By The Herald Editorial Board
The best we can come up with is to compare it to a butterfly hunt.
Overnight, or nearly so since the smartphone app was released only last week, Pokemon Go has become the latest pastime for millennials and others who apparently needed another reason to fix their attention on their phone screens.
The game challenges users to search for and capture Pokemon — Pocket Monsters — the anime characters that 20 years ago unobtrusively inhabited collector cards. Using “augmented reality,” players see animated Pokemon characters superimposed over the images shown by their phones’ cameras. Once a Pokemon is spotted, game players can hurl a Pokeball to capture Squirtles, Pidgeys, Rattatas, Oddishes and other seemingly random combinations of vowels and consonants.
The game’s advantage over butterfly hunting is that it spares the critters the fate of being pinned to a display board.
The Pokemon, at least as viewed on a phone, are all around us, in public and private spaces and at all hours of the day, which is what’s leading to some problems for more dedicated little game hunters.
Over the weekend, a couple tracking Pokemon quarry tripped a silent alarm at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store in Monroe after business hours, The Herald’s Eric Stevick reported Tuesday. And the Duvall Police Department posted a message on its Facebook page advising against lurking behind the police station and popping up out of the dark, calling it “high on our list of things that are not cool right now.”
Pokemon also have the potential for luring players into dangerous situations. Edmonds police, Stevick reported, had to warn people to stay off a fishing pier closed for repairs. And in Missouri, four people were arrested for armed robbery after allegedly using the game to lure victims to a concealed location.
Class-action lawsuit filed in three, two, one.
While the game encourages people to get out and walk around their communities, we shouldn’t have to warn players of the dangers of distracted walking posed by obstacles such as curbs, trash cans, light posts, traffic and other people playing Pokemon Go. The same obviously goes for drivers scanning for virtual lifeforms.
The threats aren’t all physical. Pokemon Go players, like many people who don’t read the fine print of user agreements — and who does? — also may find they’ve opened themselves up to I.D. theft. Although the app’s maker, Niantic, has promised to fix the problem, some Pokemon Go users are learning that they’ve allowed access to more than their Google user ID and email address and have opened their entire Gmail account, potentially allowing Niantic to read emails, post emails as the user, get access to anything stored on Google drive, sift through users’ search histories, view photos and more.
And that’s if they’ve downloaded the legitimate game from Google’s official Play Store. A faux version for Android phones has been discovered that can install malware, The Washington Post reported. Called Droid-Jack, the malware can take over a phone or tablet and steal information from it.
This must sound curmudgeonly and fusty, especially coming from an editorial board of older folk, slower to adopt new technology: But if you’re determined to ruin a good walk, at least carry a bag of golf clubs.
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