Death by Pokémon Go: The costs of using apps while driving (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Death by Pokémon Go: The costs of using apps while driving (2017)

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109 pointsbretpiatt73 comments

Pokemon Go got a lot of negative rep when it came out but I were quite (positively) surprised that local kids that used to sit at cafe with friends, not talking to each other for hours glued to their phone, now was walking around parks talking to each other glued to their phone. Funny how the negative consequences was mostly among adults (that can drive) and the behavior change among kids was pretty positive.

That said I also remember heartwarming messages from Parents with autistic kids that for their first time in their life had something they could do together outside and interact with their kids.

So I'm surprised it still gets a lot of negative rep.

Was analyzing the statistics to proof my point, which was "there are not so many people playing this kind of games, so the risk is manageable".

After I saw the statistics (Hope I got everything right), which are:

    - Pokemon Go: over 2.2m comments, 4.3 stars on Google Play Store
    - Ingress: over 0.1m comments, 3.6 stars on Google Play Store
    - Minecraft: over 1.1m comments, 4.6 stars on Google Play Store
    - Call of Duty: over 1.4m comments, 4.5 stars on Google Play Store
    - Clash Royale: over 1.8m comments, 4.2 stars on Google Play Store
    - Roblox: over 4.6m comments, 4.5 stars on Google Play Store
    - GTA: over 0.99m reviews, "Very Positive" on Steam
    - CS: GO: over 5.6m reviews, "Very Positive" on Steam
    - Apex Legends: over 0.23m reviews, "Very Positive" on Steam
    - PUBG: 1.4m over reviews, "Mixed" on Steam
    - DOTA: 1.5m over reviews, "Very Positive" on Steam

Oh boy, Pokemon Go really wasn't "just a small game nobody plays" after all.

Extrapolating the numbers to cover the whole nation has so many pitfalls that they should have left it out and kept to the facts instead.

With that said it does seem like Pokemon GO poses a substantial risk, i am reminded of this clip from the early days

https://youtu.be/MLdWbwQJWI0

I feel like it’s unfair to attribute all the crowd behaviors to a simple game, especially as these spawn must have been random. These people would have done the same if their idol was spotted in the park.

I mean, we can look at other stampedes and we wouldn’t fault religion or celebrities for being crazy popular. There can be efforts made into limiting the ill effects, but bursts in popularity are hard to plan for. The systemic issue would be people not giving a shit about society rules.

https://youtu.be/ucyia07AlMk

whoa

Did that guy just abandon his car with a passenger in it to go and catch a Pokemon?

That clip sure is crazy, but how does it show substantial risk? It's a lot of people crossing the street to enter a public park, and one person parking behind another stopped car and exiting his car. If you have a mass gathering, surely Central Park is one of the best suited locations for it.

Technically, crossing the street like this might be illegal in the US, but it doesn't seem to endanger anyone.

Wikipedia has Pokemon as the worlds #1 media franchise, well ahead of Star Wars and Marvel.

Also "Pokémon Go made $1.23 billion revenue in 2020, higher than its peak usage in 2016" https://www.businessofapps.com/data/pokemon-go-statistics/

Just briefly went through the paper, the model seems overly simplistic to make this extraordinary claim. Plus, they are not looking at confounding factors, time of day, etc, etc... If you want to prove that one variable is stronger than others, you need to include more than one variable...

The title and the fact that they calculated the damage down to the dollar are good signs that the value of the paper is in learning from its flaws, not the conclusions.

They didn't calculate health benefits that Pokemon GO induced by making people walk and bike more.

It would seem to indicate a wild lack of focus if the same paper was analyzing traffic fatalities and the health benefits of walking.

"policy recommendations require a consideration of both costs and benefits and we have made no attempt to calculate the economic benefits of using mobile devices while driving. We acknowledge, though, that identifying any economic benefits of playing Pokémon GO while driving stretches our imaginations"

They narrowed it down to just driving.

It's a bit weaselly to not try and find the value.

Napkin Maths, a movie is $5 per hour. Driving for a hour playing Pokemon Go is worth ~$5. But it's also worth ~$5 per hour walking. So the Napkin Maths fails.

Indeed. It’s tiring for me to keep reading papers written by people who believe in money as if it were the only driving force in people’s lives.

This is also a problem in the foraging community. Once you have the ability to identify all the mushrooms and trees while driving at highway speed, it's a very difficult to just turn it off.

Is this a real thing? I can’t tell if you are joking or not.

100% a real thing. I haven't heard of anyone actually getting into an accident due to looking for mushrooms while driving, or at least admitting to it, probably in part because it's a hobby that people don't usually take up until they're well out of their most accident prone years. But I know a lot of people who have paid extra for lane assist and automatic emergency braking.

