People are also searching for Pokemon Go in places considered sacred, like the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.
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The game involves using a mobile device to find and capture virtual Pokemon characters at real life locations, including apparently inside the Washington-based museum.
Pokemon Go, the wildly popular app that has taken the world by storm in just the last week, has some police department urging players to keep safety in mind.
The museum is a site of commemoration for the estimated 1.1 million people killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau and to the survivors who suffered as camp inmates. The museum’s communications director, Andy Holliger, said that they are “attempting to have the museum removed from the game”. The image could be a hoax, but the museum is still concerned by its contents, according to the Post.
At Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, spokesman Stephen Smith said the move was pre-emptive rather than to address a problem they’re already seeing.
“There are some places in national parks, all over the country, but even here in D.C. on the National Mall, where it may not be appropriate to play Pokémon Go”, Paul Ollig, the chief of interpretation and education for the National Mall and Memorial Parks, told Buzzfeed. They are now working to have the location removed from the game.
“After we were made aware that a number of historical markers on the grounds of former concentration camps in Germany had been added, we determined that they did not meet the spirit of our guidelines and began the process of removing them in Germany and elsewhere in Europe”, Ninatic said in a statement at the time.
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Short of enforcing a strict no phone policy when entering either landmark, there doesn’t appear to by any way to tell if someone is playing Pokemon Go without said player explicitly stating as such. The game was the most downloaded free app on Apple’s app store, while Nintendo shares surged almost 25 percent on Monday for their biggest daily gains ever based on its success.
