Most kids are obsessed with things—fantasies, foods, films—that they eventually outgrow.

It’s only natural. Our taste ages as we do.

But for me, it’s been 15 years since my parents got me my very first video game, Pokémon Platinum. I’m 22 years old now, and I’m as obsessed as I’ve ever been with the elemental creatures that I first met on a Nintendo DS screen in second grade.

Since then, the franchise has provided me with a place to go to find stability when my life has felt most chaotic—whether that happened to be an uprooting transnational move or just navigating adolescence.

Pokémon was created by Japanese game designer Satoshi Tajiri. Growing up, Tajiri enjoyed being in nature, catching insects and tadpoles, and as an adult, he wanted to modernize this hobby for a new generation of kids. This culminated in 1996 with the launch of the Red and Green versions of a role-playing game, which featured elementally powered, animal-like creatures called Pokémon. (Red and Green were released only in Japan; Red and Blue, which included updates and glitch fixes, were the first to debut in North America.)

The premise behind Tajiri’s brainchild was simple: You play a young Pokémon trainer striving to be the very best (like no one ever was). Your goal? To catch Pokémon who live in various environments and regions, bond with your team, battle them against other Pokémon, defeat evil organizations, and complete the League Challenge—which consists of taking on eight gym leaders (who act as checkpoints to test your battling skills as a trainer as you progress through the game), an Elite Four (the toughest in their regional leagues), and a champion (the final boss of the game). Throughout your journey, you can meet other trainers, obtain gym badges, and level up your Pokémon. By gaining experience points, each Pokémon can potentially reach the prestigious Level 100.

Red and Blue created a cultural frenzy. I wasn’t born yet to experience the full force of “PokéMania,” but a Washington Post article from 2000 captures just how insane it got. Topeka, Kansas, renamed itself “ToPikachu” for a day; fans made The Official Pokémon Handbook a USA Today bestseller, and Time magazine even put Pokémon on its front cover.

By the time I got into Pokémon in 2008, Pokémania had subsided some, but the fandom was still going strong. Already, the franchise was on its fourth generation of games, which included Pokémon Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, HeartGold, and SoulSilver.

My memory is a bit foggy as to how I first started playing (if only I had a Pokémon that knew Defog—a move in the game that gets rid of fog!). But from what I can remember, after a kid at school showed me his game, I probably did what kids do best: nag my parents until they caved and bought me my own copy to play.

This was San Jose, California, in the late 2000s. YouTube or Twitch playthroughs didn’t exist yet; all I had to rely on was my own brain power to try and figure out the game (my parents were not shelling out to buy me a pricey official handbook). I remember getting frustrated when I came across obstacles, like figuring out how to obtain running shoes for my character to make the game move faster. But as I pushed on, I discovered how much I enjoyed the challenge that the Pokémon world offered.

Soon, I immersed myself in the world. I watched the Pokémon TV show. I begged and pleaded with my parents to buy me posters and plushies. I even tried collecting the trading cards. (I gave up on those once I realized how complicated the rules were. To this day, I still cannot play them.)

Then my family moved.

In 2011, when I was in sixth grade, we uprooted our lives, selling our house and car in San Jose, and booking a one-way plane ticket to Karnataka, India. My brother, an oblivious 6-year-old at the time, seemed unbothered. But I, at 11—only a few years away from the angstiest years of my life—was angry.

I felt like I had to start over from scratch, make new friends, and form a new identity in a country that I’d never lived in before. To make matters worse, our new home was in a small city called Mysore, which had no video game store or McDonald’s at the time. In other words, it was every American kid’s worst nightmare.

I found myself clinging to the one thing I could control: Pokémon.

These cute virtual creatures—which I could still trade with my friends back in California—became my safe haven. I found PDFs of the Pokémon manga, and also used fan sites like Serebii.net and Bulbapedia to find hidden battles or items in the game that were out of the way.

Playing Pókemon also introduced me to new people through the community of fans online. I joined YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook groups where all we talked about was raising, training, and battling Pokémon.

Playing Pokémon didn’t just give me a virtual community, it also helped me bond with my family in real life. Because my younger brother liked Pokémon (I assume he just picked it up from me because he loves to copy me), we were able to bridge our age gap by talking about what to do in the game, battling to test our skills, and even getting corresponding versions of each game so we could trade game-exclusive Pokémon. 

