© Julia Koefender/FlickerThe two young boys were in rowing boats in the Imbé, Rio Grande do Sul state, when one fell into the water and drowned.
Two nine-year-old boys were playing on rowing boats on Monday and one fell into the river and drowned, a police statement said. Media reports said the boys were hunting Pokemon characters, a version of events that was included in an initial military police report. Parents of the boys, however, denied they were playing Pokemon Go and said the Alcatel One Touch phone belonging to the surviving child did not have the app installed on it.
But police have not ruled out that the game could have been linked to the drowning. "The smartphone we seized today does not have the app for the game. We are investigating whether or not it had been installed," said Antônio Carlos Ractz, chief of the civilian police in the town of Imbé, Rio Grande do Sul state. "If it was there, we'll study legal action against the app's maker, because it has no age restrictions and has already caused accidents the world over," Ractz said by telephone.
Representatives for game developer Niantic and Nintendo Co could not immediately be reached for comment.
Pokemon Go uses augmented reality and Google mapping to make animated characters appear in the real world. Players see creatures overlaid on the nearby landscape that they see through a mobile phone camera.
The game has prompted safety warnings after players glued to their phones stumbled, were robbed or wandered into dangerous places. The app has been downloaded more than 100 million times, according to analytics company App Annie.
Nintendo, which owns a large stake in the game's publisher, The Pokemon Company, has seen its stock price surge after the success of Pokemon Go.
So what if they were playing a game. It wouldn't make the news if they were just playing Fruit Ninja or Farmville and died. "Suspected Pokemon involvement" is like saying that somebody was hit by a car and we suspect that they were lost in thought thinking about their school marks -- would you charge the principal, the teacher, the parents for pressuring the kid to have good grades? You make a popular enough game that millions upon millions of people are playing it, of course you have a small percentage of accidents that happen while people play it. You really can't blame the manufacturer of the game for people being stupid. There's a very clear warning to pay attention to your surroundings. When people ignore a street sign and walk into traffic, you don't say well, we should have had a large reinforced gate at the intersection, and in the meantime let's sue the manufacturer of the street sign and the intersection, when blatantly ignoring safety warnings was the cause of the accident. It's called basic human stupidity.
Ingress has been around for years now. Sure over the years there are reports of accidents, and some people I knew would play while driving until close calls forced them to stop. Distracted driving laws are in place for this reason.The only difference with Pokemon is that it was more popular instantly because of the game content. And, the population demographics of Ingress players is different than ones who enjoy Pokemon. What would you do? Create a tutorial system to teach people to play while still paying attention? Ban the game entirely? Target it to adults only? If you're talking about children being allowed to go off on their own and dying without supervision, why is it never the parents' fault? Because Niantic is an easier scapegoat than a grieving parent. And let's not forget, they were playing on ROWBOATS. Even if they went out there to catch a Pokemon... Could the kid swim? Who let an unsupervised kid go out on a rowboat that couldn't swim? Or into dangerous enough waters that swimming ability wasn't enough? Once the kid fell in the water, was it Pokemon that caused him to drown, or a lack of supervision and preparation? How could you possibly show that Pokemon was the deciding factor in such a tragic accident, even if the game gave him some incentive to go out there?
Thank you for admitting that the circumstances here are far from a solid case against the game. It's interesting to see that even with the phone having no Pokemon game installed on it when recovered, the police are still going to push to try to pin it on the game if they possibly can. You would think that the parents would be the ones pushing for it if it were true. This is obvious fluff by somebody trying to use Pokemon's popularity to make a story out of nothing...