Most Americans would frankly rather eat their hats than use an app, let alone play a game, where important components are based on the metric system. Sure, the US system makes no damn sense. Even its formal name, the “United States Customary System,” implies that we only use it because we have been for a long time and we have no interest in changing that. Most of us rarely need to convert miles to kilometers, for instance—except Pokemon Go players, who now have to do it every day.
And indeed, Google Trends results showed that in the first couple days of usage, searches for kilometer-to-mile conversions in particular distances spiked considerably. It’s often because of eggs, a main feature of the game.
Eggs, of course, are for hatching more Pokemon (among other things, like experience and stardust, which can be used for upgrades). But you have to hatch them by walking. The longer you walk, the better the prize that is eventually hatched.
Eggs come in 2-kilometer, 5-kilometer, and 10-kilometer denominations, so you can probably guess what distances were Googled the most often. It’ll be interesting to see if this has any lasting effect at all in raising our awareness of the metric system—as literally not one single other thing ever has.
