Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Pokémon GO and Cultural Locations

This is not new, but I have an example of a problematic Pokémon GO stop near my apartment (besides the one that is in the wrong location and the one that was removed IRL), one where the cultural info is wrong in the game but the correct information is just a block away. (And yes, I know these are all from Ingress.)

The stop is "Laughing Man", as you see here in this screen grab:


However, just a short block north is a plaque about the sidewalk tiles in the neighborhood, and it's not a man, it's Geneva, and there is a fair amount of information about her that could have been included in the in-game description. This is another problem: there's no in-game way to rectify erroneous information. Granted, allowing people to submit any old thing would be a disaster and Niantic would need real human filterers (not just machine learning), but allowing people to submit any old thing is how they got the data in the first place for Ingress.