Game Theory - *WARNING* Pokémon May Cause DEATH!

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

Join former Game Theory Host MatPat as he explains how Pokémon Go just might be the most DANGEROUS game ever made!

Are you a Pocafan in search of a healthier, more active lifestyle? But tired of all the run-of-the-mill diets and gimmicky weight loss programs? So are we. So we combine the world of Pokemon with the world of fitness. Pokemon Go. A cutting-edge application that gets you up and moving, while giving you the ability to capture your very own Pokemon's in augmented reality. Don't just get up and go.

Get up and Pokemon Go. Matt Pat is not licensed doctor or medical professional, please consult your physician for actual medical advice concerning diet and weight. Side effects of Pokemon Go include getting hit by cars, falling into ditches, trouble with local authorities, bodily, and lack of situational awareness in general. Pokemon Go may or may not actually kill you. Pokemon Go is deadly. I repeat, Pokemon Go, please help me get out of here. My family's been kidnapped and I'm being held here against my will.

Welcome to Game Theory. Today it's my goal to throw Pokemon puns at you, so don't get too comfy, cringe, please. I'm pulling out all the pokey stops. Okay, so I've legitimately probably had my fill of Pokemon's for now. Now, it's been over a year since I last talked about Pokemon Go, and for an app that probably most of you assume is long dead, I think I'm surprised by some of these stats I came up with. For one, it's raked in $1.2 billion since its launch. That's almost $2 million a day, and 1.4 times more than Sun and Moon sales combined.

And here we're all left wondering why everyone doesn't want to do full-on game releases anymore. That is why, ladies and gentlemen, it's been downloaded 752 million times, of which 65 million still play at least once a month, and 5 million still play every day. Which has resulted in an astonishing 88 billion captured Pokemon, Most of whom were then promptly ground up to be fed to the strongest of their species in a desperate attempt to evolve the darn thing Long story short, while it may not be as cool as finding Dewey or discovering who touched a your spaget Pokemon Go is still alive and well. The same, however, can't be said about its players

You see, for the many titles Pokemon Go has earned itself over the last year and a half One of the ones you won't see it talking about is deadliest video of all time. That may sound extreme, but it's no joke. Whereas other video games kill a player here or there from things like blood clots forming after extended play sessions with no movement, Pokemon Go! Pokemon Go! Actively puts its players right out into the line of fire by making them do the unthinkable Go outside! It's a game that gets you walking around in public staring at your phone, which as you can imagine puts players into some dangerous scenarios. Smuggings at night, trespassing during the day, falling into ditches, driving distracted, and of course walking into traffic without In fact, there have been so many of these types of stories that there are whole websites dedicated to tracking the number of accidents the game is caused.

But to be fair, every dark Altaria has a silver lining, my friends. Pokemon Go is a game that gets its users to walk around outside, and that extra exercise comes with a bunch of health benefits, which means regular players experience longer and healthier lives. So the question that I want to solve today has Pokemon Go, the unofficial deadliest game in all of history, actually killed more people or saved more people. Now, as I mentioned a second ago, there are actual websites whose sole functionist monitor deaths and injuries related to Pokemon Go.

All with sources provided no less. Which, man, if only all the research I did for this show is that easy. Also, let me just say it right off the Noybat, I'm using the US data here because it'll be simpler for calculations that we have coming up. So right away, we know that Pokemon Go has been associated with no less than eight deaths here in the US. But wait, on the same site, we find that in St. Louis,

Pokemon Go players were responsible for saving two people caught in a warehouse fire. So already we see the eternal struggle of life and death that is Pokemon Go. That leaves our net death counter at 6. From here though it starts to get a bit tricky. Despite the game's repeated warnings and its lack of functionality when traveling above certain speeds, far and away the number one cause of injury from Pokemon Go is distracted driving. Look Ma, I'm gonna catch me a laparice! Now obviously not all accident reports are gonna cite the game as the cause of the

accident or even know that the app was the thing that caused the distractions in the first place. So we're going to have to do some smaller scale research to figure out the game's impact on traffic accidents and then scale that data up to get an estimate of the bigger picture here. Luckily, we're not starting the process blind. A study done by researchers at Purdue University titled Death by Pokemon Go, the economic and human cost of using apps while driving. Looked at the increase in traffic accidents in the 148 days after the app first launched for one county in Indiana. And despite the paper calling them Pokemon's the entire time, and I do mean the entire time,

the research they did here actually looks pretty darn good. They compared accidents around Poked stops to accidents around gyms, under the observation that people can drive by and swipe a Pocostop to refill what they call the players' ammunition. They're just Pokeballs guys, it's not like they're being loaded into machine guns or anything, though, gotta say that would be pretty awesome. Whereas gyms, you can't really engage with while driving. You gotta stand on the street and, you know, pretend like there's actual gameplay and They also do things like check to see how traffic accidents significantly decrease the further away from the Pocostop you get during this period. Now obviously there are a ton of variables to account for here

