After nearly ten years, I have finally quit playing Pokémon Go.

It wasn’t really any kind of rage quit, I just decided it was time. The game played on my mild OCD and it was causing more anxiety than it was providing fun.

I started playing on July 9th, 2016. This was three days after the game was released, and it would be more accurate to say I created my account on the 9th, as I wouldn’t start playing it in earnest for a few weeks. I mainly just wanted to secure my Ingress agent name, FetchezLaVache, as my trainer name.

At the time I was a big player of Niantic’s other game: Ingress. I was in Reno visiting some friends who had installed Pokémon Go, and I can remember wandering around downtown Reno while I played Ingress and they played Pokémon.

It wasn’t until I got back home and Andrea started playing that I picked it up, and then it became clear that I couldn’t keep playing both.

I ended up sticking with Pokémon because of two things: it was “nicer” than Ingress, and you could play without leaving the house for the most part. I wrote up my thoughts on the two games in November of 2016.

I have self-diagnosed myself with OCD. I have always liked things to be a certain way (I was one of the rare kids who didn’t have to be told to keep my room clean), and I develop anxiety when they aren’t. There are other examples where I showed signs of the condition.

Several years ago I worked in an office which had blue and white square tiles in the hallways. I decided I was going to only walk on the blue tiles (a version of “step on a crack, break your mother’s back”) just on a whim. Now these tiles were a standard size which meant I couldn’t just walk on them, I had to adopt a kind of “tip toe” gait. After a few days I thought this was silly, so I tried to stop. I couldn’t. Touching a white tile produced a negative physical reaction in me. I forced myself to get over it, but it was then I was sure I had some form of OCD.

Pokémon Go really plays into that part of me.

People play the game for several reasons, but mine was always “catch them all”. The post I mentioned earlier starts off the statement that I had caught 143 of 145 possible monsters.

That was kind of the fun part for me. I travel a lot for work and when I was in a new place I would catch a few new ‘mon and perhaps see more of the place I was visiting in the process.

Once I took an Uber from San Diego to a strip mall on the Mexican border in order to catch a Hawlucha. It is only available in Mexico but due to the border not being perfectly square you could find them on the US side.

But as the game matured they started adding more and more things. I never really cared for Player versus Player battles, but sometimes you had to participate to get a new monster. They added Dynamax battles, where the Pokémon get really big, and sometimes you had to play them to get a particular monster. It started to become frustrating.

About this time last year I tried quitting. I just uninstalled the app. But that didn’t last, and when I got back into the game I was driven to make up for lost time. The makers of the game are making it harder to get certain ‘mon. If you aren’t playing right when they are released you may not see them again for a long time, especially the top tier “legendary” or “mythical” pokémon. To evolve certain ‘mon you feed them “candy”, which is usually in the amounts of 25, 50 or 100. A bunch of the recently released ones require 400 candy, some require you to battle in 30 gyms against specific types on Pokémon that can be hard to find in those gyms, etc.

Speaking of 400 candy, the first one I caught that required that much was the Magikarp, which uses 400 candy to evolve into a Gyarados. I became obsessed with collecting that candy and when I quit I had amassed over 28K of them.

It’s all aimed to keep you engaged and to have you spend money. I am very reluctant to spend money on games but I have spent a bunch on Pokémon Go. I don’t know the exact amount, but it is more than $100 and less than $1000. Sometimes I would just get to the point where spending $10 was easier than spending the 100 hours or so it would take to do a task for free.

If I lived in a city it would be easier to play, but I live ten miles from the nearest service station. When I moved out here three years ago there were zero spawns. Even with no pokémon showing up there were still a few things you could do. One was guaranteed to appear once a day, and you could use incense to attract more. Also, there were “rogue” battles you could engage in every six hours. By doing that I was able to get spawns to appear, and last time I logged in we were getting about 40 an hour at the house.

Well, when I say “we” I mean “me” because Andrea stopped playing a year ago, which also impacted my desire to play. It is a fun game to play with friends.

Speaking of friends, you can befriend other players in the game. I’ve been playing so long two of my friends have actually died, but since their heirs didn’t delete the account they still show up.

Last week I caught my 931st unique pokémon.

It was a Kilowattrel.

There are (or were) only six ‘mon outstanding in my “pokédex”. Three legendaries that I missed during my last break, and three that were pretty much unobtainium unless you traveled to a specific event or bought a corresponding Pokémon game.

There may be more now. As I was playing on my way through the SFO Airport last week there was a news item that they were introducing a new one to the game called Glimmet (apparently that starts January 27th).

When does it end? Pokémon Go gets its ‘mon from the other video games, and at the moment there are 1025 distinct monsters across all the games. This doesn’t include all of the different variations or “shiny” ones(rare pokémon with different coloration). So in short it will never end, as it would be almost impossible to catch all of them in every variation.

Sitting at SFO Friday morning it just came to me: I was done. So I took a couple of screenshots and then asked to have my account deleted.

Some may think this was pretty drastic, but I know from experience that I would go back to it eventually unless I “nuked it from orbit”. I also debated waiting until I was with some of my friends and I could trade a bunch of pokémon before erasing them forever, but most of my friends have stopped playing other than casually, and my one friend who still plays a lot has more ‘mon than I do anyway.

It actually takes awhile for them to kill the account. You have to make the request, click through several warnings about “this is irreversible”, and then you’ll get an e-mail with a code. Reply to the e-mail with the code, wait a couple of days, and then your account is gone.

I’m not sure if I’ll find another game to play. I don’t like playing games on my phone (except for Pokémon Go, obviously) and I don’t have a console like an Xbox or PS5, and I can only play casually because I don’t have much leisure time. I also don’t get into games that require a lot of commitment, plus my machines are getting so old I’m not sure they can run the newer games in any case.

My overall favorite games franchise is Diablo. I played the heck out of I through III, but they never released a MacOS version for Diablo IV so I skipped it. I have an old bootcamp accessible image of Windows 10 on one of my machines, but that operating system is no longer supported and I just don’t care enough to mess with it.

I liked Diablo because it was pretty easy to play. The main goal was to beat on things until they pop open and then pick up what they drop. I liked that it had an “end” (kill Diablo) but you could still play around with it after you were done.

I’m thinking I would like Baldur’s Gate 3, but it only runs on Apple Silicon for their MacOS port and I am still on Intel. I thought I had bought Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2 on Steam, but after launching Steam for the first time in years I remembered they were on my GOG account.

I can remember trying out Baldur’s Gate 2 and getting frustrated during the initial training part, but I also have a copy of Neverwinter Nights, so maybe that would scratch the ol’ D&D itch.

Actually, what I should do is work on my Bridge skills and play with other humans, leaving video games alone.