With the smartphone game Pokemon Go achieving unprecedented popularity, some of the geographic locations of “PokeStops” — the real-world places where the game spawns new Pokemon for players to catch — are coming into question.
As ARLnow.com first reported yesterday, Arlington National Cemetery has asked visitors to refrain from playing the game, after several people were spotted playing at the cemetery and called out on social media. (Some of the graves themselves are PokeStops.)
That followed reports of people playing at the Holocaust Museum, where officials say they’re asking the game maker to remove the museum as a PokeStop.
In addition to the cemetery, there’s another potentially inappropriate PokeStop in Arlington. As a Twitter user pointed out yesterday evening, a marker at the Pentagon that serves as a memorial to the children who lost their lives in the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks is a designated PokeStop.
Here's another #pokemonGO poke stop that they maybe should rethink. At the pentagon. @ARLnowDOTcom @wtop @DCist pic.twitter.com/E9XGUj0s6F
— LucyVanPelt (@LucyAppa) July 12, 2016
The center of the Pentagon is also a Pokemon “gym,” though that seems to raise more questions about Pentagon employees playing the game at work than it raises questions of appropriateness.
https://twitter.com/HanananahVick/status/752230945655287808
No word yet on whether game developer Niantic Labs plans to eventually remove “inappropriate” PokeStops like the Holocaust Museum or the Sept. 11 children’s marker. Such locations in the game were actually originally geotagged by users of another Niantic Labs game called Ingress.