One of the biggest is the fact that Pocus stops are in busy locations to begin with which means that they're just gonna be prone to heightened levels of accidents from the get-go and it doesn't really help that this paper is written by people who so clearly want to prove that the app is deadly I mean look at the title of this quote-unquote academic papers like they're titling an episode of game theory or something But it's the cleanest data that I could find online, so I'm going to use this as our worst-case scenario for deaths from Pokemon Go. Their study found that in a county that usually gets about 6,000 traffic accidents per year, there were an additional 134 accidents resulting from Pokemon Go. Scaling that up to the entire US, which has about 6,300,000 accidents per year, we get an additional 140,000 accidents in 2016 caused by the game. A number that we then have to slice in two since it launched

midway through the year, so that's 70,000 extra crashes due to Pokemon Go in the US in 2016. Now for 2017, we have to remember that this study only tracked the first five months of the game. By the end of 2016, people had stopped playing it by the millions, going from 28 million daily users in July to just 5 million daily users in December, where it's remained pretty consistent to this day. So it's safe to assume that accidents caused by Go went down by a similar percentage. Thus, let's say that of those 140,000 additional accidents in a year, Only about 20% of them existed in 2017 or another 28,000. In total, that's around 100,000 additional accidents caused by Pokemon Go during the year and a half then it's been out. Fatality by car accident has a rate of 0.176%. That means 100,000 accidents times a fatality rate of 0.00176 equals a rough estimate of 176 driving deaths related to distracted Pokemon Goers. Add in the 6 from earlier and we have 182 years

US deaths in total. All of this from a mobile app where he catch cute creatures and give them candy. Candy made from the flesh of their peers, but still, the numbers don't lie. You don't need to be a gum shoes to figure out that that number is too damn high! So, can Pokemon Go make up for the hundred and eighty-two fatalities that it's helped cause? It actually might. According to the US Department of Health and the National Institute of Diabetes and Kidney Disease, inactivity kills 5.3 million people worldwide every year from Diage. diabetes, heart disease, depression, and certain cancers. But unlike mostly every other video game other than just dance and I don't know, the two weeks one-two switch was having us bang our chests like horny gorillas,

Pokemon Go encourages players to get up and move! According to Microsoft research in the one month after launch between July and August of 2016, US players of Pokemon Go walked an additional 144 billion steps on account of this one game. Considering it takes about 500 million steps to walk to the moon, that's enough to walk to the moon and back 144 times! In the most extreme cases, players were walking 4,000 more steps every single day while they played. On average though, the increase was a much more modest 1,473 extra steps. So, that begs the question, how do we turn extra steps into human lives saved? Let me explain. What we know as a calorie is,

Simply a measurement of energy. When calories aren't used, they're stored in our body as glycogen or fat to use later. If you don't burn off the excess your body hangs on to it Consuming more food leads to more calories that don't get burned and that's basically how fat is gained The more you have the higher your chances for health problems and increased odds of death On average 20 steps equals one calorie meaning that if you walk 10,000 steps in a day you're gonna be burning about 500 calories Now according to a study conducted by Dwyer Pezik's son and A person who walks 10,000 steps every single day can increase their average lifespan by about 41 days Considering that the average lifespan is 79 years, that's just a lot of walking for an extra month of life But whatever it gives us the conversion of steps to human life that we need all we need to do is calculate the total number of steps

Walked by Pokemon Go players for the past year and a half which in turn will enable us to calculate the number of years that it's added to players lives And thus the overall total number of lives Same. That first month had about 144 billion steps, right? But as I stated earlier, Pokemon Go lost about 80% of its daily active users since then, dropping from 28 million to 5 million, meaning that the number of steps has decreased drastically as well. So based on this graph, we can estimate that there were about 10 million active daily users in August and September of 2016, and ever since the number has hovered around 5 million users, give or take. Knowing that on average daily user of Pokemon Go walks an additional 1,000

4,473 steps per day, we can calculate that in August and September, 61 days, the 10 million users walked 898 billion 530 million extra steps and in the 15 months after that with only 5 million daily active users That's 457 days times 5 million users times 1,473 steps or 3 trillion 365 billion 805 million steps in total we're talking about 4 trillion 4,4808803 steps. In total we're talking about 4 trillion 4, 4,48 billion 335 million additional steps taken since the launch of the game and yes that number is admittedly high But we're trying to give both sides the benefit of the doubt here and as you're about to see it doesn't really matter

We've almost reached our final answer 79 years of 10,000 steps a day gets you 41 extra days of life Right well that would mean that 79 years times 365 days times 10,000 steps 288 million 350,000 steps equals 41 days of life, or about 7 million steps for one extra day spent on this planet. Now, we just found that Pokemon Go players walked 4 trillion extra steps. So dividing by that 7 million steps it takes to earn ourselves an extra day of existence, we get 629,762 extra days of human life just from playing Pokemon Go. But that leads us to the question that we've been asking since the beginning.

How many actual human lives does that translate to? Ladies and gentlemen, here's our grand total. 629,762 days divided by 365 gives us 1,725 years of life. Divide that number by the 79-year average lifespan that a human gets, and we derive. Drum roll, please. Drum roll, I said, please. Please give me something to build up the hype.

Okay, 22, 22, 22 human livesave. It's actually 160 lives short of that 182 that we calculated that the game had killed. So yeah, like those Purdue researchers concluded, the peril of Pokemon Go is definitely real. Now, in all seriousness, obviously this was all for fun. Pokemon Go has clearly done a lot of good for its users. Not only on the health side, but it's also encouraged community. The week that Pokemon Go first came out was like the most positive uplifting week of communal gaming I've been a part of in years. of in years. And if I'm honestly pointing the finger of blame at anything here, it's actually just using cell phones while driving in general,

with 25% of all driving-related accidents being tied to using phones while on the road. Fun fact, by the way, fatal car crashes were actually on the decline, reaching their lowest point in five decades in 2011. But by 2015, 16, and 17, the number has been back up on the rise, with many researchers attributing it to the glut of new apps on phones. But heck, who knows? Driverless cars are coming, which means a whole whole new way to grab another hundred freaking ratatahs from the driver's seat. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.