If you’re absolutely sick of people climbing over you in public locations because you just happen to be sitting in front of a hard-to-find Snorlax or something in Pokémon Go, you might want to consider making a move to Russia. The massively successful augmented reality game has yet to officially launch in the country, although that hasn’t stopped numerous people from fiddling with their phones to get it to play, and government officials from decrying the game and its corrupting influence on the nation’s youth.
“It feels like the devil arrived through [Pokémon] and is trying to tear our morality apart from the inside,” said one Russian parliament member calling for restrictions on the game, as quoted in a long piece on the topic by the English-language Moscow Times. Other officials didn’t go quite so far in their hatred for the Pikacus and Bulbasauri now roaming the Russian capital, but they did express concerns that the game might have been partially engineered by intelligence agencies as a way to collect covert photos and video. (Not to mention the security risk if a Dugtrio or Geodude managed to infiltrate the grounds of the Kremlin itself.)
Meanwhile, businesses are going where the money is, offering promotions to Russian players who’ve managed to get their phones to play the game. The Moscow government has a potential alternative in the works, though. According to Gawker, an augmented reality game based on “catching” dead Russian celebrities—like Peter the Great, Alexander Pushkin, and Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin—is currently being planned, presumably so the Russian government can destroy Pokémon Go once and for all, by getting the fetid stink of “edutainment” all over it and driving all the would-be players away.