Whenever I had a rough day dealing with classmates in a new country, culture shock, and general pre-teen angst, I knew I could come home and open my 3DS (the updated version of the DS that I’d guilt-tripped my parents into buying for me because of the move). Seeing my Pokémon team always made me feel invincible. I raised them! So what if I felt alienated from my peers and was struggling with my schoolwork? In this world, I was a champion.

My Pokémon collection grew. Now, I had whole generations of games. The arrival of a Nintendo e-shop meant I could even download games to stay up to date on the latest and greatest. My favorites in my roster were HeartGold, Black/White, X/Y, Ultra Sun, and Omega Ruby. At this time, I’d gone from the six Pokémon that everyone starts off with, to collecting hundreds across all these games. I took comfort in knowing that I could put in any game cartridge (or start up any digital download) in my 3DS and travel to any Pokémon region I wanted: Alola in Sun and Moon (the game’s version of Hawaiʻi), Kalos in X and Y (France), or Unova in Black and White (New York). As a Pokémon trainer, I was a world traveler, fighting in the most exquisite, historic, and beautiful places—by choice.

In 2018, I graduated high school and moved back to the States (to the toaster oven that is Arizona, specifically), which is where I’ve lived for the past five years. Now at age 22, Pokémon no longer feels like my lifeline, like it did during that first big intercontinental move, but I’m glad that it remains a huge part of my life. My go-to username continues to be @pokefanrithwik, a moniker I coined at age 13, and refuse to change. And I still catch up regularly with the games and follow the anime. Not to mention, my apartment is littered with figurines and plushies (that I don’t have to ask my parents’ permission to buy anymore!).

Feeling sentimental, the other day, I dusted off my old, trusty Nintendo 3DS that’s been with me since 2011. I put in my original Pokémon Platinum game cartridge from San Jose, and found that I had saved the game right before facing the final champion character: Cynthia.

Sitting in my Phoenix apartment, I enter the battle room to face her. There Cynthia is, decked out in all black with pixelated blond hair. “Together, you and your Pokémon overcame all the challenges you faced, however difficult. It means that you’ve triumphed over any personal weaknesses, too. Let’s get on with why you’re here,” she says. “I, Cynthia, accept your challenge as the Pokémon League Champion! There won’t be any letup from me!”

I’ve beaten Cynthia before, but I like running through different battles in the game so that my Pokémon can gain experience and reach that coveted Level 100. My six Pokémon this time are Sharpedo, Lucario, Electivire, Infernape, Togekiss, and Garchomp—a pretty balanced lineup, if I do say so myself.

When I finally defeat the last Pokémon in Cynthia’s own team of six, her static character model slides across the screen. The game lights up with futuristic blue light strips and white cube-like decorations. Once again, I’ve done it: My Pokémon have officially made it to the Hall of Fame.

“Remember,” a defeated Cynthia says. “Your Pokémon are partners that grew with you through many challenging battles. Together, you and your Pokémon can overcome any challenge that may come your way.”

Exactly, Cynthia.

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In the near future, information technology may provide new, more effective ways to organize disaster response. We’ve already seen the power of Twitter to coordinate political revolution, and we’ve seen the Pokémon Go augmented reality game motivate tens of thousands of people to get outdoors and chase imaginary monsters. What if, in response to crises, augmented and alternate reality games like Pokémon Go switched into a mode that rewarded players for donating blood? Delivering water bottles? Filling sandbags? Offering temporary housing? Or evacuating areas threatened by storm, wildfires, floods, tornadoes, or other hazards?

Author and game designer Jane McGonigal popularized the notion of gamification, in which players can get points, badges, or other rewards for ordinarily mundane tasks. According to McGonigal and others like Ian Bogost, gamification can motivate us to recover from personal setbacks including injury, depression, or distress, and improve our lives by forming new habits or skills. For example, Duolingo allows people to learn a language online while translating online documents and websites. Students earn skill points as they complete lessons or translate web content, and the complexity of sentences increases as the user progresses. Other games use competition and peer pressure among neighbors to reduce electricity consumption when appeals to saving money and the environment don’t work.

So gamification can work in our private lives. But what if we combined gamification and the sharing economy to coordinate the manpower of gamers for the public good in response to disaster? Already Airbnb’s disaster response unit allows hosts to open their homes to storm victims. Uber has offered free rides to facilitate evacuation of areas during emergencies like the Boston Marathon bombing and the Dallas police shootings. In this way, the sharing economy taps into the empathetic human impulse to do meaningful and pro-social work in response to need. Maybe all Pokémon Go players need is a little nudge in the direction of emergency response tasks when disaster strikes.

