Are you a pokefan in search of a healthier, more active lifestyle
but tired of all the run-of-the-mill diets and gimmicky weight-loss programs?
So are we. So we combined the world of Pokemon with the world of fitness.
Pokemon Go, a cutting edge application that gets you up and moving,
While giving you the ability to capture your very own Pokemons in augmented reality.
Don't just get up and go. Get up and Pokemon Go.
(Sped up words)
[Theme]
Hello Internet welcome to game theory; where, if you were one of the thousands of people who still want a game theory hoodie even though
they sold out in the first 24 hours (that's me!)
well, then stay tuned to the end of today's episode because you can still get one...
...but you're gonna have to act this week and this week only (gotcha). In the meantime though, today
it's my goal to throw pokepuns at you (oh no), so don't get too comfy cringe police.
I'm pulling out all the poke stops. (pun counter: 1) Okay
so I've
legitimately probably had my fill of poke puns for now. Now it's been over a year since I last talked about Pokemon Go, and for
an app that probably most of you assume is long dead,
I think you'll be surprised by some of these stats I came up with. For one, it's raked in
1.2 billion dollars since its launch. That's almost 2 million dollars a day, and
1.4 times more than Sun and Moon sales combined. And here we're all left wondering
why everyone doesn't want to do full-on game releases anymore. That is why ladies and gentlemen -- it's been downloaded
752 million times of which 65 million still play at least once a month, and 5 million still play
every day, which has resulted in an astonishing eighty eight billion
captured Pokemon.
(Most of who were then promptly ground up be fed to the strongest of their species in a desperate attempt to evolve the darn thing)
Long story short, while it may not be as cool as finding da wae or discovering who touched your spaghet Pokemon
Go is still alive and well.
The same however can't be said about its players. You see, for the many titles
Pokemon Go has earned itself over the last year and a half, one of the ones you won't see it talking about is
deadliest video game of all time (O.o) That may sound extreme, but it's no joke. Whereas other video games kill a player here
or there from things like blood clots forming after extended play sessions with no movement, Pokemon
Go actively puts its players right out into the line of fire by making them do the unthinkable......
Go outside. It's a game that gets you walking around in public staring at your phone
which, as you can imagine, puts players into some dangerous scenarios. Muggings at night,
trespassing during the day, falling into ditches, driving distracted, and of course, walking into traffic without looking. In fact, there have been so many of
these types of stories that there are whole websites
dedicated to tracking the number of accidents the game has caused, but, to be fair, every dark
Altaria (pun counter: 2) has a silver lining my friends. Pokemon
Go is a game that gets its users to walk around outside, and that extra exercise comes with a bunch of health benefits,
which means regular players experience longer and healthier lives. So the question that I want to solve today?
Has Pokemon Go, the unofficial deadliest game in all of history,
actually killed more people, or saved more people. Now as I mentioned a second ago
there are actual websites whose sole function is to monitor deaths and injuries related to Pokemon Go, all with sources provided no less.
Which, man, if only all the research I did for this show is that easy also let me just say it right off the noibat (pun counter: 3)
I'm using the US data here because it'll be simpler for calculations that we have coming up. So, right away,
we know that Pokemon Go has been associated with no less than eight deaths here in the US.
But wait -- on the same site we find that in St. Louis,
Pokemon Go players were responsible for saving two people caught in a warehouse fire, so
already we see the eternal struggle of life and death that is Pokemon Go. That leaves our net death counter at six. From here
though it starts to get a bit tricky. Despite
the game's repeated warnings and its lack of
functionality when traveling above certain speeds, far and away the number one cause of injury from Pokemon
Go is distracted driving. "Look Ma, I'm gonna catch me a Lapras!" (blows up)
Now obviously, not all accident reports are gonna cite the game as the cause of the accident, or
even know that the app was the thing that caused the distraction the first place.
So we're gonna have to do some smaller scale research to figure out the game's impact on traffic accidents, and then scale that data up
to get an estimate of the bigger picture. Luckily we're not starting the process blind. A study done by researchers at Purdue University
titled "Death by Pokemon Go: the economic and human cost of using apps while driving". Look at the increase in traffic
accidents in the hundred and forty eight days after the app first launched for one county in Indiana. And despite the paper calling them
"pokemons" the entire time, (and I do mean the
entire time) the research they did here actually looks pretty darn good.
