Finally

I finally unlocked "Blue Lake" in the Pokewalker (2000 Watts). Now I'll be able to catch a water pokemon, which is something that I severely need in this game.

Not much to say

I'm just filling in words here, I don't have much to say, the thing sat in my pocket most of yesterday, I pulled it out and caught another Gastly (not that I needed another one). I didn't do enough steps yesterday to unlock better pokemon to catch.

smiles and such

So, I'm really trying to figure out what the little smiles and such my pokemon are making mean. It's apparent that I'm waking it up sometimes, but I don't know. I've seen a flat non smile ish thing, a smile, a music note, and just last night, a heart.

Playing with the game

I've been playing the game. I do rather wish I spoke Japanese better, I'm missing a bit of the story. Also, sometimes it appears that I get "bonus" watts on my pokewalker. I'm not really sure why, but the pokemon has a little smiley face or a music note, so I assume it's really happy for some reason.

Also, I ran the numbers to hit the highest Pokewalker route, you need to walk 1400ish miles. Lets say, you walk 10 miles a day every day; it would take you half a year to hit that. I'm guessing that long before that you'll become bored with the game (or have figured out a good way to cheat the game).

And again I rearrange my pockets

The pedometer has recessed buttons; the pokewalker does not.

Buttons

Keep hitting the damn buttons in my pocket. I assume when I sit on it. Mute gets turned off, my butt attempts to catch Pokemon or items, and other random stuff happens, I dunno. I haven't seen this behavior before, or I didn't notice it. But I'm rearranging pockets so it might not happen again.

Yup, data

Played the game for like 5 minutes last night, still haven't earned enough watts to unlock a new route yet (though I think I might today). My lack of any free time whatsoever makes playing a video game difficult (although the small mini games for this device are short enough that I can play them when I have a few spare seconds).

My Copious Free Time

OK, so I enjoy this toy, but I must admit, I frankly don't have time to get the watts I need/want. I do about 4000 steps in a day, just wandering around campus and going to meetings; this will give me more than enough watts to do whatever I want generally. But when I offload the Pokemon onto my DS, my watts are zeroed out again and they go into the DS, so I need to get more steps before I can check out a new route I unlocked...

In related news, how do you cheat with this device:
Shaking, works quite nicely, but if you shake too fast it doesn't register. I've found that a limp-wristed shaking back and forth works nicely while reading email.
The Fan Method
The Record Player
If I have time, I'm going to attempt to attach mine to my Jigsaw and try that at it's lowest setting.

Also, issues with this thing:
It's in Japanese, I speak Japanese, I can sorta read/write it, but playing the game is hard.
It comes with a belt clip; there is no way I'm going to walk around town with a Pokeball on my hip. I'm 25, and I'll leave that activity to grade school kids. Thankfully the clip is optional.
Its not backlit. I play the DS in bed; I play with my iPhone in the dark car; hell, even my keyboard on my laptop is backlit; I want to play this game at night and that's impossible. (I've been playing it as one of the last things I do before bed)
Some of these routes take significant amounts of watts to unlock. I'm thinking literally hundreds of miles of walking. Kids are just going to find ways to cheat this; I know I would/will.
It falls out of my pocket when I'm hanging upside down at the climbing gym; it and my pedometer get left in my coat now.
It prominently displays your Pokemon's name. This sounds like a good thing, but kids name their Pokemon all sorts of horrible/rude/graphic/sexual things. This WILL get kids into trouble in school.

And the good
The thing is solid, I really don't feel like I will break it by sitting on it or dropping it; I can't say the same about my pedometer.
Its fun. It keeps my attention for short spans of time when I play with it.
I can get Pokemon on it that I can't in the game. Early on in the game, when you are frantically trying to create a decent team, that is invaluable.
It's a fracking Pokeball! I need not say more.
It is actually difficult to get it to register cheating reliably as steps. It really seems to want an elliptical motion to count a step.
You can turn off the sound; kids will be able to play with this device during class and the teacher won't hear it beeping.
Your Pokemon won't die if you leave it on the device for a while and forget about it. Talk about annoying if you had a Tamagotchi and forgot it at home one day; your Tamagotchi would die.

