The Weekend Pokémon Go Took Over America

Customers were pouring into Supreme Beans Coffee Shop in Daytona Beach—happy for the free Wi-Fi and the hot and frozen espresso-based drinks, but much more interested in the gaggle of Rattata—enough to start a small army. “People were coming into the shop saying we were a ‘gym,’” says Supreme Beans’ co-owner Brandy Glenos. “I had no idea what it meant.”

What it meant was Pokémon Go, a game that turns people’s phones into cameras on an parallel universe, one in which mythical cartoon beasties with Harry Potterish names frolick amid familiar landmarks and places. Download the game, hold the phone up, and you see them—and can “capture” them and train them to fight in “gyms,” also locked to real-world locations. What it meant was that, this past weekend, crowds of people went outside to play a game, alone, together, in the real world and in an augmented reality....
http://www.wired.com/2016/07/weekend-pokemon-go-took-america/