Property owners: Get off my lawn, Pokemon!

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES

As throngs of “Pokemon GO” players traipse around to real-world landmarks in pursuit of digital monsters, some ticked-off property owners are asking to have their locations in the fictional Poke-verse removed.

For Valerie Janovic, a 19-year-old psychology major at Brandeis University, the game went too far when the image of a poison-gas-emitting pocket monster called “Koffing” was pictured near the U.S. Holocaust museum’s exhibit on World War II gas-chamber victims. Her online petition to have the site removed from the game had collected more than 4,500 supporters by Thursday.

“I just don’t think people should be playing a game where people remember people who suffered and were tortured and who died,” she says.

Besides the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, several churches and cemeteries including Arlington National Cemetery want their in-game locations removed to keep crowds of players away.

The addictive, location-aware smartphone game gives digital incentives such as “Pokeballs” as rewards for visiting real places. The locations, known as “Pokestops” and “Gyms,” are based on landmarks submitted by players of Niantic’s earlier game, “Ingress.”

Niantic offers a form to request exclusion, but it’s neither automatic nor guaranteed. It’s a mystery how quickly, if at all, Niantic will respond. Several requesters said they got a stock response saying, “Thank you for reporting this PokiStop/Gym. We will review and take appropriate action.”