Home at last

Drove home from Glenwood Springs today. Had a lovely trip, but didn't do nearly as much walking today as I did yesterday.

I spent some time this evening working on playing with the pokewalker and doing research. Bulbapedia is a amazing resource. Through playing with the device, I've determined that its rather diabolical, in that you can find better and better Pokemon on your route the more steps you do in a particular day. For example, I'm currently on the Pretty Seaside Route and at the start of the day I can find low level Woopers and Sunkern, but if I walk 5000 steps, I can find Staryu and Psiduck (which are better Pokemon).

Also, you earn access to new routes by walking and earning watts, not playing the normal game (there are some special things you can do in the regular game to earn a new route, but they are not part of normal gameplay). I picked up the regular game to offload a couple Pokemon today, but all I've done it play with the walker.

Also, I did find myself tapping my foot on the ground attempting to get the pokewalker to register more steps so that I could go fight/capture more Pokemon when I wandered upstairs to get a drink (it is 200 steps to earn enough watts to attempt to capture one).

In Glenwood, got some good walking in

As stated in the previous post, I'm in Glenwood Springs. We parked the car in front of our hotel and have been walking everywhere. And the Pokewalker has been in my pocket all day (10K+ steps, according to it). There was a significant amount of discussion of it at the Brewery as well today. We all passed it around and got a good chuckle out of the Slowpoke I put on there (a Slowpoke on a pokewalker is apparently "epic, but not as epic as a Snorlax on one.")

There were some thoughts about this. We were discussing if a pokemon levels up faster with the walker than it does when fighting normally (ie. put it as the first and instantly switch it out with something strong enough to battle whatever you're fighting). I'm hypothesizing that no, it doesn't; all this walking today made my Slowpoke only go up a single level. But, it might be worth testing this.

It also came up in conversation whether if the pokemon would learn a new attack at the level up that it does in this device, whether it would do it or not. When you leave a pokemon at the ranch in the game for others to raise, you lose those attacks; so it was hypothesized that the same might happen for pokemon in the walker.

I also figured out that you can get a new area to walk in for every badge you collect (at a minimum). And there are different pokemon in the areas (many of which you haven't yet seen in the game, so there is significant motivation to try and capture some of those).

We also discussed who might use the walker as a useful device. Because, it really seems easier to raise pokemon normally in the game. I can see the use case of a 10 year old boy carrying the pokewalker to and from school and screwing with it in class and between class (frankly, I expect schools to react and ban the things when these are officially released in the US (way to go pro-health policies)). I say 10 year old boy, mainly because I remember being in that situation and bringing stuff like the pokewalker to school and playing with others who owned the same. Margaret mentioned that pokemon was really cool in 6th-7th grade and it would be seen as cool to have the pokewalker on your belt. But by 8th grade, it was no longer cool and such a thing would get you shunned. I dunno, we'll have to see what kids do with this, but I think I can safely guarantee they will be playing with it.

I'm also remembering a ton of Japanese as I'm playing this game. I'm starting to sound things out that come in menus I see all the time. I decided instead of going "ok, the second from the top is the one I want" that I should make sure I know what buttons say incase some new item gets introduced that moves them around. I've also been doing the same with attacks and such. Doing this has turned this game from a chore back into an enjoyable game.

There was another observation about the device: when you are walking and then suddenly look at the device, you can see the number incrementing quickly and the pokemon walking with you; there appears to be a bit of a time lag to give you feedback. We also we passing the device around the table playing with shaking it in various ways to get it to register steps. I think the best method is a simple moving your hands in a ellipse with the walker in it; any straight motions aren't detected reliably as steps. This makes it a little harder to cheat at this than with the Pocket Pikachu 2 (which has stories online of kids sitting and just shaking the thing).

