it was also penetration testing. that's the perfect dataset to know which areas are easily accessible and which aren't. ingress was the previous game the developers worked on, which was like capture the flag but with geolocated phones. pokemon go was more sophisticated because it's basically like capture the flag but with a value hierarchy determined by rarity of the pokey-men. i had a hunch glowniggers were ultimately behind these games back then when i saw how quickly they caught on in certain circles.
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