Since its release earlier this month, the Pokemon Go app has been downloaded more than 30 million times.  In public places you can see people walking erratically, excitedly, staring at their phones.  The last time there was such broad, youthful enthusiasm for a shared experience was July nine years ago when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows hit bookstores and sold 15 million copies the first week.  There was a general buzz in the air then wherever you went.  You almost knew just looking at someone if they were in on the excitement– our world suddenly segmented into excited wizards and oblivious muggles.

Part of the appeal of Rowling’s fantasy realm is that it isn’t set in an imaginary place or distant time, not in Earthsea or Middle-earth.  You don’t get to it through a wardrobe or looking glass.  The wizarding world is our world, but only wizards know it exists.  There is something intriguing about that.  Invent a make-believe world and you have free rein to mold its reality to whatever the plot requires.  But if Harry Potter is going to board a magic train at King’s Cross Station, London, Rowling must hide its platform between two other real ones.

Now comes Pokemon Go, bringing its action into our world.  The game planners at Nintendo could’ve spun out a Pokemon game app like all the others, something contained in the tiny screen of a smart phone.  They instead made the phone a lens through which gamers could see the world with the game elements superimposed.  In Pokemon Go, you are the game piece and the world is the board.  The Pokemon you catch are all around us.  This is one key to the game’s appeal.  My backyard has always simply been my backyard, but now I might find something interesting there, there or anywhere.

When elements of fantasy are brought into the real world, the experience differs from the pure escapism of an imaginary realm.  The fiction makes us see our world differently.  A sign for Platform 9 3/4 has been placed in the actual King’s Cross station in London, along with a baggage cart, halfway through a wall.  Rowling pulled the real London into her fantasy; that fantasy now crosses into the real London.

Something deep within us wants to believe there’s more to our world than what we see every day, a hidden aspect, deeper layers of reality that once revealed, enchant our surroundings, inviting us to look at familiar objects again with new interest.

Many books and movies have played with this idea of adding fantasy elements to the real world.  Ghost stories and fairy tales go back even further, hiding nymphs, witches, trolls, and goblins in our own woods and basements.  Fairy stories inspired the infamous Cottingley Fairies, supposedly captured in photographs in 1917 — not so different from using our camera phones to catch Pokemon today.

It’s difficult to determine the financial benefit to Nintendo from 30 million downloads of a free app, but the impact of the game itself has been seismic.  It will undoubtedly spawn copycats and spin-offs just as the cartoon did.  It also creates a new model for developers to liberate their games from the small screens of phones and deploy the action in the real world.  In this way, Pokemon Go is literally a game changer.