Yesterday Therese Coffey, Conservative MP for Suffolk Coastal, told Twitter that she’d received her first complaint from a constituent about Pokémon Go.
Their house, she says, has been ‘designated something without their consent’ . When asked by another user where their issue lay, Coffey replied ‘I think they found it disconcerting to have strangers pulled up outside their home (in rural area) for no apparent reason’, which is totally understandable – no one wants strangers lurking outside their house.
In an interview with Buzzfeed News, Coffey said that ‘This person thinks their home has become… I think they call it a gym, a Pokémon gym’. A Pokémon Gym is where players can go to battle their Pokémon against other players, but you have to physically be in the vicinity in order to ‘enter’ it. She told them that 'I will follow up with Nintendo and alert the digital minister' so watch this space.
These people aren't the first to have an issue with the placement of a PokéStop or Gym; the Hiroshima Peace Park in Japan, the site of the former Auschwitz Concentration camp in Poland, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Arlington National Cemetery are other notable areas where people have been going to search for Pokémon and that have complained about people playing the game on their sites.
It does seem, however, that this is something the game's makers plan to rectify. According to Game Rant, the marketing director J. C. Smith said in an interview that the company are working on making it more respectable to business and home owners who have been affected by PokéStops and Gyms, whilst also keeping it fun.
Also, on the Niantic website (the people who make the game) you can actually request the removal of a PokéStop or Gym.
I'm not entirely clear about how places become PokéStops or Gyms in the first place, although Niantic did invite people and businesses to request locations for PokeStops and Gyms a few weeks ago but submissions have now closed.
McDonalds have already capitalised on the game by signing a sponsorship with Pokémon Go, making over 3,000 of their restaurants into PokéGyms which is bound to drive footfall.
Westboro Baptist Church was a PokéGym which had Clefairy ‘holding’ it which they were not happy about because they believed it was a ‘sodomite’ and went on to use other Pokémons to preach their hateful rhetoric. Gross.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.