Countless Pokémon Go-ers Will Try Not To Get Injured In The Loop Sunday

By Stephen Gossett in News on Jul 13, 2016 4:01PM

The new augmented-reality game app Pokémon GO has been so popular that, for days after its release last week, players caused servers to crash. When potentially thousands of players descend on Millennium Park on Sunday at 2 p.m., they may have to worry as much about crashing into one another.

As you very likely already know, the game synthesizes the real world with the virtual through your mobile device. Built on the foundation of geo-location game Ingress, Pokémon GO generates a virtual interpretation of your environment and gives the player an avatar. You gobble up animated characters that appear against the real-world image.

Needless to say, plenty of observers have aired safety concerns, worried that the augmented-reality hybrid could lead players to pay too little mind to the real-reality true physical realm. And wouldn't you know it, those predictions proved prescient as reports of (mostly minor) Poké-injuries filtered through.

So even if only a fraction of the 7,000 who RSVP'ed for Sunday's meetup at the Bean actually show—which is always the case with Facebook commitments—all those faces buried in phones could get still slightly precarious. So if you plan to attend, please be mindful of your surroundings and enjoy your unlikely dominant-culture ascendance safely!

Other bizarre tales from the nascent cottage industry of GO curiosities include player-targeted crimes, cheaters busted through the game, trainer-for-hire side gigs, and creatures spotted at the 9/11 Memorial pool. For real.