Yeah. I work. We have a pokestop in our building and a pokemon gym out behind the building.

It's definitely become a competition between a bunch of employees here (we have 1500 in our building).

*shrug* It gives people who wouldn't normally interact a reason to strike up a conversation.

The only way to take over a gym with powerful pokemon at it is to team up and go at it with 3 other people together. You have to all be physically standing there to do it.

The first 10 or so levels of your person it's super easy to catch a Pokemon and there isn't much skill involved. After that, it starts to get considerably harder and you have to incorporate some of the skill throws to it.

For example, you can throw a curve ball by swirling your finger on the pokeball then tossing it, but you have to toss it with the curve in mind.

In combat, there is a dodge mechanic that takes a good amount of skill to use.

There are consumables (stardust and candies) that you also need to make good decisions about using. You use those to evolve and power up pokemon. Each pokemon are generated within certain bounds, and it's up to you to decide which ones to power up, evolve, etc...

That's kinda how it feels at my work too. We are on a health kick at work lately, so we all wear fitness trackers and compete in contests with them. They've even painted guide paths around our campus for certain distance walks during your breaks.

This is my first pokemon game, and I am a very casual player. I'm only level 14 right now. I'll probably stop playing once the popularity dies down, but for now it's just a little bit of fun dotted throughout the day.

I have an interesting story about that. There actually is some skill to the scientific side of birdwatching.

I used to work on a project with the USGS to improve the accuracy of bird population estimations. Currently, ornithologists go into the woods with a clipboard and a timer. They stand still for a certain amount of time and record all the bird calls they hear, the distance away, and the general direction. They feed all of that information into a SAS program that spits out population numbers.

This entire system relies on the ability of the researchers to correctly identify what species of bird, the distance, and direction. It also requires them to decide if a call was the same bird or a different bird.

We built a bunch of remote wireless speaker boxes (basically glorified MP3 players) that could all be controlled by one wireless signal. Before the day of an experiment, we would place these boxes all around the woods and would sit these guys down in the woods and run through a bird count. After playing a playlist of bird calls, we would take their data and compare it to our known setup.

It was amazing how many of these guys were wildly inaccurate.