Lanceypooh, a maker of Youtube videos, was out hunting for Pokemon, playing the tulip-fever-sensation game Pokemon Go, when he seems to have trespassed on a stranger’s land, drawing gunfire from the irate landholder.
The video is unverified, but there have been other instances in which the crowdsourced geographic database has drawn Pokemon hunters onto private land, to the displeasure of the local residents.
Omar Atkil’s excellent essay on Pokemon While Black has pointed out the zeitgeisty danger of a smash-sensation game that asks its players to wander around strange places doing inexplicable things at the very moment at which white peoples’ inability to police their own imaginations has made being black in public a potentially lethal sport.
I spent less than 20 minutes outside. Five of those minutes were spent enjoying the game. One of those minutes I spent trying to look as pleasant and nonthreatening as possible as I walked past a somewhat visibly disturbed white woman on her way to the bus stop. I spent the other 14 minutes being distracted from the game by thoughts of the countless Black Men who have had the police called on them because they looked “suspicious” or wondering what a second amendment exercising individual might do if I walked past their window a 3rd or 4th time in search of a Jigglypuff.When my brain started combining the complexity of being Black in America with the real world proposal of wandering and exploration that is designed into the gamplay of Pokemon GO, there was only one conclusion. I might die if I keep playing.
Warning: Pokemon GO is a Death Sentence if you are a Black Man.
[Omar Atkil/Medium]
Pokémon ‘Gone’ wrong: YouTuber gets shot at while catching them all
[Mix/The Next Web]