They compared accidents around pokestops to accidents around gyms, under the observation
that people can drive by and swipe a pokestop to refill what they call the "players ammunition"
They're just pokeballs guys,
It's not like they're being loaded into machine guns or anything though, gotta say, that would be pretty awesome. Whereas
gyms, you can't really engage with while driving. You gotta stand on the street
and you know pretend like there's actual gameplay involved. They also do things like check to see how traffic
accidents significantly decrease the further away from the pokestop you get during this period. Now
obviously there are a ton of
variables to account for here. One of the biggest is the fact that pokestops are in busy locations to begin with, which means that
they're just gonna be prone to heightened levels of accidents from the get-go.
And it doesn't really help that this paper is written by people who so
clearly want to prove that the app is deadly.
I mean, look at the title of this quote on quote "academic papers". Like they're titling an episode of Game Theory or something (so true).
But it's the cleanest data that I could find online, so I'm going to use this as our worst case
scenario for deaths from Pokemon Go. Their study found that, in a county that usually gets about six
thousand traffic accidents per year, there were an additional one hundred and thirty-four accidents resulting from Pokemon Go.
Scaling that up to the entire US, which has about six million three hundred thousand accidents per year, we get an additional
140,000 accidents in 2016 caused by the game, a number that we then have to slice in two, since it launched midway through the year.
So that's seventy thousand extra crashes due to Pokemon Go in the US in
2016. Now for
2017 we have to remember that this study only
tracked the first five months of the game. By the end of 2016 people had stopped playing it by the
Millions; going from 28 million daily users in July to just five million daily users in December, where it's remained pretty
consistent to this day.
So it's safe to assume that accidents caused by Go went down by a similar percentage. Thus, let's say that of those
140 thousand additional accidents in a year, only about 20% of them existed in 2017, or, another twenty-eight thousand.
In total, that's around
100,000 additional accidents caused by Pokemon Go during the year and a half
that it's been out. Fatality by car accident has a rate of 0.176 percent.
That means a hundred thousand accidents times a fatality rate of point zero zero one seven six equals a rough estimate of a hundred
and seventy six driving deaths related to distracted Pokemon Goers. Add in the six from earlier,
and we have a hundred and eighty two US deaths in total, all of this from a mobile app we catch cute creatures and give
'em candy (candy made from the flesh of their peers)
but still, the numbers don't lie. You don't need to be a gumshoes to figure out that that number is too damn high.
So, can Pokemon go
make up for the hundred and eighty two fatalities that it's helped caused? It actually
might. According to the US Department of Health and the National Institute of Diabetes and kidney disease, inactivity kills
5.3 million people worldwide every year. From diabetes, heart disease, depression, and certain cancers.
But unlike mostly every other video game other than Just Dance
and, I don't know, the two weeks one two switch was having us bang our chests like horny gorillas, Pokemon Go
encourages players to get up and move. According to Microsoft Research in the one month after launch between July and August of 2016,
US players of Pokemon Go walked an additional one hundred and forty four billion
steps on account of this one game. Considering it takes about five hundred million steps to walk to the moon,
that's enough to walk to the moon and back a hundred and forty four times! In the most extreme cases, players were walking four
thousand more steps every single day while they played. On average though, the increase was a much more modest
1473 extra steps. So, that begs the question, how do we turn extra steps into human lives saved?
Let me explain. What we know is a calorie is
simply a measurement of energy. When calories aren't used they're stored in our body as glycogen, or fat to use later.
If you don't burn off the excess, your body hangs onto it.
Consuming more food leads to more calories that don't get burned and that's basically how fat is gained; the more you have, the higher your
chances for health problems and increased odds of death. On average, twenty
steps equals one calorie, meaning that if you walk 10,000 steps in a day, you're gonna be burning about
500 calories. Now, according to a study conducted by Dwyer Pezic sun and company, a person who walks
10,000 steps every single day can increase their average lifespan by about 41 days.
Considering that the average lifespan is 79 years, that's just a lot of walking for an extra month of life,
but WHATEVER it gives us the conversion of steps to human life that we need. All we need to do is calculate the total number
of steps walked by Pokemon Go players for the past year and a half, which in turn will enable us to calculate the number of
years that it's added to players lives.
And thus, the overall total number of lives saved.
That first month had about one hundred and forty four billion steps, right?
But as I stated earlier, Pokemon Go lost about eighty percent of its daily active users since then, dropping from
28 million to 5 million, meaning that the number of steps has decreased drastically as well.
so, based on this graph, we can estimate that there were about 10 million
active daily users in August and September of 2016, and ever since the number is hovered around 5 million users, give or take.
