Teen Gets Hit By Car While Playing Pokemon Go, Mom Blames Game

The game's popularity has reached levels unimaginable, and almost everyone seems to be playing it. Unfortunately, humans are prone to be distracted by smartphones, and games and apps with virtual reality appear to make some people do foolish things.

Earlier this week, we wrote about a driver that was playing Pokemon Go while driving. Instead of a Pokemon, he caught a tree. With his car. Luckily, there were now pedestrians on his route to the tree, but this was just blind luck, which was even blinder than he was while using the game.

Coming back to the story at hand, Pokemon Go makes players watch the screens of their smartphones to see how many steps away are they from the next Pokemon. The whole point of the game is not having a direction indicator, which makes most wander the world in search of new Pokemons.

The only way for a player to know they are in the right direction is to see the number of steps until the target decreases. Naturally, this means carefully watching the screen of the smartphone, making peripheral vision less advanced than a horse wearing goggles to focus ahead. Unfortunately, looking at a smartphone screen means no focus at the world around you, which leads to dangerous situations.

A 15-year-old teen from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, discovered this the hard way, as she was struck by a car while crossing a busy four-lane road. According to the report from WTAE-TV Pittsburgh, the teen was returning from a museum, where she went to collect a Pokemon. She was discharged from the hospital the next day and is out of harm's way, but her mother is furious at the game's developers.

Tracy Nolan, the mother of the teen who got struck by a car after going to a destination found in the game, says the app is to blame for the accident, as her daughter would not have left the house if it were not for Pokemon.

At this point, we must note that playing Pokemon Go is entirely optional, and nobody makes people do it. The same goes for using Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and texting.

It is unclear if the teen had the app open when she got struck by a car, or what the driver was doing at the time, but this accident raises concerns about pedestrian distraction and the dangers of a game that conveys people to roam the world to get achievements.

What about good, old, in-app purchases, people? Oh, check your dictionary for common sense, we believe it helps.