I dunno about we, but it’s what I’m calling it, because I can’t be arsed typing out Pokemon Go every time.
2 Likes
A problem doesn’t have to be intentional to occur (you could even argue that an “intentional problem” is something else, such as a “malicious act”). But it does have to be noted before it can be corrected.
6 Likes
Belleville News-Democrat
Ah, good ol’ Belleville, the town that has fences between it and East St. Louis, minutes away from one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. (a city which coincidentally has the United States’ second highest crime rate). a town that owes its modern suburban existence to “white flight”, and is just 25 miles from Ferguson, MO.
Oh, there’s so much to unpack there, and issues that go so far beyond, “why do Pokemon avoid black neighborhoods?”
Well, you could download Ingress, create an account, and then check the Ingress Intel Map to find out if there are any portals in your neighborhood. Or ask an Ingress player to check it for you, should you know any. (Or a Pokémon Go player, for that matter.)
Funny how many exceptions there are to those rules.
Or give some sort of reward for players who submit such. That seems like the best route–it gives something back to the same people who were penalized for living in underserved neighborhoods, and keeps things inclined towards popular local landmarks as intended, rather than randomly-chosen businesses.
This is exactly how Ingress portals were populated. You got experience points for successful portal submissions, and then they introducted the Seer badge with five levels.
Bronze - 10 portals, Silver - 50, Gold - 200, Platinum - 500, Onyx - 5,000 (!).
The problem was the timeliness of reviewing submissions, the changing criteria, the quality control ability of the bloody portal monkeys, and then giving this shiny incentive for people to submit portals. People love shiny badges.
Like a few people already said the timescales for getting portals approved went from a few days in beta to months before submissions closed. I’ve just relogged into my submission tracker, and I’ve got ones which are still waiting for a response nearly two years later. I think I submitted 1,500 or so portals all through, and got 533 approved.
Then you’ve got the criteria changes. When the beta launched submissions there were certain ‘gimme’ candidates. Post Offices and Churches were the main ones for this. The thinking being that you could find those in every town, and so every town could have portals so people could play. There were broad categories to start with - art, historic buildings and landmarks, unique local businesses, etc. These changed and evolved to the final ones, and were applied to submissions as they were reviewed, rather than when they were submitted which lead to annoyance about rejections for things that weren’t applied at the time (eg: there’s a bit of a car in the photo) or poorly applied (nothing on private property - some of the monkeys seemed to then reject everything in large cities). If your submission got rejected, you could either try to get it appealed in the G+ community, or re-submit and it would go to the back of the queue. Problem with appealing was that you could quite often find someone else had had the same candidate approved in the time it took to be appealed, and then you didn’t get the credit.
This ties into the quality control/consistency of the portal monkeys. I’ve got a very simple example to show how inconsistent they could be. London has a ring of Coal Tax Posts dating from the 1860s. They mark the point where tax was due on wine or coal being moved into London, and all surviving 210 posts is listed as Grade II historically significant by English Heritage. You see them around the area next to roads, on riversides, on paths in the woods, but could go your entire life without knowing what they are. In other words they’re prime Ingress portal candidates. Submitted a few of these over a couple of days (my eventual plan was for series of missions involving all of them around London). Similar photos, form descriptions which highlighted the historical significance and discovery nature of the candidates. Just over half got accepted, and the others rejected. Identical candidates in different locations, and pretty much a crapshoot. Even with appeals you could get rejects from Niantic on what everyone in the community saw as nailed on candidates, and no details as to why.
Now we get onto the quality control, and the other part of the button mashing. You’d see some things live which were nowhere near the criteria, but had been submitted by people to make their farming areas more portal dense or get a home/work portal. Things like bollards submitted as “iron foundry bell monument”, tagging graffiti, memorial benches, or garden ornaments. Someone I know submitted a bunch of coin rides outside the supermarket as an “Amusement Park” for comedy value, and then was a bit embarrassed when it went live. Group of people all took a photo in their pockets, then submitted them all as “Pocket Portal” for the same reason. Some of them got accepted.
So you have that situation where it’s already getting swamped, and then you throw in a shiny badge for people who get portals accepted. Massive ramp up in the amount of random crud getting submitted, and swamping of the submissions system. They closed off the Seer badge at the end of 2014, so there was a rush of people submitting candidates before that (I did a few submission trips to villages with dense listed buildings, historic cemeteries, etc). After that it reduced to people who were submitting for tactical reasons/because they enjoyed it, rather than badge chasers.