There is even a whole subset of mushrooms called the 55-mile-per-hour-mushrooms, so called because they're especially easy to identify while driving at highway speeds. Here is an old post referencing this: http://mpb.ou.edu/ben/ben416.html

This has all got to be a joke.

It's a little eccentric, but it's not all that different from geocaching. Plus, free food!

I've also dumpster dived a little bit (decent amount of crossover between foragers and dumpster divers), grocery stores toss out tons of food that's still perfectly good.

Geo-noshing?

I prefer the term eatercising.

Makes sense, you can cover a lot of ground at 55 mph.

Note that this article mentions Agaricus augustus as an edible mushroom, even though it is now known to have carcinogenic properties

Mushroom hunters are a bit notorious for being single minded about their hobby. One of the more popular books on the subject contains a reproduction of an actual event where the author ran off during the intermission of an orchestra that he was playing in to go hunt for mushrooms.

https://m.imgur.com/6Yv41

Funny enough, the model for the cover photo was actually a professor of computer science at my university (recently retired, I believe). I'm a bit surprised that this pocket guide is well-known in the mushroom hunting community.

I remember reading somewhere that the behavioral circuits that attention engineers at social media companies exploit are the same ones that foraging uses.

Maybe that's why they traditionally had berries depicted on slot machines.

> Maybe that's why they traditionally had berries depicted on slot machines.

Or else they use things like gold nuggets or diamonds, which have the same intermittent reward mechanism.

> foraging community

This is completely foreign to me. Do these people drive by bushes and quickly scan for berries and shrooms to pluck? In the actual real world?

They usually go for a hike or walk around their neighborhood. I discovered black raspberries in my yard last year and once I learned to identify them I see them everywhere in season. I can totally see how it would become distracting if you were more serious about foraging.

Not often purposely. It’s more like once you know how to see it, it’s hard to turn it off. E.g. the other day I saw magic mushrooms growing near my house. I can teach you how to see that, but I can’t teach you to unsee it.

It goes further than just games, of course. Many otherwise sensible people believe they can use their phones while driving — often making up rules like “it’s OK if I’m in heavy traffic” or “it’s OK if I’m waiting at the light,” as though they aren’t at best losing situational awareness and contributing to traffic even in that scenario.

Think about this when you are making any app that is used on mobile, esp if it helps someone get to a destination.

Think about that for a second.

Seemingly innocuous changes in UX for a maps app can literally kill people, either inside or outside of the car.

Gives a whole new meaning to an A/B test.

The Instagram speed badge was associated with a few deaths iirc. Encouraging higher speed is obviously bad, but encouraging users to look at their phone while traveling extremely fast is particularly dumb.

Edit: it actually was Snapchat.

(2017), and posted multiple times before, but only one such thread that I found had any comments on it -- just one here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16423434

you can't catch any pokemon from within in a moving car (the pokemon just puff and disappear while on the move, it used to upset my daughter when she was into this stuff), so what is the point of looking at the pokemon screen while driving?

I think they added that in in response to the accident stories. I also think some people would drive around to the vicinity and then get out.

I run FVWM on my pinephone. I've had people ask how I use it while driving. Nearly everything about smartphones is upsetting.

The closest I've come to this is that my daughter who often plays this in the car while I'm driving can no longer assist me with navigation and other sundry help which I miss and means I guess my driving is slightly more distracted without the help.

For reference here's footage of a Pokemon player hitting a police car (2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD51pg9iTN8

This paper doesn't seem to know that all gyms are also pokestops but bases a lot of the analysis on this incorrect understanding.

The paper is based on the first 148 days of the game. At that point, gyms were not pokestops. That addition came later.

Somewhat embarrassingly, I was the person that wrote the code that put the gyms into the game and even I forgot that they didn’t function as pokestops in the beginning.

That being said, safety was the number one criteria for placement every time. I spent so much time making sure we didn’t have things showing up in dangerous places like freeways. The idea that I did something wrong and that as a result someone may have been harmed is terrifying.

What are you talking about? There are gyms at seemingly every travel stop on I-80 in Ohio and I can easily spin them passing by at highway speed as a passenger. They’re in range of several travel lanes because the gym dots are at the entrance door. They’re also not accidents because many are Starbucks promotions.

Do you mean “don’t accidentally create pokestops literally on the freeway?” As in, 12345 I-80 as an address? Because I can think of many counterexamples to what you’re saying here.

Yes, I mean literally on the freeway (or inside a nuclear power plant, or in the ocean, or many many other restrictions). A "travel stop" is a place designed for stopping so that sounds perfectly reasonable there would be one there.

