Associated Incidents
There are typically fewer PokeStops in non-white areas, if there are any at all.
While playing the popular augmented-reality game Pokemon Go in Long Beach, a city that is nearly 50 per cent white, Aura Bogado made an unsettling discovery - there were far more PokeStops and Gyms than in her predominantly minority neighbourhood in Los Angeles.
So Bogado created the Twitter hashtag #mypokehood in July to crowdsource the locations of PokeStops.
The results that poured in from across the county, and research from The Urban Institute think tank, bore out her experience.
Urban Institute researchers found an average of 55 PokeStops in majority white neighbourhoods and 19 in majority black neighbourhoods.
The Belleville News-Democrat found that pattern repeated itself in African-American sections of Detroit, Miami and Chicago.
Similarly, New York boroughs Brooklyn and Queens, both of which have high numbers of Hispanic and black residents, had significantly fewer PokeStops than in Manhattan and white and Asian neighbourhoods.
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"It turns out Niantic, which makes Pokemon Go, relied on a map from a previous augmented reality game called Ingress, which was crowd-sourced from its mostly male, tech-savvy players," she wrote.
"The result is a high concentration of PokeStops in commercial and downtown areas of some cities, while there are typically fewer PokeStops in non-white or residential areas, if there are any at all."
The Urban Institute says the racial divides in the game amount to redlining - a term used when a community is cut off from essential services based on its racial or ethnic makeup.
The dearth of PokeStops and Gyms make it tougher for residents of these overlooked communities to participate in the game. They also lose the benefits to gamers that come with a multitude of virtual stops that dispense critical items for free such as Poke Balls, used to catch Pokemon, or egg incubators to grow new monsters.
'THIS IS NOT A NEW STORY'
This isn't the first time that structural inequities in the physical world have played out online.
Amazon's same-day delivery service Prime initially overlooked predominantly black and poor areas. Google's high-speed Internet service Fibre got dinged for doing the same.
"This is not a new story in terms of a product having some type of - whether intended or unintended - discriminatory effect," says Safiya Umoja Noble, professor of information studies and African-American studies at UCLA.
Reinforcing these inequities on the digital plain has implications that go far beyond Pokemon Go, says Jeffrey Vagle, executive director of the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
"Yes, Pokemon Go is just another silly smartphone game. But through its popularity and usage patterns, we can see the very real boundaries of poverty and racism that continue to be reinforced when we should be using our technologies to dismantle them," he wrote in a blog post.
The makers of Pokemon Go - which was downloaded more times during its first week than any other app in App Store history - didn't deliberately set out to disadvantage certain communities.
Niantic CEO John Hanke told Rolling Stone that Pokemon Go uses the same locations for PokeStops as in its previous augmented-reality game, Ingress. In Ingress, players would submit locations based on where they wanted to put "portals", or battle spots.
The problem: The demographics of Ingress players - mostly white, young and English-speaking, according to informal surveys of the community in 2013 and 2014 - shaped how the game unfurled in the real world.
Niantic spokesperson Chase Colasonno did not comment on the disparity of PokeStops and Gyms in predominantly black or white areas, but said in an email that the game is not yet processing user requests for additional PokeStops.
He said Niantic would "readdress this topic after the game is fully launched worldwide".