If You Catch Them All, They Can't Fight Other People's

“But officer…I only broke into the bank vault to catch an Arcanine”  

Ladies and Gentlemen, Jeremy has fallen victim to the scourge that is Pokemon Go.  He may never be seen again.  We now present you the new Blag, "LIR Is In The Office"...

Yeah, no.  

So, on the off chance that you're living under a rock and don't have access to the internets (at which point, I would have to ask how you're reading this, but that's beside the point entirely), you're aware of the new game Pokemon Go.  It's based on the entertainment empire that is Pokemon, a series of fictional POKEt sized MONsters that you are canonically supposed to catch all of.  Then the idea is you force them to train and evolve for the purpose of fighting each other.  Why one of these monsters isn't named Ivan Drago, I may never know.  Then again, there are somewhere north of 800 Pokemon that have been created at this point, so there may very well be an Ivan Drago out there and I'm just not aware of it.  

Either way, the newest thing going is a mobile app which uses every expensive and quickly consumed aspect of your smart phone (ie: battery, GPS, and Data Plan) to alert you to nearby monsters so that you can point your phone's camera at it and take a picture of it...and subsequently catch...or something.  I'm honestly a little fuzzy about how the whole thing works since I've never been all that into Pokemon (if there was a Transformers version of this game back in the late 80's, I'd have been all the heck over it, believe me).  I've discussed the matter with some friends in order to gain a rudimentary understanding of the concept, and have even seen the game in action, in the form of somebody yelling at me because I was driving too fast so they couldn't catch the Pokemon that was apparently sitting on my dashboard.  I'm not making that up.  

The whole concept has gone unbelievably popular in an unbelievably small amount of time.  The game debuted just about a week ago now, and already people have blamed car accidents on the game, people have wandered out into traffic to catch a monster, people have been lured into muggings, and one person found a Dead Body while playing the game.  Good wholesome entertainment here. 

All of this made me start to think about potential locations for Pokemon, and how the locations are determined and controlled.  There exists the possibility that monsters are now located in areas normally off limits to the general public and that there will be some trespassing issues as a result.  Also, areas whose locations are even more strictly controlled (such as my work site which, like many, has digital badge locks on every entry door) may start to see problems with people trying to get in to hunt imaginary digital combatants.  As usual, my brain took things to an extreme, where Pokemon Go can be used as a criminal defense where a cornered bank robber can try to convince the police that he was only in the bank vault to catch a prized legendary Pokemon.  A quick Google search yielded the name Arcanine as a rare Pokemon, so I went with it.  

Happy catching!