He weeps as he defiantly asks the universe, “What happens when I catch them all?”

As of the week of this writing, you cannot go on Twitter or Facebook or any news site without seeing something about the unstoppable popularity of Pokemon Go. It is everywhere. People are walking around the real world (outside!) trying to catch imaginary creatures, and having a ball sharing screen grabs of cartoons in funny places like on the toilet or next to celebrities. It’s a lot of good clean fun.

But as a more, let’s say, discerning fan of video games, my question with this game, and most free-to-play mobile games where you tend a farm or build a fortress or any other task of accumulation, is why?

Once you get the Pokemon, you have them. You can make them better, by training them. You can fight other Pokemon with your Pokemon, but all this finding, collecting and powering-up of pretend pets is in service of… having lots of Pokemon? Why is that compelling?

I wonder if the real draw isn’t the novelty of AR; the wildfire spread of this game seems in part attributable to the social currency of funny animals superimposed on otherwise mundane places, the appeal of which is obvious (and articulated well here).

But I’m more interested in what comes next. Once people have realized the appeal of an augmented reality game, when do we get one with a real story, a real point of view, as a work of creative art? Getting me out of the house is fine, giving the world another funny little trifle to feed small talk is fine, but how do we make it mean something more?

What kind of game would be a more interesting use of the AR that Pokemon is popularizing?

Is there a different property that would make a better AR game, like Star Wars or Mission Impossible or the Kardashians?

Is there a more tangible good for society an AR game could drive people to participate in, like voting or pothole reporting or recycling?

A good warm-up question: who in your life do you lie to the most?

As mobile computing, big data, location services and voice recognition converge, new possibilities emerge we probably never even thought about. The Atlantic had a smart piece on one possibility: the future of fraud-busting.

They cover several potential avenues that technology could protect us, but one in particular seems like it could change a lot more than how often we have to change our credit card numbers.

Picture yourself walking down the street when a man approaches and asks for bus fare; he says he lost his wallet and needs to get home. Right away, your phone buzzes with a notification: Stay away. He’s a fraud. The same voice has been asking for money in different locations all week. Such a possibility sounds far-fetched, but your phone company already gathers information from all the phones in its network, and several tech firms are developing voice-biometrics software that can identify individuals and even catch emotional patterns that may indicate deceit. [emphasis added]

The idea of catching on to repeat offenders with data is one thing. But what if someone unlocks that next level of real-time analysis, decoding an individual’s voice patterns and emotional cues, to foil lying? Imagine a world where an effective lie-detecting machine is in everyone’s pocket. Conversation would never be the same again.

Would you want this technology to exist, understanding that you’d know when people were lying to you, and they’d know when you lied to them?

Even if that meant the polite deceptions we use to smooth things over with friends or in relationships are no longer possible?

How else would this change our lives — at work, in commerce, in dating, even in public life like politics or dealing with the law?