There are some places you don’t fuck around with, one of which would be the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.. Pick any other museum to behave like a total douche, litter garbage or use as a “public place” to dump your girlfriend so she won’t cause a scene – but the Holocaust Museum? No. That shit ain’t funny.
But according to The Washington Post, that’s what people have been doing…sort of. You see, the Pokemon GO map has the museum marked as having three PokeStops inside, something that the museum’s communications director, Andrew Hollinger, does not find “appropriate”:
“Playing the game is not appropriate in the museum, which is a memorial to the victims of Nazism,” Andrew Hollinger, the museum’s communications director, told The Post in an interview. “We are trying to find out if we can get the museum excluded from the game.”
While Pokemon GO is fairly innocent on its own (although I’ll admit, I’m not quite sure the thought of catching Weedles and Caterpies would be at the top of my mind when reading a plaque about Auschwitz), a now-deleted image from someone supposedly playing the game while inside the museum shows a Koffing floating around. For the uninitiated, Koffing is a poison Pokemon who exudes gas – although the image could be a hoax, however Hollinger says that he’s “aware of and concerned” about the possibility that it was programmed to appear there intentionally.
Niantic did not immediately respond to inquiries about the alleged Koffing sighting or if there was anyway to honor the Holocaust Museum’s request to stop Pokemon from popping up inside its building.
Hollinger stressed that the museum is generally pro-technology and encourages visitors to use social media to share how their experiences with the exhibits moved them. “But this game falls very much outside that,” he said. Hollinger added that it seemed disrespectful, especially in more solemn parts of the complex like the Hall of Remembrance.(via)
As of today the Holocaust Museum still has PokeStops marked at its location, and while it’s fair to say that most patrons mean no disrespect playing Pokemon GO inside its halls, only time will tell if the museum is successful in being removed from the map.
[Via The Washington Post]