GiRL (Gyms in Real Life)

With Pokémon Go, I've had the chance to visit a few places in my locale that I wouldn't normally visit. This includes PokéStops and Gyms alike, but since Gyms are the places where many battles take place, raids occur, and coins get earned, they are more pronounced. And often, these Gyms can provide new insights about the places as they exist in real life. To that end, I'm motivated to organize them under the header of "Gyms in Real Life", or GiRL for short.

The insights that I receive are not only of the actual places where the Gyms exist, but also how they relate to their surrounding areas. I can illustrate this with an example of a Gym near where I live. The Gym shows a place that actually exists, and if one takes the effort to find it, the place can actually be considered "quaint", in a way. Yet because of the restrictions that apply to accessing the actual place of the Gym, the actual place suffices for battles involving a couple of people, but not for high-level raids, which definitely involve many more. For that, a friend has figured out that the actual place need not to be accessed; instead, a place on the other side can serve as a good place to hold many people for the affair. It's kind of tricky, but at least it shows a different consideration for the Gym's placement and therefore its relation to actual places.

I'm inspired to take all these insights and capture them in a photographic form. I'd like to take pictures of the actual locations of the Gyms as well as insightful areas like the ones described above, then present them in the style of an exhibition. For the purpose of this, I can either leave the pictures unedited as they are, or I can add Pokémon-related embellishments; perhaps the first is better so that the actuality of the settings are maintained, and the Pokémon embellishments can be added in the framing of the photos. This would be a really, really interesting project that I'd like to take on if there is enough demand for it and if it really is possible to have such an exhibition. It's one of the things I could at least do for my fellow players playing Go.

The objective of Go is to go out in the real world, capture Pokémon, and have all the fun in doing so. I like to think that this has been achieved with how I play the game, especially in relation to finding Gyms and where they are situated in the real world. It adds to the knowledge I have about my locale and gets me interested to show off this knowledge in pictures. All the insights I receive just makes the alternate reality of Pokémon Go that much more closer to the reality of real life.

One year ago: To Japan and Beyond