Such an emergency response system would be a logical extension of the emergency broadcast system. If you haven’t cut the cord, you’re probably familiar with the EBS regularly interrupting television and radio programming. And we all know about the alerts that get pushed out to our mobile phones to warn us of dangerous weather (or, as recently occurred in the New York City area, an alleged terrorist on the run). While these broadcasts go over public airwaves, they have always been delivered to our private communications equipment—temporarily seizing control of private property for a public purpose.

What the EBS system doesn’t do is facilitate or coordinate a response. A more appropriate emergency system for the social media age is one that does not merely push messages—but that also mobilizes communities, to collect intelligence from them or to take other action. Already apps like Google Maps, Waze, and Swift.ly collect real-time information on traffic flows and incidents. These kinds of apps would just need augmented reality disaster response modes that encourage coordinated emergency actions, helping create community resilience. We could call it an Emergency Interaction System.

That might sound a little techno-utopian, but there are precedents. Emergency response organizations like the Red Cross already have extensive experience using table-top simulations and simulation learning tools to train personnel and prepare adaptive responses. If the Red Cross integrated these simulations with networked sharing-economy apps and augmented reality games, it could mobilize and coordinate an extraordinary group of volunteers and private resources on a scale that might rival official government efforts.

An app called SwingVoter Go is an example of serious game inspired by Pokémon Go. The game sought to motivate people to become more engaged in the 2016 election by inspiring gamers who don’t live in swing states to influence voters who do. It would prompt you to pick any battleground state, like Florida or Pennsylvania, and use Facebook to find people in your social network from those states that you can engage in election-related conversations. SwingVoter Go provides “lures” that you can share on social media to draw undecided voters into a conversation with you with the goal of influencing them to vote for a particular candidate. If successful you increase the collective score of the game as well as get one step closer to becoming a “swing master.”

In a similar way, an emergency interactive disaster response system could use social media and augmented reality to connect people with needs to those who want to help. By building a “Red Cross mode” into existing apps, emergency response tasks could appear instead of Pokémons or other lures, and players could earn hero points for finding or distributing emergency supplies, providing transportation to shelters, making charitable donations, or helping clean up. Players could opt out, but building an emergency mode into existing apps would solve the problem of distributing the software ahead of time so that it could be mobilized at a moment’s notice.

Of course, potential catastrophes will require more than human resilience. An Emergency Interactive System does no good if it doesn’t function in an emergency, so technological infrastructure must also be adaptive to stress. We’ve already noticed a degradation of mobile phone signals at crowded venues like music concerts or sporting events, when uploading data-intensive videos and photos can overwhelm mobile phone towers. During massive events, relying on normal tower signals will only exacerbate the disaster—especially in cases that affect the towers themselves. For example, since the loss of service that accompanied hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, several measures have been taken to help make cell phone towers and service more resilient to disaster. Nevertheless, each new catastrophe seems to expose some previously unknown vulnerability, at the worst possible time. What we need from the Emergency Interactive System is a more resilient way of connecting people to one another, so that they can check in on loved ones and participate in recovery efforts.

Fortunately, smartphones are already equipped with the capacity to connect via mesh networks that could allow our disaster response players to drop in and out, bypassing mobile phone towers. For example, FireChat is an app that allows text messaging independent of Wi-Fi and mobile data. The app gained popularity in 2014 when hundreds of thousands of protesters in Hong Kong used it to communicate and coordinate without being intercepted by the Chinese government. Like many other peer-to-peer data sharing apps, FireChat can use Bluetooth connectivity to send messages between devices within about 200 feet of each other—perfect for dense crowds that typically overtax towers.

A new version called FireChat Alert even allows emergency responders to broadcast text messages during a crisis. Originally developed in collaboration with the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, FireChat Alert is being tested in a Philippines pilot program to improve communication during and after typhoons. While the app is currently a one-way broadcast medium only, it proves the potential to adapt private, mobile technologies for public purposes, even without existing data towers.

By combining advances in augmented reality games with the sharing economy and mesh networking, we could be poised on the threshold of a revolution in disaster response that empowers the public to follow their natural helpful instincts in response to all kinds of crises, without getting in the way, and even when our electricity, Internet, and/or cell service fails.

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