It seems like an awful lot of us are getting swept up in this whole Pokémon Go craze. It’s probably easy to roll your eyes at something like that, but this silly little mobile game has achieved a lot of positive things in a short amount of time.

In case you haven’t read our coverage elsewhere in the paper, here’s the quick and dirty of it: Pokémon Go is a smartphone app that encourages you to walk around in order to collect virtual creatures and stop by landmarks, like local art, to collect in-game goodies at locations called “PokéStops.”

Thanks to all of that artwork around Fountain Park, The Avenue of the Fountains and the Community Center, downtown Fountain Hills inadvertently became one of the hottest spots to play this game in Arizona.

There are several dozen spots in our downtown area alone, encouraging folks to stroll around town or simply hang out in the local park. By comparison, I dropped by Tempe Market this weekend and the mall, a place you would expect to be a prime location for an app like Pokémon Go, had maybe a dozen PokéStops total.

Last week, Jenn and I made a couple of evening trips to Fountain Park in order to walk around and visit these PokéStops. Both nights, we were amazed by the activity we saw. Kids, teens, parents and everything in between were walking around the Fountain, playing Pokémon Go, checking out the artwork and chatting with one another.

Just about everyone we passed gave a smile and said hello before going on their merry way. Many strolled alongside us, sharing in some brief conversation before going our separate ways.

On Friday evening, we came across a mother and son who were visiting from Mesa. The mom informed us that she wanted to take her son to the best place to play the game and heard online that Fountain Park was the place to be.

At the end of the night, I turned to Jenn and asked, “When was the last time we came out and walked around the Fountain at night, and when was the last time we talked to that many people while here?”

She agreed that there was something special about the sense of community this simple game has managed to create, seemingly overnight.

In just a week’s time, we’ve gone on multiple long walks, joined our friends on spontaneous “hunts,” joined a Facebook group of local players who are enjoying the game together and had the opportunity to meet all sorts of new people.

Not to take a somber turn, but the world hasn’t been super great to itself these past six months. It seems like we can’t go a day without hearing about the latest bit of ugliness one person or group enacted on others. It’s been pretty depressing, honestly, and it makes me worry that maybe that the light at the end of the tunnel is further off than we might have hoped.

Over the past week, I’ve been reminded that it’s not all doom and gloom out there, and all it took was a silly little smartphone app and a community springing up around it to reassure me of that fact.