If you’ve spotted someone seemingly glued to their phone, creating a trench in the ground by walking over it several times, and thought it odd—wonder no more. They’re just looking for Pokemon.

Southeast Texas is one of many areas recently afflicted by an electronic craze whose franchise slogan “Gotta catch ‘em all” has Golden Triangle residents of all ages walking around their front yards, other people’s front yards, around parks, streets, cemeteries, and other places in hopes of doing just that—catching them all. What are they catching? Pokemon. How are they catching them? By playing Pokemon Go.

Pokemon Go is a mobile video game by Nintendo for smartphones that has its players physically go to different locations in order to geocache the fictional creatures known as Pokemon with their phones.

It is an example of what is considered an augmented reality game where the Nintendo app utilizes your smartphone’s GPS and camera feature to augment the world around you with images of wild Pokemon.

The objective is to find them, catch them, and train them for battle with other players (fellow Pokemon Trainers) in locally designated areas called gyms, which could be anywhere really where players congregate and have their Pokemon fight each other.

After all the hype that has accumulated around it, though, Pokemon Go has its legions of fans for a very simple reason.

“It’s fun,” Cody Guillot, 28 and a resident of Port Neches, said. “Really, it’s just cause I’ve been playing Pokemon since elementary school [but] it’s a good distraction.”

The kind of built-in fan base that such a long-running franchise cultivates cannot be underestimated, of course.

“I’ve been playing the game since it came out,” Bradley Armstrong, a resident of Nederland, said. When asked how long he’s been playing Pokemon as a brand, the 22-year-old answered, “Since I was a kid.”

Beside the obvious fun factor and long standing crowd appeal, however, is another reason why the free-to-play mobile game has garnered such attention.

“It motivates you to walk and get fit,” Armstrong said. “A lot of people make it their goal to get out of the house [and this allows it].”

Port Neches Chief of Police, Paul Lemoine, would tend to agree: “It’s at least getting people to exercise more.”

But Lemoine also confessed that “It’d be nice if they could channel that excitement into something productive,” before admitting that there were worse things that people could be getting themselves into instead.

Armstrong seemed to have that in mind when he went on to elaborate about the unique social aspects that such a game allows for:

Beaumont has a program where Go players can rent out dogs and walk them while the players find Pokemon on their phone. There are care packages comprised of water and snacks that are made for thirsty players who walk out into the Southeast Texas heat—a sign that this game could actually help bring people together.

“There’s also people who pick up trash wherever they walk,” Armstrong added, highlighting another socially creative aspect of community play.

Clearly, not everyone would engage in such activities; but that siren call of Pokemon cries (“Pika! Pika!”) would still prove hard to resist.

“I never really wanted to play it because I did not want to walk around the city—but I still downloaded it,” Tim O’Neal, Port Arthur resident, said. “I’ve always been more interested in augmented reality than virtual reality.”

And while virtual reality replaces the real world with a simulated one, augmented reality takes what is already there—a real-life environment—and superimposes a computer-generated image or sound on top of it—augments it.

“In augmented reality, you’re not stationary. You could walk around and interact with what is in front of you,” O’Neal, 27, said. “You could use your augmented reality in real life—something to multitask with. You can’t do that with virtual reality.”

And when asked about the growing number of reports about accidents, incidents, and tragedies associated with Nintendo’s latest video game craze? About people simply not taking the time or effort to note what is around them and thus suffer the consequences as a result?

“That’s their problem,” O’Neal said simply. “There’s a big warning when playing the game to ‘beware of your surroundings at all times’.”

The Port Neches Chief of Police put a finer point on it.

“They’re losing awareness of their surroundings and that could be dangerous,” Lemoine said. “They’re letting it distract them to the point where they’re stopping in the middle of the road so they can catch these [Pokemon].”

Needless to say, distracted pedestrians becoming distracted motorists is something no one wants.

“We’ve had enough distractions as it is, but if they start to play with this while they’re in their vehicles…” Lemoine began. “I wish there was something that the programmers of the game could do about it, like not letting people play it while they’re driving.”

Regardless, Nintendo’s popular franchise shows no sign of slowing down. So in case you come across someone pacing to and fro, seemingly glued to their phone, take a chance, go up to them, and ask how many Pokemon they’ve captured so far. Their answer may surprise you.