Also my wonderful girlfriend got me a DSi for Valentines Day!!!

A couple days of being sick and now at a hot springs

Ok, so after figuring out how to use the pokewalker. Thursday, during one class I was fine, the next class, I basically got really dizzy and sick and somehow managed to make it home. I passed out in bed and didn't play the game.

Friday, I spent the day at home working. And didn't get enough footsteps to make any sort of progress in my study.

Today, Margaret, I and another couple drove out to Glenwood Springs and spent the evening wandering around. I did get a chance to play the game a little and filled up my three spaces to put captured pokemon and three spaces for items. It was trivial to dump those back onto my DS when I made it back to the hotel room. I then replaced the ratatta with a slowpoke on my pokewalker and proceeded to play the regular DS game.

haha! Great Success

So I've been fighting this for a while: playing this game w/o being able to easily read things is HARD. I've been trying all sorts of things to get my Pokewalker to work (my actual research topic) but I finally figured out how to load pokemon on the Pokewalker. Basically:
you need to have caught more than one pokemon and put a pokemon into one of your boxes on the PC
Save the game
Reboot the DS
Load your pokemon game, and choose the third option
You then just keep clicking YES (todo, lookup how to input Japanese on my EEEpc/eeebuntu)
You choose a pokemon in your box (I chose a rattata I just caught)
Then you just follow the pictures and you get a pokemon on your pokewalker.

HURRAY!!!

And no, I didn't magically find this combination through button mashing. I found a video of the Pokewalker in use on Youtube.

Now onto my actual tests.

harder than I though

So I've been playing the game. Its amazing how much I can do without doing any sort of reading whatsoever. Mind you, I've been playing these games for over a decade, so it's all pretty familiar. Its interesting, I didn't think the random dialog with people in towns was remotely interesting, but it really adds something. The game is actually rather boring when I'm not reading dialog. I'm seriously concerned about later in the game when I might have to actually pay attention to dialog and I just skim over it not knowing it's important. I'm also having difficulties understanding attacks, some of them are english-ish things, others aren't. So these things I have to actually read, and often some of them aren't words I know (thank god for my Furigana dictionary).

First Impressions

Ok, so today, I figured I had enough calibration data and cracked open the game. No the Pokewalker didn't come magically loaded with pokemon (though that would make my life easier). I spent about 1/2 hour playing the game; it's amazing how much text you can skip and still understand what is going on. To get farther in the game, I will have to start reading things. Right now, I'm slowly sounding out words if I think someone is saying something of interest. We'll see how long I can do that without getting into trouble.

I haven't managed to get the pokewalker working yet. I think I need to capture a second pokemon, and then access my PC (it's a pokemon thing to call every computer/terminal in the game "my PC"). Thats the best I can figure out from the instructions in the book. If I get really stuck, I'll spend some time and actually do a decent translation the applicable couple of pages and see if I can grok anything else from the text.

Anyway, it's time for bed. I'm making good progress in the game, and will do a little research online tomorrow to determine what steps I need to complete to use my pokewalker. Although, Pokemon's first two towns or two are generally set up as tutorials that introduce one piece of the game at a time (and that piece isn't accessible until I go through the tutorial). So I might just get an event where the pokewalker is explained to me and I'm instructed how to activate it.

A bit of reading

I spent a lot of time today sitting on my couch with my laptop reading. I needed to create an annotated bibliography for this project and needed to provide three references for this iteration. There are quite a number of pieces of literature on the topic of pedometers. I've picked three that represent a decent basis for what I believe is the background of the Pokewalker.

