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from the busy-scratching-their-pokéballs dept.
Two economists are blaming Pokémon Go for causing traffic accidents and likely fatalities:
For a brief, shining period last summer, Pokémon Go reigned supreme. It brought obsession, joy, and, according to a new paper, injuries and death.
This working paper, appropriately and evocatively titled "Death by Pokemon Go," shows the darker side of the massively popular augmented reality game. Purdue University economists Mara Faccio and John McConnell combed through accident reports from Tippecanoe County, Indiana, in the first 148 days after the game was released in July 2016. In that county alone, the total value from injuries, damage, and the two lives lost is between $5.2 million and $25.5 million. If you scale this to cover the entire US, it would suggest that $2 billion to $7.3 billion were lost just in those few months.
The reports showed during those 148 days, 286 additional crashes occurred in the county, compared to the same period before. Of these, 134 were near pokéstops. In this scenario, it's crucial to determine that Pokémon Go caused these damages directly, as opposed to just causing people to be outside more, thus more likely to be hit by cars.
Also at PC Magazine.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 27 2017, @05:38PM
I think it was a lack of paying attention to one's surroundings that killed people.
It doesn't matter whether it was Go or something else. It was careless people, made worse when it is the careless people that killed someone else who expected that driver playing the game to actually follow the rules they were licensed to abide to under the threat of legal duress if they did not. Assuming people would uphold that requirement seemed like a safe assumption.
It's like how guns don't kill people. Shooters and inattentive drivers do.