Pokémon Go stories may be fun or heartwarming or downright tragic

You will probably have seen by now suspicious-looking groups of young people gathered at apparently random spots around town. But they are probably playing the incredibly popular new Pokémon Go app, a cultural phenomenon I will admit that just do not understand at all. The internet is bursting at the seams with new stories about it, and it seems like some of them are is good, and some of them not so much:

• Police are warning people not to search for Pokémons while actively driving, on the grounds that it could be dangerous. One man in Alabama has already driven his car into a tree whilst looking for Pokémons, while another had the bad luck to crash his car into a police car in Quebec while distractedly playing the game.
• Several city metro systems (including Los Angeles, which has it own dedicated Pokémon Go Twitter account and provides online hints as to where Pokémon characters might be found) are actively encouraging the game in order to bring in more transit riders.
• For a price, you can hire the services of a dedicated Pokémon-hunting chauffeur, who will drive you around and even give you hints about where those hard-to-find critters might be located.
• Some enterprising local businesses, including restaurants and small mom-and-pop stores, are cashing in on the hysteria by promoting themselves as hotspots for the game.
• Some claim that the game is encouraging couch potatoes to walk more, use more public transit, and generally engage more with their neighbourhoods and the world around them.
• An animal shelter in Indiana is seeking avid Pokémon Go players to help walk adoptable dogs while they play the game on their smartphones, which sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.
• Criminals are getting in on the act too. In one scheme in O'Fallon, Missouri, a group of guys set up a false lure for Pokémon Go players in order to bring in unsuspecting Pokémon Go players, whom they then rob.
• Two Florida teenagers playing Pokémon Go late at night in their car were shot at by a householder who mistook them for burglars.
• Two men fell off a cliff near San Diego when they climbed over a fence in search of a Pokémon (they were probably drunk at the time.
• A girl playing Pokémon Go in Riverton, Wyoming, discovered a dead body in a local river while playing the game.
• Three Pokémon Go' players in northeastern Pennsylvania got themselves locked inside a cemetery while playing the game.
• The mother of another 15-year-old girl in Pennsylvania has blamed Pokémon Go when the girl was hit by a car after tracking down a Pokémon near a busy highway.
• A hacking group known as PoodleCorp has claimed responsibility for allegedly taking down the Pokémon Go servers using a distributed denial of service attack, and promises larger scale actions in the future.
• If you want to fully understand the depths of hysteria we are talking about here, be aware that one man in New Zealand has even quit his job in order to play the game full-time.

I'm sure there are many more stories out there, and I'm almost equally sure that there will be many more, and that some will probably turnout to be tragic.