It really needs a crowdsourcing method of approving/rejecting Pokestops/Portals. If they couldn’t cope with Ingress, there’s no way they can cope with Pokemon levels of submissions.
4 Likes
Oh, and beyond all that, the linked article screwed up with their use of the Ingress Intel map. If you don’t zoom in, you only see linked portals rather than all of them.
Here’s their map of the portals in part of Detroit.
I can’t actually zoom out far enough to show them all, but here’s the actual portals around the top left of that area:
1 Like
Isn’t that standard operating procedure in America now, find a problem and complain about it as loudly as you can, and for bonus points make sure you include “racism” and/or “sexism” (but only the RIGHT KINDS of racism and/or sexism).
1 Like
It’s not just that the badges are shiny, but at higher levels you are required to have to have a certain number of specific types of badge in order to progress to the next level.
The thing about joke portal submissions is amusing. Here in Indianapolis, there are, or at least were, a few portals named after a local player. (Though the one I’ve personally visited seems to be missing now.)
Also: there’s a submission tracker?
And they closed out Seer? I must have missed that. Darn. So much for hoping they’d re-open portal submissions…
IPST app - parses all your submission medals.
On badge requirements for higher levels, if someone was looking at Seer as a good one to chase, they’re crazy.
So…like real life?
Ironically, I play in a “black” neighborhood as I live in north Oakland. Half my neighbors are black. That said, almost all of the Ingress players I’ve seen are either white or Chinese American (which is like 20% of the Bay Area) for the last few years. Almost no black players, which is probably part of the metadata sourcing issues.
2 Likes
Seeing that we got another police massacre at the hand of a “slave descendant”, us African Americans are discourage from even going outside due to the escalating tension between the police and the “minorities”. Nothing can stop a paranoid rightwing follower to outright call the cops on us out of fear that we’ll kill them for their skin color; which also stems from the aristocrat’s fear of the poor mugging them because of what they got.
It’s also obvious that locations dominated by “minorities” will be skipped over due to the poor conditions of the surrounding environment; which is based off of the assumption that it was filled to the brim with “thugs and rapists”. So it make sense that Niantic refused to list those locations since those were literally dumping grounds for the poor; especially when the aristocrats shifted the blame on races and religion.
So basically, all of the proposed solutions are moot until racism and classism are completely eliminated at best (or at the very least, Segregation by any means been eliminated by federal court with all of the loopholes closed; especially the one in the 13th amendment where it didn’t list slavery as “cruel and unusual punishment”) ; till then, we’ll be continued to be viewed as poor, ignorant, vicious little monkeys by the majority (especially those who don’t know any better than they should).
6 Likes
No.
Desperate attempts by the privileged to pretend that racism and misogyny don’t exist, however…that’s standard operating procedure.
9 Likes
Niantic didn’t refuse to do anything. The locations were submitted by the players of a previous game, and those players were predominantly white. The employees making the accept/decline decision for each location probably didn’t have a clue what kind of neighborhood it was in.
The lack of locations in black neighborhoods is still fallout from systemic racism, and Niantic still needs to take responsibility for fixing it, but there was never a deliberate policy here.
3 Likes
It sounds like the actual problem is that Niantic didn’t/couldn’t hire (and properly train) enough people to handle the workload.
Perhaps with Google/Nintendo money, and some tweaks to the system, that will be corrected.
The content was 90% user submitted (and most of the rest was specific contracted businesses like Zip Car and Subway) so Niantic didn’t refuse to do anything unless you have some evidence that we don’t know about that you can cite.
Niantic was a Google company during most of Ingress’ existence. It was a wholly owned group inside Google. They had as much money as Google wanted to give. I do expect they’ll be working fast to improve their current money maker though.
2 Likes
User summited or not, my point still stands: places of neglect won’t be notice by the mainstream.
1 Like
I’m not sure what you’re saying. Could you be clearer?
I live in a black neighborhood. The only thing stopping my neighbors who are black from playing is (a) access to smartphones and (2) possibly the desire to play. That’s a result of class and race issues but not ones that lay at the feet of these games, Niantic, Google, or Nintendo.
1 Like
That’s the point though: Places of neglect.
