Bengaluru: The Narasimharaja Wadiyar statue in Lalbagh is a “Poke stop”, a term that one is unlikely to have heard unless they were part of the Pokemon Go Crawl that took place in Bengaluru, on a Sunday evening.
Hundred of youngsters were pressing and swiping away furiously at their smartphones at Cubbon Park and Lalbagh trying to catch their favourite monsters on the Pokemon Go game.
“Poke stops are places that have ‘lure modules’. They attract the Pokemon for 30 minutes, so you can catch them. You also collect eggs at poke stops and hatch them when you walk 5 km. The more you walk, the more eggs you can hatch, giving you more Pokemons,” said Prateek.
One of the reasons the game has set itself apart is because it has managed to get gamers off the couch. “I normally don’t go for walks, but I started doing that now. Yesterday, I walked 10 km from my house and went around catching Pokemons… Oh I just caught a Tangela,” he said, pointing to a creature covered in thick blue veins revealing only its eyes, on his phone.
Players said they drove around 10 to 15 km in the city and also the outskirts trying to catch Pokemons. Some of the hotspots during the event were Victoria’s statue, the bandstand in Cubbon Park and the lake, Glass House and the fountain at Lalbagh.
The game that has taken over the world of gamers by a storm has caused some serious injuries to the hooked on players, who seem unaware of their surrounding while walking into moving traffic.
“The other day as I was cycling, I was playing the game with one hand and controlling the cycle on the other. I did not notice a road hump and went right over it. I fell and hurt my chin,” said Shiv, pointing to the band-aid on his chin.
Another gamer, Arun, explained why the game is so obsessive. “If you look at everybody playing here, they are all in the age group of 18-25. We are the people who have access to smartphones and saw Pokemon on TV when it first started in India. There’s a strong nostalgia factor,” he said.