Gyms could not be spun for items when the game first came out, which is the time period covered in this paper. The gym rework about a year later added that ability.

What about placing a Pokémon in the gym? This can be done while driving by.

During the first year with the prestige system it was rare that you would find a gym just sitting around with an open slot. Typically you had to battle repeatedly at a friendly gym to increase prestige to open a slot for your pokemon, which takes way too long for a drive-by.

Does the paper itself have figures for increased casualties? The abstract only has specifics for $$$ cost.

It does, on page 4.

"The 134 incremental crashes give rise to 31 incremental personal injuries in the vicinity of PokéStops. These account for 25% of the aggregate increase in the number of personal injuries experienced county-wide over the same time period. Based on data from the Insurance Information Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the incremental claims for bodily injuries and the estimated loss of lifetime income imply a county-wide total incremental cost of $988,621.

On a sadder note, our analyses point to two incremental vehicular fatalities in the vicinity of Pokéstops following the introduction of the game."

TLDR the app isn't the problem, people are the problem. Pokemon GO is demonstrative, not exclusive, marking high enough sample data to show that humans are not capable of doing many things at once.

> TLDR the app isn't the problem, people are the problem.

The app has multiple mechanisms to keep people “engaged”. It absolutely bears some responsibility here.

Isn’t the whole purpose of it to make you walk ? They even added speed limits to prevent cheating distance by driving.

No, the purpose is to make money.

It tries to dis-engage when it detects the phone moving faster than walking speed. But it is not perfect.

The phone manufacturer bears the most responsibility. If it wasn't Pokemon Go, it would be TikTok or Snapchat. Instead of having every single app implement some kind of restriction, cut it off at the root. If Android and iOS disabled any phone screen moving faster than 5mph, a lot of deaths would have been prevented at the cost of a few people unable to text on their Uber ride.

People simply cannot not look at their phone while they're driving. We've had ample time to learn this lesson and do something about it. We haven't done anything about it except pass ineffectual phone-use laws and some very ineffectual software nags. I suppose there's a lot of money invested in people using their phones while riding or driving.

Consequently, I know a lot of people who have been seriously injured or killed.

At the cost of a few people unable to text on their Uber drive? Maybe you mean millions of people who are using public transport, trains, planes, bicycles?

I am not very old, but I am old enough to remember we managed perfectly well before we had Internet on the car/plane/train. It's not clear to me that it provides any societal benefit that outweighs the cost in human lives.

Sounds like Darwin award material. But seriously, those who can't survive the sea change of digital onslaught are eliminated from gene pool. Do the evolution.

Except for the innocent drivers and passengers who weren’t playing the game but were involved in a crash anyway…

Also the fact that car safety is so advanced now that the Pokémon go driver will most likely live and some random person on the street dies.

>Do the evolution.

humans adapting evolutionarily to shitty interfaces produced by lack of fore-thought and research sounds like a tech-horror writing prompt.

The lisp-alien comes to mind. Is this the face of perfection?[0]

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Lisplogo...

Rofl

Sadly, evolution doesn't tend toward perfection -- only toward what reproduces best, like Windows and JavaScript.

Haha, leave the lisp alien alone, he just wants to enlighten you

56 pages. back in the 80s and earlier, papers were much shorter. It's not like the claim being made here necessitates such a long paper compared to earlier studies.

How exactly would you make this paper shorter? Do you have any specific suggestions beyond your analysis here?

Bullet points like all of the major websites do, and then stop at the end of the list. No need for details. Don't have time to read while I'm driving to my next PokeStop anyways. /s

While we're at it, the abstract should really be named TL;DR - who still says abstract?!

(/s, obviously)

I've read plenty of lengthy and long-winded papers from the 80's and earlier. Also it's not typeset, so it's taking up a lot more room than it appears to.

they have indeed gotten longer as I suspected

https://jeffbloem.com/2018/07/27/are-economics-papers-too-lo...

I duno why the original comment was down-voted so much. shorter papers are quicker to read and faster to compose. If shorter papers were good enough 30 years go, why not now?

> If shorter papers were good enough 30 years go, why not now?

Society can only support so many high-status cathedral positions, but the competition has increased significantly.

Yet people also rant about publish-or-perish resulting in minimum publishable unit churning.

Maybe the answer is some researchers just wrote a paper, non-typeset spacing is pretty wasteful, and Word does a bad job at tables, rather than some deep rooted societal crisis in "high-status cathedral positions".

I downvoted because it’s such a shallow dismissal of the author(s) work. There was zero substance, just a petty complaint over the length of the paper.

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