My only request is to re-skin the app to something like Star Wars or Star Trek. Pokemon looks like baby software.
Play Ingress. Really. If you want something more techy/scifi (it has a complete scifi storyline, but you don't have to believe in it in order to play), you will absolutely love Ingress. I can't recommend it highly enough. It's an ongoing game of capturing and holding territory played between two factions, the Enlightened (green), and the Resistance (blue), using the entire world (literally) as our playing field. It uses all the same in-game/real-world location data as Pokémon (indeed, the Pokémon locations are only a subset of the Ingress locations, and all those locations were collected and submitted by Ingress players - you're welcome, new Pokémon players), but it's a much more strategic/competitive game. You'll do all the same walking, you'll be working with the same real-world map (with a darker, glowy, matrixy scifi theme), you'll be capturing and holding Portals (not Gyms), but you'll be linking those Portals together into ever larger series' of triangles (called fields), covering more and more territory (all while the opposing team is trying to knock them down and make them their color, all in real time). I have seen fields covering multiple states, fields linking countries - epic things pulled off by squads of players working in coordination over large areas - they make fields that could be seen from space. At the other end of the spectrum, I have also done a ton of walking the local neighborhoods by myself, usually at night, hacking, smashing, linking, and fielding (Ingress will show you your local neighborhoods like nothing else). In between, I've been involved in epic realtime battles with groups of other players, sneak attacks at midnight, all sorts of fun. The first week I played Ingress, I "accidentally" ended up walking 45 miles. I've spent about $10 on the (totally optional not-required non-intrusive) IAPs they added to Ingress last year, but in the years before that my only expenses were buying new shoes and an external battery (both Ingress and Pokémon Go eat batteries, by nature of running all the phone's hardware and radios full tilt continuously - Anker batteries highly recommended).
And in many areas, Ingress is quite social - the game, by design, makes higher level players work together to accomplish things, and local organizations have developed, in most cities, for each faction - I've made a bunch of good friends amongst fellow Enlightened players. And I've met some pretty nice smurfs - uh, Resistance players too (we call them smurfs, they call us frogs - it's friendly rivalry).
Most of the world is seeing Pokémon Go as a new groundbreaking thing, but, really, Pokémon Go is cashing in on the ground already broken by Ingress. (And, frankly, I'm really happy for Niantic for their success - they've earned it.)
(To your last sentence - don't worry about losing your masculinity or maturity or any such thing by playing Pokémon Go - after all, it was James T. Kirk who said, "The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play." Give Pokémon Go a whirl - the worst that can happen is you may feel a bit foolish. But it's fun. Either way, definitely check out
Ingress.)
