A meditation on TFW you go searching for a Rattata and find a rat

One pitfall of trying to catch ’em all in the streets of Brooklyn: instead of finding a Rattata, you might end up stumbling upon a real, live rat.
Witnessing that exact scene got Mark Hurst thinking about the principles of game design. The creator of iOS game Brooklyn 1776 and winner of our Brooklyn Innovation Award for Best Indie Video Game of the Year shared his thoughts in a new podcast from his Chelsea-based consultancy, Creative Good.
Listen
The pitfall of games like Pokémon Go, Hurst says, is that they encourage players to ignore what’s happening in the real world around them. While that can be a good thing — we all need an escape from time to time — it also creates hazards (namely, being accosted by giant city rats).
“I think that there’s a great opportunity for people who are creating digital experiences to think about how to make them engaging and helpful to the user at the same time,” Hurst said on his podcast.