going, a man in New York crashed his car into a tree, admitting he had been distracted playing the game. In San Diego, two men fell off a 150-200-ft.-tall cliff after jumping a fence in search of Pokémon.

Some locations that the game designates as Pokéstops would prefer to be removed from the game, like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Arlington National Cemetery, both in Washington, DC. Players have come to those locales looking for Pokemon, and spokespersons for both places have called it “inappropriate.”

There are other stories, too, about people’s homes being Pokéstops, setting up situations where dozens of players are walking in their yards looking for the creatures. In Jacksonville, a man fired a rifle at two Pokémon-hunting teenagers he thought were burglars.

In Wesley Chapel, there haven’t been any newsworthy incidents, says Pasco County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Melanie Snow.

“It’s so early on, but those things will become a bigger issue,’’ Snow says. “It is absolutely something for us to keep our eye on from a safety perspective, when it comes to things like loitering and crime. There’s a multitude of things that can occur as a result of Pokémon GO.”

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The game’s positives, though, do outweigh the negatives, at least according to Olsen. The game definitely promotes the physical nature of finding Pokémon, as players must walk to find them, and the more kilometers someone walks — yes, it’s gotten millions of Americans to use the metric system — the quicker their eggs will hatch and their Pokémon will evolve.

The budding video editor says he has a reclusive friend who has gotten into the game and now spends more time outside than he ever has, shedding 10 pounds in the process.

Olsen also is organizing Pokémon GO meetups — he had one at the Wesley Chapel District Park on Boyette Rd. on July 24 (after we went to press with this issue) — and says he has made friends while hunting at the mall.

“The social aspect of this game is a big thing for me, and the exploration part of it, too,’’ he says.

Meanwhile, George Navarro says he has lost three pounds his first weekend playing the game. He understands the negatives of the app and how those stories tend to resonate with the casual observer, but what he has seen so far is mostly positive. “I would say there are a lot of negatives,’’ Navarro says, “but not enough to overcome the good.”

Both Navarro and Olsen say local businesses might be wise to harness the popularity of the game, and some already have.

At the Shops at Wiregrass, one store offered 25-percent off your purchase if you showed them your Pokédex. Another created Pokéball-themed cookies to get people in the door.

But again, the most popular method of attracting extra customers, though, is creating Lures, which attract Pokémon, in order to attract Pokémon-hungry gamers.

If a business is located in or near a Pokéstop, it can pay (in game coins or real cash via an in-app purchase) to activate a Lure for 30 minutes. A New York Post story recently highlighted a pizza shop in Queens that paid $10 to “Lure” Pokémon to the store, attracting so many players the shop increased sales by 75 percent.

The Barnes & Noble at the Shops has two Pokéstops located inside it, which is paying off for the bookstore. “It’s brought in a lot more traffic,’’ assistant store manager Lisa Kuehner says. “You can definitely tell by the way people are walking around staring intently at their cell phones. People usually walk around looking at their phones, but not that intently.”

Kuehner says Barnes & Noble is definitely hoping to take advantage of being home to multiple Pokéstops. Ironically, It had already scheduled a Pokémon event on July 16th as part of its month-long celebration of pop culture, to celebrate the card game’s 20th anniversary.

Originally planned to focus on the original card game, Kuehner said adjustments had to be made after Pokémon Go was released a week prior to the event — which, she says, attracted about 50 people.

Expect many local businesses to follow suit.

“We’ve definitely noticed (an increase in traffic),’’ says Lenners. “It’s kind of early to tell, but I have actually heard comments from some of the stores that the game is bringing people inside the businesses. From a marketing aspect, we have not done anything, yet. But, if you can get people to the mall, that’s a good thing for us.”