It’s been a brave, new, digitally-augmented world for more than a week now, and Butler County is squarely in the throes of the Pokemon Go craze. People of all ages are on the hunt; the battle for supremacy among trainers is heated.

Pop open the smart phone app in the Butler Eagle Newsroom and you can watch first place at a nearby Pokemon battle arena change in real time — sometimes by the minute.

The game is fittingly referred to as “augmented reality” because of the way that the Pokemon, which are rendered digitally, are overlayed into real world settings. So, using a mobile device like a smart phone or tablet, players can — in fact they have to — wander about the real world to find and capture the creatures.

Fascination with the game, which was released as a free-to-play app on July 6, quickly swept the nation. And just like any other fad, it has brought along with it plenty of good and bad — from players saying the app encourages people to socialize and get more exercise, to public safety concerns and stories of those who have exploited the game to harm others.

In O’Fallon, Mo., police have said they believe four teenagers used the game as a lure and are behind as many as 11 armed robberies in St. Louis and St. Charles counties. In northern California two men were reportedly carjacked while visiting a park to catch Pokemon.

And the United States Holocaust Museum and Arlington National Cemetery, both in Washington D.C., have both issued public appeals for players to stop hunting Pokemon at their sites, saying that playing the game is “extremely inappropriate” for such hallowed places.

That’s absolutely true. People visiting a place which memorializes victims of the greatest atrocity in human history, and a place enshrining thousands of our nation’s wartime heroes, should be more respectful.

But it’s also true that the good appears to have outstripped the bad when it comes to Pokemon Go, which treads the line between game and shared social experience in a way few things have before it have managed. People share rumors on the location of rare Pokemon, or weird experiences that happened to them while playing the game; everyone with a smart phone is suddenly a possible acquaintance with common ground.

In Butler County more than 400 sites are tagged in the game. If you drove along Main Street in Butler this week and saw a crowd in Diamond Park, it was likely a congregation of Pokemon trainers visiting the “gym” located at the site.

Sites in Slippery Rock, Cranberry, and elsewhere have reported an influx of people chasing Pokemon — from parents with children to teenagers and adults caught up in the search for rare versions of the digital creatures.

Interest in the game will wax and wane over time. But while it’s here, people should realize that they are the ones who will ultimately decide whether Pokemon Go augments their reality — and the reality of those around them — for better or for worse.