I'm Surprised There Aren't Any Niantic Conspiracy Theories Yet*

*Oh wait. I spoke too soon.

It's so funny that now I am rarely alone in places where I am accustomed to encounter no other human beings.

This is because Pokemon Go has turned a whole nation of young people out of doors in search of elusive virtual creatures.

I was wondering where the Pokemon Go app was getting all the photographs of pretty obscure landmarks for this game. I figured they had to be pre-existing photographs and I figured they might be geo-tagged, but I had no idea they were largely the infrastructure of Niantic's other game Ingress.

So a significant number (millions) of these photos were contributed by Ingress players. This makes sense. Because one of my favorite, outre tombstones in this one particular cemetery (buried in the middle of the grounds) was tagged as a poke stop. It has some unusual art on it. I had photographed it several times but couldn't have imagined that there would be other photos of it online. And here it was in the Pokemon Go game.

Everyone is expecting horror stories because 1) players get so distracted while driving and 2) players are going into areas of which they have no real knowledge, often at odd hours of the night. This is a little worrisome.

It's not unusual for me to be in a cemetery before dawn taking long exposure photographs by using a tombstone as a tripod. But to look over and see a college kid hunting pokemon, his face lit by the glow from his phone at 4 a.m., is definitely something new. I wonder how long this fad will keep up. It's good that people are getting out of the house for once, I suppose. I know the system keeps crashing because of the level of usage. It did get me interested in geocaching, which sort of overlaps this phenomenon. I assume the Ingress game is actually ongoing. So there are armies around you unseen, green and blue factions. The company Niantic separated from Google in August 2015. I suppose Pokemon Go is the game which will finally make it a household name.