The game uses Global Positioning System and mapping capabilities in smartphones to let players roam the real world to find “Pokestops” stocked with supplies and hunt cartoon character monsters to capture and train them for battles. It’s also caused a few problems with police departments in several cities warning players to avoid wandering onto private property while getting caught up in the game.
Advertisement
He added that the makers of the game had already been contacted, and asked “not to allow the site of Auschwitz Memorial and other similar sites to be included in the game”.
Within a couple of days of the launch on the App Store and Google Play Store, Pokemon Go shot to the top of the app summit at a canter.
Niantic has run into trouble with Holocaust memorial sites before.
Pokemon Go has completely taken over the mobile gaming space, but we’re quickly finding out that some places aren’t exactly appropriate locations to “catch them all”.
It has been reported that multiple parts of the museum are being used as three “PokeStops”.
“We are attempting to have the museum removed from the game”, the museum’s communications director, Andy Hollinger, said in a statement.
On the other hand, a Reuters reporter who had visited the museum on Tuesday said that although many smartphone users were using their devices for capturing photos or sending messages in the museum’s premises, none of them were playing Pokemon GO or any other mobile games for that matter.
In one particularly inappropriate image circulated online, one user captured the moment a Koffing Pokemon appeared in the Museum’s Helena Rubinstein Auditorium. PokeStops could also be a major reason why the museum, and even the cemetery, is attracting great attention from Pokemon masters around town.
Advertisement
A Care 2 petition has quickly raised more than 1,700 supporters asking developer Niantic Labs to remove the Holocaust Museum from Pokemon Go. However, some sites have posted instructions for obtaining the game in countries outside of the US, Australia or New Zealand, where it is available.
