Why You Should Play Pokemon Go

"What's up with this new Pokemon app?" I asked the PCMag staff only a week ago. Now I am a level-nine trainer with a Pinser (CP 552), a Dragonair (CP 326), and an adorable Pikachu that I don't want to level up for nostalgia's sake.

I have no particular affinity for Pokemon. I watched the TV show with my son years ago, but I always thought it was pretty dumb. It can't hold a candle to the Robotech Saga. I never played the card game, and I spent plenty of time telling my son they were a waste of money. Now I am spending my lunch hour walking the streets of Manhattan picking up Pokeballs and nabbing junk Duduos for their Stardust.

To be clear, I'm not trying to "catch them all." [Disclaimer: this is not entirely true.] For me, Pokemon Go is a giant animated sign of the augmented, annotated, and interconnected world we live in today and a harbinger of even greater things to come.

Even if you haven't played the game, you know the story. One week after its launch in the US, Australia, New Zealand, and now the UK, Pokemon Go is the No. 1 app on iOS and Android. It topped 20 million daily active users in the US alone on Tuesday, according to Survey Monkey. It's already installed on more US Android phones than Tinder and will probably pass Snapchat soon. All of this and it hasn't even launched in Japan yet. That's good news for struggling Nintendo, which has added $7.5 billion to its market cap.

Pokemon Go is far from perfect. The app constantly crashes, regularly loses your position, and will absolutely kill your battery life. To make matters worse, it recklessly demanded full access to your Gmail account at launch—email, contacts, calendar, the works. It was an accident that has since been fixed, but it was a potential privacy nightmare nonetheless.

As an app, Pokemon Go is a hot mess. You should download it anyway.

You should download Pokemon Go because it instantly reveals what the somewhat mushy concept of augmented reality is, why it is appealing, and how a lot of people are going to get rich building these apps. Pokemon Go is an augmented reality app in the truest sense. On the most basic level, it uses your phone's screen and camera to project a virtual object in a particular location. AR is cool—and it makes for a very shareable screen shot. You can also play Pokemon Go with the camera off, but you still have to interact with real-world locations to play. You need to pick up objects at Pokespots and catch wild Pokemon on the streets of your town. If want to catch water Pokemon, head down to the river.

I have jumped on buzzy bandwagons before. But this feels different. Pokemania will fade, but this type of gamified, augmented, technology-enabled, real-world gaming is here to stay.

Digital media was dominated by the Web for years until Facebook and Snapchat came along and replaced the "Web page" with streams of messages. Our online world used to be defined by screens on our desktops, and now those screens are just handheld windows on an increasingly mixed reality around us.

Augmented reality games like Ingress and Life is Crime have been around for a while, but Pokemon Go pushed it mainstream. The combination of the Pokemon brand and some innovative technology managed to get users age 10 to 45 out into the streets—albeit staring at their phones. I'm not saying Pokemon Go will make America great again, although I know someone who does. What it will do is make America—and every other country—different.

If you want to find out how different, download the crappy app and go for a walk.

Need help? Check out Pokemon Go: How to Get Started and Catch 'Em All.