Resident Barbara McCormick, seated, tries Pokémon Go while others look over her shoulder. They are, from left to right, Ray Denkhoff, Jean Deal, Sam Patterson, Kay Denkhoff and Debra Klinger, CHRISTUS St. Joseph Village director of residential services.
(Photo by: Katy Kiser/CHRISTUS Health)
As the Pokémon Go craze sweeps the nation, residents of CHRISTUS St. Joseph Village retirement community got schooled on the basics of the game. They downloaded the Pokémon Go app, created digital avatars and went searching for Japanese cartoon characters in the augmented reality game.
The game has been credited with getting players moving outside — smartphones in hand — to capture virtual creatures, which pop up on their screens against a camera image of the actual setting players traverse. But residents of St. Joseph Village in the Dallas suburb of Coppell, Texas, played the game indoors, due to blisteringly high temperatures in July when Katy Kiser, CHRISTUS Health's public relations manager, and Meghan Vital, CHRISTUS social media specialist, gave the tutorial.
While St. Joseph Village encourages the Pokémon hunts, some hospitals are setting policies to limit or prohibit the playing of the game on their campuses out of concern that distracted players might get hurt or congregate in areas that need to be free of unnecessary foot traffic to facilitate patient care.
Niantic, the game's developer, has a form on its website where institutions can request the elimination of a PokéStop or gym, spots that correspond to real-world locations where players congregate.
Meanwhile, some children's hospitals are supportive of the game because it allows many of their patients to be active and socialize.
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