The original title for this post was "Augmenting Reality with the Nintendo 3DS." The 3DS is an interesting game system and even though I play relatively few games, I've got one, because Pokémon won't be available for anything I do have for a long time. The way the 3DS in particular tries to (and in some ways succeeds wildly) to bring social features to their games and integrate the video games with the real world is interesting. I particularly love it for the pedometer, which is a good way not only to set goals to achieve certain amounts of physical activity, but is also an excellent way to gain coins for the built in "Find Mii" and "Puzzle Swap" mini games, which is what I do every two or three weeks when I get those coins. You can also use other people's Miis that you gather both to get puzzle pieces and as heroes in the Find Mii game. It's all very adorable and it's a very particularly Nintendo way to add location-based social features to games.
For these reasons, there was no question at all for me as to whether I was bringing my Nintendo 3DS or not. It was absolutely mandatory.
For the most part, my use of it wasn't too wild. I achieved an 18,000-step day (I must have walked like seven or eight miles that day, my 3DS in particular shows about 5000 steps when I've walked two miles) and met a variety of Mii characters, not all of which were particularly useful. Some of them must have been for new 3DS systems or the 3DS systems of people who don't care too much about the Puzzle Swap game.
One evening, coming home from the Eurovision show on the Øresundståg train, I pulled out the 3DS and mentioned to Cat and Tris that I had had okay but not completely awesome luck meeting whole loads of Swedes and Danes in augmented digital reality. This wasn't completely true and I probably met five or ten of them that way, but it was still not maybe what I'd expected for a pair of large metropolitain areas. I did manage to meet one person twice. I had gone through my Mii people earlier in the day, and on the train when I checked again, "Andrew from UK" was listed once more on my screen. I mentioned this to Cat, and almost imperceptibly, some people to my left shifted around.
Within about 45 seconds, while I was adventuring in Find Mii again, a pair of men (from England) shows up and asks "Is that a Nintendo 3DS?" and immediately I reply "Are you Andrew from UK?" It was, too. We spoke for several minutes about the 3DS and when we take ours out into the world, which apparently for people other than me is "not all of the time" (something that admittedly surprised me.) Cat, Tris and I hopped off the train before Andrew or his buddy did, and even though we joked about it, we didn't meet any additional times.
I've got a lot of people on my 3DS who I meet on a regular basis, but other than my housemates and my colleagues who have them, I haven't completely confirmed who they are, and even if I have very strong suspicions, I certainly haven't confirmed it. It's therefore exceedingly interesting to have been approached by somebody, in a foreign country, on the off chance that I was in fact talking about him.
To my own credit, I'm not often talking about my Nintendo 3DS buddies on crowded trains, but the situation was hilarious to me nonetheless.