In no particular order:

Toscos, T., Faber, A., An, S., and Gandhi, M. P. 2006. Chick clique: persuasive technology to motivate teenage girls to exercise. In CHI '06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006). CHI '06. ACM, New York, NY, 1873-1878. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1125451.1125805

Consolvo, S., Everitt, K., Smith, I., and Landay, J. A. 2006. Design requirements for technologies that encourage physical activity. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006). R. Grinter, T. Rodden, P. Aoki, E. Cutrell, R. Jeffries, and G. Olson, Eds. CHI '06. ACM, New York, NY, 457-466. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1124772.1124840


Consolvo, S., Klasnja, P., McDonald, D. W., Avrahami, D., Froehlich, J., LeGrand, L., Libby, R., Mosher, K., and Landay, J. A. 2008. Flowers or a robot army?: encouraging awareness & activity with personal, mobile displays. In Proceedings of the 10th international Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Seoul, Korea, September 21 - 24, 2008). UbiComp '08, vol. 344. ACM, New York, NY, 54-63. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1409635.1409644

There is also the obvious Fish'n'Steps paper from Siemens Corperate Research, but I felt that the Consolvo et al. 2008 paper built upon the Fish'n'steps research so I'd use it instead.

I also keep coming across references to Fogg's "Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do" book, and it talks about the Pocket Pikachu; so this is something that I will need to track down. I've looked at part of the book online using Google books (a half page blurb about Pocket Pikachu), but I'm going to need to attempt to reserve a copy from the library.

Finally found my DS

After frantically tearing apart my house, I finally found my DS. I have another two days of data to collect before I begin playing, but I was starting to get worried. The house is still in a bit of disarray from when we moved in back in August. In other news, I found a large stack of ACM Queue and Urban Climber I'd also been looking for.

Its Here!

I arrived home tonight full of anticipation. Like a kid on Christmas day, I crept to the mailbox outside my house. I held the post and pulled the mail box open, for it had been crushed in years past by an exuberant driver who missed the road (or perhaps a rural youth practicing their baseball swing, and they are now playing for the Phillies). I peered into the metal vessel of communication to see if my prize had yet arrived. There was a manila envelope inside the box, the kind with bubble wrap built into it. Could this be it?

There was also some spam shoved in my mailbox as well, which I dumped into the recycling bin on the way into the house. I inserted my key into the door; two locks were opened, and I pushed the door into the dark house. I stepped inside, and placed my messenger bag upon the floor in the foyer. My keys were hung upon a hook beside the door, and I turned the lights on. I stepped lightly up the stair, like a kid granted a cookie from the kitchen, but they must choose it themselves. My manila envelope was placed upon the dining room table as I removed my coat.

I tore into the package as a lion tears into a gazelle after a long hunt. This was it! My precious had arrived! I rubbed my handed over the satin textured gold coating on the box. The text was in Japanese, barely readable, but symbols I knew. The seams of the box were crisp and well made, the tabs to open my prize uncreased.

My hands trembled; do I dare to open this package before my calibration test is complete? Will I be able to resist placing the cartridge into my DS, if I do open this? No. No, I would not be able to resist; I must keep the box sealed until the fateful day when I have a week of calibration data.



Also, note to self, if there is a weird spike in footsteps today, I spent a couple hours wandering the hill eating gelato and drinking boba tea.

The Anticipation Builds

Your item is out for delivery or available at a PO Box at 11:14 AM on February 4, 2010 in LONGMONT, CO, 80501.

Detailed Results:

Out for Delivery or Available at PO Box, February 04, 2010, 11:14 am, LONGMONT, CO 80501
Sorting Complete, February 04, 2010, 10:44 am, LONGMONT, CO 80501
Arrival at Post Office, February 04, 2010, 8:46 am, LONGMONT, CO 80501

The pre-game excitement

I've found that my game has shipped 1st class from California, so I'm expecting it by the end of the week. I'm pretty stoked, but somewhat concerned about my lack of reading any Japanese seriously in the past five years. Therefore, I ordered a new Furigana-Japanese to English dictionary to make my life a little easier. I'm even watching a episode of Pokemon tonight to get hyped up for the game.

I've also put some tape over my pedometer's screen yesterday, and have been carrying the device in my back pocket. Hopefully I didn't break it tonight when I was at the climbing gym and took several falls and forgot it was in my pocket. I'll find out when I have my recorder look at the data sometime in the next day or so.
'