An event or moment · 2016 · Games
The stadium
A game event causes a physical stampede at a real stadium because players arrived to capture it in person.
A parasocial bond with software producing a crowd in a physical space, and the first time the parasocial frame had to explain a mass-casualty event rather than a feeling. Everyone in that stadium was a genuine participant, which is the difficulty.
Manipulation. One-sided attachment engineered for somebody else's benefit. Paid intimacy, parasocial persuasion, sasaeng, grief extraction, the streak. The lane that pays the bills and the lane that causes the most harm, frequently at the same time.
Where it sits
2010 2010+ · 2016 2026
Provenance · 3 source record(s)
- retrievableThe real 2016 event, and it was a park rather than a stadium: hundreds of players ran through Central Park late on Thursday in pursuit of a rare Vaporeon, with video showing people yelling and running through traffic near 60th Street at about 11pm and one driver getting out of his running car. No injuries are reported here. Corrects the entry's location and its implied casualty toll.Price, R. D. (2016, July 18). Rare Pokemon Sparks Stampede in Central Park. NBC 4 New York. ↗
- retrievableThe actual 2016 harm, which was a scatter of individual incidents rather than a mass-casualty event: a skateboard crash, players entering a Darwin police station because it was a PokeStop, an armed robbery police in Missouri said the game may have prompted, and players who were in fact meeting face to face. This is what the record supports: real individual harm and a lot of unexpected sociability, not a stampede.Associated Press (2016, July 10). Getting hurt, mugged and even finding a dead body with Pokemon Go. CBC News. ↗
- retrievableThe stadium-scale crowd event, a year later than the entry's date and in a park rather than a stadium: the inaugural Pokemon GO Fest in Chicago's Grant Park, where server and authentication failures produced repeated surges at the main stage, a chant of 'Fix the servers', booing of the onstage host and of Niantic's CEO, and players leaving en masse. A crowd physically organised by a game mechanic, and a refusal to leave. Not a crush.Farokhmanesh, M. (2017, July 25). I went to Pokemon Go Fest, and it was a disaster. The Verge. ↗
Connected · 2 out, 2 in
The crowd injurycites · 2005 · An event or momentThe athlete and the citycites · 1920 · A mechanism or tacticThe residencyof the same time as · 2023 · An event or momentThe crowd injurycites · 2005 · An event or moment
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