On Wednesdays, from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m., students, families and seniors gather in Central Park to play the mobile phone game Pokémon GO for the weekly “raid hour”.
“A year ago it was only like 5 or 7 people, and it’s really amazing seeing how much we’ve grown in honestly the past 2 months,” said Carlos Perez, a regular attendee of the raid hours. “The community is really what makes Pokémon GO a game.”
The game uses location tracking to place players on an in-game map to find, capture and battle Pokémon, which are monsters that are stored in “poke balls” and brought out to battle other Pokémon. During the Wednesday raid hour, all the locations marked as “gyms” in game turn into raids for up to 20 players at once to battle a single legendary Pokémon, with the opportunity to catch it afterward.
What started as players organically meeting up at Central Park due to its large amount of gym locations in the game turned into organized meetings when Niantic (the developers of the game) launched the Niantic Campfire app, a mobile app designed to coordinate and meetup with other players in Niantic’s many location tracked mobile games.
David Zeller hosts and creates the meetups on the “Pokémon GO Corvallis” group in the Niantic Campfire app, which has over 700 members. “I want to just do what I can to make it welcoming and inclusive to everyone,” said Zeller.
While in Bend for work, Zeller was involved in a very active community playing Pokémon GO which included a community ambassador, someone who is a direct liaison with Niantic. The ambassador was able to have “ambassador sponsored meetups” where the ambassador could hand out small gifts like pins, Pokémon cards, or QR codes that granted in-game items.
“I was like, that’s pretty cool! I want to do that,” said Zeller discussing his discovery of the ambassador program. Zeller has applied to the program to become an ambassador, but says it’s a long process.
“I don’t take credit for being a big leader – we were all just playing together and I just stepped up to be like, ‘hey I’ll set up the campfire events’,” said Zeller, “I don’t want to draw too much attention to myself.”
If people are interested in attending events, Zeller encourages players to use the Niantic Campfire app to view upcoming events and come to meetups to ask further questions and get involved.
