Tales of the dead

I got a text message last weekend from John Baronia, chief security officer of the University of the Philippines Diliman, reporting that a number of people were roaming UP’s many open spaces, looking rather dazed, sometimes bumping into one another.

The walking dead? Well, most would take a few steps, ambling along with hands occasionally waving in the air, and then they’d begin to run, then go back to a slower pace, hands still flailing.

So could these be the running dead?

I’m sure you’ve guessed what’s going on. It’s Pokemon Go, taking off from a Japanese cartoon series in the last century. The creatures from TV are now brought into apps for phones. There are all kinds of pokemon, much like wildlife species, with different habitats (for example, on trees, in bodies of water).  You throw a poke ball to one of the creatures and then try to grab it. If you do, then you own it and can deploy it for combat in gyms, complete with teams. The pokemon are apparently low-maintenance, their combat power raised with candies and stardust, but their human owners are kept busy and, if using augmented reality, physically active.

Augmented reality

I’m writing this based on what my son tells me since I just don’t have time to play these games. I do find them fascinating in the way they tap into our human brains’ hunger for stimulation.

Pokemon Go allows you to use built-in backgrounds, as with regular video and app games. But, wonder of wonders, you also have the option to tap into your GPS (global positioning system), so your real physical environment becomes the setting for the game. This means, for example, that if you’re in Luneta you might find your pokemon standing next to Rizal… Talk about photobombing.  I won’t be surprised if we start seeing Facebook postings of pokemon creatures on the Oblation in UP Diliman—not, I hope, poking around.

The problem is that the reality is not quite real, so you end up trying to go for the pokemon from a nonexistent bush. Or you run into an electric post. Or into a non-pokemon creature, meaning a fellow human being.

But because augmented reality is so absorbing, you end up with droves of people running around in one place, each with their own augmented reality. The result is that they look like zombies, the walking dead.

Even if the app had not been officially released in the Philippines, people found ways around that. My son, who is 10 years old, figured it out on my cell phone, downloading from the iTunes store based in the United States. (Or it can be in Japan or any of the countries where Pokemon Go has been released.) A few days later, he told me he was in Greenhills and vendors there were offering to upload the apps into customers’ cell phones.

The game has been praised for its use of augmented reality, and the possibility that, for a change, people playing the game will get some exercise. But officials in other countries where Pokemon Go has been released have not been too happy. The armed forces in Thailand have banned the use of the game in military areas, and warned that the streets might turn chaotic if the game is not regulated.

What to do in UP Diliman, where you have bands of the walking dead roaming? We’ll just have to keep issuing warnings for them to be more careful, and keep our fingers crossed that there won’t be crazy encounters leading to road rage. These days, after all, people seem too quick to turn to fist fights or, worse, gun duels.

Returning dead

From the Pokemon-induced running dead, let’s look at the surge of the returning dead, with President Duterte’s recent blacklist of assorted officials with supposed connections to drug syndicates. There have been the usual denials from those named, but a new twist is that one on the list, a judge, has long gone on to the Supreme Court in the sky.

Mr. Duterte’s response: If there are indeed such accused dead, then let them, or rather their relatives, come forward with the death certificates. All that was still another reminder of our virtual and augmented realities: Apparently people may have been dead for several years but death certificates have not necessarily been issued. This happens with fugitives fleeing the rather short arm of the law in the Philippines. Relatives declare them dead, but a death certificate is not issued.

Sometimes the converse happens: A death certificate is issued but people wonder if the dead is indeed the dead. For example, stories are going around in Mindanao that Andal Ampatuan Sr., the main accused in history’s worst massacre of media workers, is not really dead, as the media reported in July 2015. It’s said that he was spirited away, not to the spirit world, but to a place where he can no longer be prosecuted.

Then there’s the dictator Apo Ferdie, dead for years but not buried. Come September he will finally be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, unless protesters are able to resort to some kind of legal action. Can the Supreme Court issue an order to restrain a burial? Probably not. The justices have their hands full now, with the threat of martial law as a response to the judiciary’s expressions of concern over the President’s lack of due process.

But I’m digressing. It’s curious that for years now, there have been rumors going around that the guy encased in glass in Ilocos Norte, venerated by his loyalists, is not really Ferdinand Marcos but a wax effigy.

The necro-rumors keep going, and as rumors go, they may have elements, usually wisps, of truth. That’s the case whenever we have elections, with claims that incumbent officials are able to resurrect the dead to vote. They’re called ghost voters, and can spell the difference between victory and defeat for a candidate.

No, I have not heard, yet, of the dead becoming candidates, but nothing is impossible in the Philippines. Watch out for another kind of running dead.

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