![]() ![]() It’s just a front-facing phone camera, it has no way of telling whether my kids are brushing the top or inside of their molars! It’s got a rough idea of how fast their arms are moving, and that’s about it.īut my kids don’t know that, and I sure as hell aren’t going to tell them. This “action” was displayed in real-time in the centre of the screen, while off in the bottom right there’s a display that tells kids to move the brush to various parts of the mouth, so that they brush all sides of every tooth, top to bottom, inside and out. So long as they kept up a good pace, the screen would show a random Pokémon trapped in bacteria have its bonds slowly chipped away, while other bacteria on the kid’s teeth was being zapped off at the same time. We worked out pretty quickly, after a few failed attempts at catching Pokémon, that the game was tracking how fast/hard the kids were brushing. The secret to its magic is that it elegantly fudges the line between what it’s actually doing and what the kids think it’s doing. ![]() It’s the brushing itself though that, as a parent, I’m obviously most impressed with. While I’m impressed that both kids are sticking rigorously to the prescribed two-minute timer (though this can be adjusted for younger kids), I’m just as happy that both are spending 5-10 minutes each night just fucking around with all of this customisation stuff, because it’s making sure they’re keen to be involved in everything the game offers, not just the brushing. The best is maybe the way you can unlock stupid Pokémon hats that you can wear during gameplay, but there’s also this cool feature where the game takes four random photos during a brushing session then, at the end, lets kids choose one and cover it in unlockable stickers, then save and share the image. Pokémon Smile taps into this in multiple ways. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen kids play with something like Facebook Messenger before, but the ability to mess with their faces in real-time on a screen can keep them busy for hours. While each of those hooks sounds pretty thin on its own, as a complete rewards package for doing something they usually hate, it’s more than enough. It uses a front-facing camera to turn brushing into a game, visualising the bacteria that’s inside a kid’s mouth and asking them to brush real hard to get rid of it. In case you let the news of this game wash over - and I don’t blame you, this is barely a game at all - Pokémon Smile is an app for iOS and Android designed specifically to do what I’ve just described, which is get kids brushing their teeth with more gusto than usual. Somehow though, this game is the one thing that has managed to break their resistance, and has them not only brushing their teeth without a fight, but racing to do it, twice a day, every day. Licensed electric toothbrushes, a teeth-brushing timer on their Fitbits, (delicious) Minion toothpaste, rewards, punishments, you name it. My wife and I have tried everything over the years to try and get around this. In non-Pokémon Snap news, this morning’s YouTube presentation from The Pokémon Company also revealed free-to-start puzzle game Pokémon Café Mix and Pokémon Smile, a mobile app meant to help children brush their teeth. Pokémon Gets A New Puzzle Game And A Toothbrushing App ![]()
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