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Title: Ghost of Pokémon Go
Fandom: Pokémon Go
Characters/Pairings: an original character
Rating: G
Word Count: 600
Summary: A glimpse into the life of a mysterious player, whose personality and habits are revealed through his gameplay style and digital traces.
Notes: Coursera Writing Course, a gift that keeps on giving ;)
Disclaimer: While the vibe and style of the username and in-game locations were inspired by a real person, the exact names themselves are completely made up by me. They don't belong to any real-world players, active gamertags, or actual places.


One weird thing about Pokémon Go is that even though it’s a massively multiplayer game tightly connected to real world, it's so easy to stay hidden.

In our neighborhood, we had this player, Pix3lK1tten3x0sc. Nobody ever saw him in person, even after raids became a thing, and then community days. But the game’s digital landscape was haunted by his presence. From the early days, several local gyms claimed by aggressive Valor or methodical Mystic by day, flipped to yellow, the color of the small and unpredictable Team Instinct, around 2-3am, even if the gym was an impregnable tower of Dragonites, Snorlaxes and later, Blisseys. But instead of defending the gym with his own powerhouse Pokemon, he'd leave a wacky Psyduck or a cute Meowth.

When raids were introduced in the summer of 2017, local players finally stepped out of the shadows to meet face-to-face. But Pix3lK1tten3x0sc never attended any gatherings. We’d stand in a circle by the fountain, watching our phone screens, and notice his avatar slip into the raid lobby during the early morning hatches. We’d look around the empty square, searching for a stranger furiously tapping a cellphone, but there was no one. We suspected he was just a GPS spoofer playing from a distant bedroom.

But in late 2019, when Niantic finally opened PokéStop submissions to the public, our neighborhood sprang a bunch of stops named like “The Sub-Woofer Kitten Statue,” “Monument to Unfinished FLPs,” and “The 8-Bit Brickwork Masterpiece”. PokéStops don't list their creator's username. But among dry labels like “Downtown Wall Mural” and “Park Information Board”, the weird ones stuck out like an Alolan Exeggutor among Weedles. Spoofers can't upload the mandatory, real-time photos of local alleyways. Pix3lK1tten3x0sc was somewhere around, walking our streets in the dark.

These PokéStops were visited at weird hours, too. Driving past the park on my way home from late shifts, I’d glance at my phone and see glowing pink petals raining down onto the digital map, indicating that someone had dropped a Lure Module onto “The Sub-Woofer Kitten Statue” at around 2am. I never saw if someone was lurking in the shadows, and I never noticed which windows were lit up in nearby buildings. I just knew that wherever the pixel cat stops were glowing pink, the musician was awake and grinding.

When Routes rolled out in mid-2023, he mapped bizarre trails like “The 140 BPM Fountain Loop” and “The Alley Cat Chord Progression”, now unmistakably attributed to his username. With his exact walking paths finally pinned to our digital maps, we knew we could track him down, ambush him at the fountain with a greeting, and finally invite him into our community. But we never bothered. We figured he'd always be there in the background, a funny golden glitch in our local matrix.

And one day, the map went quiet. The yellow gyms flipped to a permanent, uncontested blue. The midnight pink petals stopped falling in the park. The only thing left of Pix3lK1tten3x0sc was a bunch of amusing PokéStop names and zig-zagging blue lines on the routes menu. Traces of a ghost we were too late to meet.

It’s been years. Last night, I walked his “140 BPM Fountain Loop”, following invisible footsteps around the empty park. As usual, the end of the route triggered a virtual postcard exchange. The sender’s username was a cryptic string of Japanese characters, but the attached PokéStop name was eerily familiar: "The 8-Bit Shinjuku Arpeggio". I tapped the image, and couldn’t stop grinning stupidly at the description: "A perfect spot for late-night chiptunes and watching sakura cats in the dark."