"Pokemon Go and the growing feeling of wasting time."

#PokemonGO: No, this is not a topic about playing Pokemon being a waste of time. It's a life changer for many people around the world. We go out, we catch Pokemon and we meet friends. We raid, we battle gyms. All those features had their issues. There are obviously too many animations to go through, the 120s Raid-Timer is annoying and also those animations battling a gym take way too long for my taste. But it was okay.The more features the game got, the more time consuming things got.The Snapshot Feature was completely abandoned after it was fun for like 5 minutes. Still, they left it behind with a task, that is probably the most pointless and time consuming in the whole game. The Snapshot medal is no fun, it's, yeah, it's a waste of time, that takes a staggering 8 interaction points for one single try.When Team Rocket Battles came up, time consumption got even worse. A lot of scrolling, animation, waiting 5 seconds between attacks, finding the right team, getting pre-selected teams that stand no chance against the grunts. Minutes go by for a single Pokemon as a reward. And you can't ignore them. Even if you just want to get items from that stop, you are caught in animations and more scrolling.With the introduction of team leaders, it's even worse. As all the before mentioned is needed to get to this point. And you have to get there, before you can start the challenge of finding those 6 pieces again. This means you have to go left and right and back and forth, before you reach your final goal: a meowth, a sneasel.And well, then there's the friends feature. A feature, where you have to go through a lagging list to find the right people to be able to accept a gift. To gift every single gift. Manually.There are so many hurdles in the game, you have to climb to reach your goals. The goal of catching them all. Nothing wrong with hurdles, because where's the fun without a task? But we have to face so many detours with the goal straight before our nose. Those are no hurdles. Those are no tasks, no challenges, it's wasting time.I like to be on the move, also to meet with friends at a raid, but mostly, I like to be on the move. But the game stops me, again and again, and it just doesn't feel right. And there's no need for it to be that way.So in the end, yes, the game makes me, many of you, waste time for no reason. It's part of why many players feel burnt out at times.I know this is a sub about research, but adressing this issue here feels right, because it somehow is research about the games mechanics and how they should and could be more user friendly. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/2PXjVkN