Knowing that on average daily user of Pokemon Go walks an additional one thousand four hundred and seventy three steps per day,
We can calculate that in August and September,
61 days, the 10 million users walked
898,530,000,000 extra steps. And in the 15 months after that with only 5 million daily active users, that's
457 days x 5 million users x
1473 steps or 3 trillion
365 billion
805 million steps (see what I did there?). In total we're talking about 4,408,335,000,000
additional steps taken since the launch of the game, and yes, that number is admittedly high
But we're trying to give both sides the benefit of the doubt here, and as you're about to see it doesn't really matter.
We've almost reached our final answer. 79 years of
10,000 steps a day gets you
41 extra days of life, right? Well that would mean that 79 years times 365 days times 10,000 steps
288 million three hundred fifty thousand steps,
equals 41 days of life, or about seven million steps for one extra day spent on this planet. Now
We just found that Pokemon go players walked four trillion extra steps
So dividing by that seven million steps
it takes to earn ourselves an extra day of existence, we get six hundred twenty nine thousand seven hundred and sixty two
extra days of human life, just from playing Pokemon Go.
But that leads us to the question that we've been asking since the beginning, how many actual human lives does that translate to?
Ladies and gentlemen
here's our grand total: six hundred twenty-nine thousand seven hundred sixty-two days divided by
365 gives us one thousand seven hundred twenty five years of life. Divide that number by the 79 year
average lifespan that a human gets, and we derive, drum roll, please...
Drum roll, I said, please
Please give me something to build up the height
Okay, twenty...
22. 22 human lives saved it's actually a hundred and sixty lives short of that hundred and eighty two that
We calculated that the game had killed.....so yeah like those Purdue researchers concluded the peril of Pokemon Go is...
definitely real. Now in all seriousness,
obviously this was all for fun. Pokemon Go has clearly done a lot of good for its users.
Not only on the health side,
but it's also encouraged community. The week that Pokemon go first came out was like the most positive uplifting week of communal gaming
I've been a part of in years, and if I'm honestly pointing the finger of blame at anything here,
it's actually just using cell phones while driving in general, with
25% of all driving related accidents being tied to using phones while on the road.
Fun fact, by the way, fatal car crashes were actually on the decline,
reaching their lowest point in five decades in 2011. But by 2015, 16, and 17, the number has been back up on the rise, with many
researchers attributing it to the glut of new apps on phones. But heck, who knows driverless cars are coming
which means a whole new way to grab another hundred freakin rattatus from the driver's seat. But hey?
That's just a theory.
A GAME THEORY!
Thanks for -
ordering hoodies actually.
Seriously a quick note here, many of you reached out to me personally and the merch
company, disappointed that you guys weren't able to grab a game theory hoodie before they all sold out, and I totally
understand those things were gone in less than 24 hours. None of us -- none of us could believe it
We were so thrilled to see you guys so excited about them
So we went back and figured out a solution. If you still want a hoodie, and honestly
I don't blame you not only does it look cool, but I wear this thing
Non-stop, it is so soft. We're actually making them available for order again. (YAY!)
The link is in the top line of the description or via the endcard link here in a second. The only
thing I gotta warn you about though is that it's gonna take a little bit of time.
It's gonna take around three months to get here, and I know, I know it's a long time
I hate how long it has to be, but that's because we're working with high quality
manufacturers. These things aren't just like a bunch of t-shirts that you can just print off overnight. Everything is highly customized. It's all embroidered,
it's built to last; that's also why everything we do has a limited run, it takes a long time
for us to make these. So if you want a guaranteed hoodie,
we're making just as many as you guys pre-order and this absolutely will be your last chance to get them, so if you were
disappointed to miss out in those first 24 hours, well then pre-order yours now. After this week
we are closing off the list for good. Also while we're talking about merch,
it is worth mentioning that we do have a few t-shirts and socks left.
And I do mean a very limited amount, as well as those mysterious gold coins.
I keep hyping up. So if you want a crack at getting one of those tokens, now might actually be one of the best odds
you have of finding one of those left in your package. Plus the shirts are just hella cool. They're soft and thin;
they have a really cool design that I think makes you look thin, and
stylish (OOH STYLE)
So this is pretty much your last warning if you don't preorder a hoodie or buy a t-shirt or socks in the next week,
they're all pretty much gone for good,
including those mysterious gold coins, which, again are going to be valuable sometime later
this year. You want to find one of those things and this is your last chance to get one so, place your orders now,
link is on-screen, link is in the top of the description. Not only will you look good, you'll feel good,
it's a new year, get yourself some new gear.
So now, if you'll excuse me, tired of talking about people dying for a week,
soo....maybe we take a few weeks off of that. See you next week.