A woman plays Pokémon Go in Lafayette Park in front of the White House in Washington on July 12. (JIM WATSON/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

I’ve written about this before, in this space and others, but one of the reasons it’s amusing that I’m a critic is that I grew up largely without access to mass culture. There were exceptions, of course. I saw the 1994 adaptation of “Little Women” in theaters and cried so loudly when Beth died that a neighbor called my mother afterward to make sure I was all right. My parents introduced me to the genius of Buster Keaton from an early age, giving me a firm grounding in physical comedy, great story structure and the power of a poker face. And my rides on the school bus introduced me to Outkast, blowing my word-loving brain wide open.

But while I’ve caught up on a great number of the things I missed while growing up, lately I’ve been coming to terms with the idea that there’s one area in which I’ll probably remain permanently and woefully deficient: any kind of video gaming. I had some minor exposure to the “Myst” franchise in school, played a little bit of “Half-Life” with a friend during my teens, and in my early 20s, I made my way through parts of “Portal.”

But I never quite fell into fictional worlds the way I was supposed to; I felt lonely, rather than curious, and I was always too tense to develop the reflexes I needed to shoot monsters or jump through hoops. None of this is to say I’m not an explorer or adventurer; it’s just that I seem to have missed the stage where I developed the tools and instincts that would make me suited for the sort of adventures most video games seem to offer.

When Pokémon Go blew up this weekend, there was part of me that was curious about what creatures might be roaming my neighborhood. But after a momentary experimentation, and capturing a couple of Pokémon, I deleted the application from my phone and revoked Niantic’s access to my Google account swiftly thereafter.

Culture is a big, wild, wonderful thing, and if I can’t traverse every nook and cranny of it myself, it just gives me an excuse to commission wonderful pieces such as Peter Suderman’s meditation on the “Fallout” franchise that ran on Act Four as part of our week-long series on the End of America. And in the same way, I don’t need Pokémon Go to get me out into the city. I loved seeing Washingtonians swarm the park where my husband I like to go to read on weekends, even if what’s drawn them there is different from our reasons for going. And if I meet our new neighbors by wandering up to inquire about their dogs, or babies, or just out of general curiosity rather than asking them what Pokémon they’ve nabbed lately, we’re all getting to the same place in the end.