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.
Related: Peak Pokémon Go?
No Pokémon Go or Other AR Games in China
Russian Prosecutors Seek 3.5 Years for Blogger Who Played "Pokémon Go" in Church
Trial Will Decide Whether Milwaukee Can Require Permits for Using Locations in Augmented Reality
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Pokémon Go is unquestionably this season's hit game. But whether it has any staying power is a very open question, and early signs suggest it's already trailing off.
Bloomberg has published some charts by Axiom Capital Management that show daily users and engagement dropping. One chart, using data from analytics firm Apptopia, shows Pokémon Go peaking at around 45 million users in mid-July, during the week or so following its launch. It then begins a decline to somewhere above 30 million daily users last week.
Bloomberg's article also notes a surge in searches for "augmented reality" coinciding with Pokémon Go's debut.
Niantic, for its part, is "still working hard on several new and exciting features to come in the future of Pokémon Go." Meanwhile, Nintendo is releasing two new 3DS Pokémon games on November 18.
Chinese state censors won't be permitting Pokémon Go and other augmented reality games anytime soon:
Nintendo's hit smartphone app, Pokemon Go, and other augmented reality games are unlikely to be rolled out in China any time soon, after the state censor said it would not license them until potential security risks had been evaluated.
[...] Prompted by "a high level of responsibility to national security and the safety of people's lives and property," the censor, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, is coordinating with other government departments to evaluate the game's risks, an industry body said. These risks include the "threat to geographical information security and the threat to transport and the personal safety of consumers", a games panel of the China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association, which is governed by the censor body, said in a posting on its website.
Some Chinese companies have been developing similar games based on augmented reality and location-based services, prompting the panel to seek advice from the top licensing body, it said.
Russian prosecutors requested a 3½ year prison sentence Friday for a blogger charged with inciting religious hatred for playing "Pokemon Go" in a church.
Prosecutors made the request as the trial of Ruslan Sokolovsky, 22, wrapped up in the city of Yekaterinburg. A judge said a verdict in the case would be issued May 11.
Sokolovsky posted a video on his blog showing him playing the smartphone game in a church built on the supposed spot where the last Russian tsar and his family were killed. He has been in detention since October.
He is charged with inciting religious hatred. It is the same offense that sent two women from the Pussy Riot punk collective to prison for two years in 2012.
Source: ABC News
Video: YouTube
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
In August, Milwaukee's Lake Park saw swarms of Pokémon Go players, some of whom trampled and trashed the area, making a general nuisance of themselves. Not everyone behaved badly, as John Dargle, Jr, director of the Milwaukee County Department of Parks, Recreation & Culture, acknowledged in a letter [PDF] at the time. But a subset of thoughtless gamers created enough of a burden that Milwaukee County Supervisor Sheldon Wasserman proposed an ordinance [PDF] to require augmented reality game makers to obtain a permit to use county parks in their apps.
The ordinance was approved and took effect in January. It has become a solution waiting for a problem – according to a spokesperson for Milwaukee County, no game maker has bothered to apply for a permit since then.
[...] Nonetheless, in April, Candy Lab, a maker of augmented reality games based in Nevada, filed a lawsuit "out of genuine fear and apprehension that this ordinance, conceptually and as written, poses a mortal threat not only to Candy Lab AR's new location-based augmented reality game, but also to its entire business model, and, indeed, to the emerging medium of augmented reality as a whole."
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 4, Funny) by kazzie on Monday November 27 2017, @02:23PM (2 children)
It's just a Snorlax asleep in the middle of the road again.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday November 27 2017, @04:51PM (1 child)
That Snorlax is begging for a Darwin Award. More so than Pokemon Go players and mobile phone users in crosswalks.
The Snorlax could change business models from sleeping to: You Shall Not Pass (unless you pay).
Would a Dyson sphere [soylentnews.org] actually work?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 27 2017, @06:07PM
Darwin Award? Of course, Pokemon do evolve, you know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 27 2017, @03:10PM
in whether Poke caused this mayhem directly or indirectly...
People are crazy, exhibit 234734734233566347.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by beckett on Monday November 27 2017, @05:27PM
In order for the extrapolation to hold true, the rest of the counties, suburbs, cities must meet the same geographical structure as Tippecanoe, IN, all police across the expanded area must fill out their forms the same way and report at the same rate, the reports must be consistent rather than reports of convenience, and with regards to fatailities the expanded area must have comparable emergency response and emergency healthcare resources that Tippecanoe county had. yet i see none of these variables controlled in their methodology.
What i see is findings that only apply to Tippecanoe County from March, 2015 to November, 2016. While it's mentioned that controlling for "pokemon caused these damages directly", but i do not see in the study how they were able to achieve this, let alone extrapolate this assumption to cover the entire US.
(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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by archfeld on Monday November 27 2017, @08:53PM
I'd say that that 2 economists have finally just flat out given up and are admitting that their chosen field is hokum and that they can't predict, or extrapolate economical futures and are now just scraping for some relevancy.
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge