If you wake up early and head out into your local neighbourhood, you’ll notice something a bit different.

Among the usual weekend athletes – the joggers, the dog walkers, the cyclists – you’ll see people walking along staring at their phones, brows furrowed in concentration.

The concentration it takes to catch ’em all.

If you’d asked me two months ago how to get geeks to walk miles every day, get people with social anxieties and learning disabilities talking to total strangers, and have university students out before 7am, I’d have laughed. Told you it’s not possible. Especially not on a big scale.

But it turns out it is. For a game twenty years in the making, I’d say every second was worth it.

I’ll happily confess to being a born-again Pokemon addict. When I was eleven years old, I picked out my first Charmander, and we were inseparable (screw you PETA). I caught every Pokemon and completed every gym. I collected all the cards, and went to lots of real-life Pokemon trainer events. As the years went on and I picked up more games and life was more demanding and Pokemon got incredibly complex (you practically need a degree in biology to figure the breeding genetics out), my interest waned. I still loved Pokemon, but as an observer.

That all changed again when Pokemon Go came out. I’m a happy addict. The highlight of my week was when my boss exclaimed, ‘There’s a Bulbasaur outside!’ and half the office got up to go on a hunting mission. I’ve found endless interesting things in my local area that I never knew existed, and suddenly care a lot more about stuff I walk past every day. And I’m seeing what’s around me in a whole new light; I never knew before that our local lake looks like a Pidgey ;)

It’s good for small businesses, too. A local gaming lounge that’s been struggling recently held a Pokemon walk around the city with hundreds of attendees. Our local pubs often have lures on them and the conversations inside have switched from Brexit to Magikarp.

Whether you like Pokemon or not, what’s exciting about Pokemon Go (and its predecessor Ingriss) is that it’s very clearly a gateway game. They’ve unlocked the future of app gaming, and disrupted how we use our devices, and it’s really bloody exciting. This is just the beginning.