Crowdsourcing is Only as Representative as the Crowd Doing the Sourcing
August 11, 2016 12:22 PM   Subscribe

 
(I don't deny the experience of people of color playing the game, this is solely a complaint about the maps in the article.)

I can't really discern any patterns by moving the maps back and forth. I wish they had done the visualization as an overlay, ideally with some effort to control for Ingress portals per capita. As it is, either the disparity is too subtle or I'm too dumb to see it, at least with that visualization.
posted by jedicus at 12:42 PM on August 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm glad this has been pinged as a potential issue, but I really have trouble seeing the correlation that the article talks about in the provided visualizations. To me, it looks like city centers (either majority white or majority-minority) tend to be portal heavy, with lower density as you back out.

I would have been interested to see a city like Boston, where that one weird majority-minority neighbourhood (Roxbury) was underserved by Amazon Prime Now.

I always assumed that this wouldn't be a problem with Ingress because of the portal suggestion feature. It was never perfect, obviously, but it was probably an oversight on Niantic's part to launch Pokemon Go without a robust PokeStop suggestion infrastructure in place.

It actually makes me wonder if a lot of the problems with Pokemon Go were Niantic assuming that the Go player-base would be more similar to the the Ingress player base than it turns out to have been.
posted by sparklemotion at 12:44 PM on August 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


This article made me think of another: The Problem With 'Areas of Interest' on Google Maps
posted by gyusan at 12:55 PM on August 11, 2016 [3 favorites]


As it is, either the disparity is too subtle or I'm too dumb to see it, at least with that visualization.

I feel like this is something that could be fixed with quantitative analysis based on census data. You can calculate a Portals Per Square Mile for each census block group, and label/sort them according to demographics.

You'd need to correct for population density for sure, and then maybe also incomes and the age of the neighborhood (not the people -- older neighborhoods might have more Places of Interest).

And then do some google street viewing of the outliers.

Obviously it's fuzzy, but you could get a reasonable idea of whether Niantic is actually more blind to Places of Interest in majority-minority areas. If I were of a mind to learn more about statistics (and R, specifically) this would be a perfect project. But by the time I get annoyed about not understanding P-values again, I'm sure someone will have done it.
posted by sparklemotion at 12:57 PM on August 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


It would also be interesting to overlay these maps with cellular coverage data. When I first got a smartphone, one of the first things I noticed was that minority neighborhoods always had huge 3G/4G dead zones. You can't play smartphone games in neighborhoods without data access, which speaks to yet another level of structural racism.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:14 PM on August 11, 2016 [8 favorites]


This article is great. I've been sharing it regularly as an example of how even (presumably) well meaning people can inadvertently create racist systems. Also the persistent effects of economic deprivation, about how racial disparities are self-perpetuating. I feel certain Niantic had no intention of creating an unfair system, and yet here we are. The group does deserve some criticism for not noticing and correcting the problem before the game was released though.

(Note this article is a month old, it came out just a few days after Pokemon Go was released. Christopher Huffaker did a remarkable job of research in a short time.)
posted by Nelson at 1:15 PM on August 11, 2016 [7 favorites]


I feel like this is something that could be fixed with quantitative analysis based on census data

Well... some countries may not have reliable census data for some time now. Like Australia.
posted by greenhornet at 1:24 PM on August 11, 2016


Maybe this article will be more useful? [link] (Le Monde, Pokémon GO, the mutliple causes of geographic inequality) It's in french, but the maps are pretty clear, showing banlieues that are rich in culture have more Pokéstops, but also that this isn't the only factor that can be considered. I'm about to go to bed, but I'll translate tomorrow if anyone wants it.
posted by Braeburn at 2:11 PM on August 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


Cross-posting from the "When Black Lives Stop Mattering" thread:

Let’s add Pokémon GO to the extremely long list of things white people can do without fear of being killed.
I spent less than 20 minutes outside. Five of those minutes were spent enjoying the game. One of those minutes I spent trying to look as pleasant and nonthreatening as possible as I walked past a somewhat visibly disturbed white woman on her way to the bus stop. I spent the other 14 minutes being distracted from the game by thoughts of the countless Black Men who have had the police called on them because they looked “suspicious” or wondering what a second amendment exercising individual might do if I walked past their window a 3rd or 4th time in search of a Jigglypuff.

When my brain started combining the complexity of being Black in America with the real world proposal of wandering and exploration that is designed into the gamplay of Pokémon Go, there was only one conclusion. I might die if I keep playing.

The breakdown is simple:
  • There is a statistically disproportionate chance that someone could call the police to investigate me for walking around in circles in the complex.
  • There is a statistically disproportionate chance that I would be approached by law enforcement with fear or aggression, even when no laws have been broken.
  • There is a statistically disproportionate chance that I will be shot while reaching for my identification that I always keep in my back right pocket.
  • There is a statistically disproportionate chance that more shots will be fired and I will be dead before any medical assistance is available.
The premise of Pokémon Go asks me to put my life in danger if I choose to play it as it is intended and with enthusiasm.
posted by filthy light thief at 3:07 PM on August 11, 2016 [7 favorites]


There's also the experience that I had both times I played Pokemon Go in predominantly black neighborhoods (once in Los Angeles and once in Chicago), where the friendlier locals advised me that the area that I was in was probably not the best place to be walking around staring down at my $500 phone.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 3:45 PM on August 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


Reading the comment at the bottom, it sounds like they originally used maps that only showed high-level ingress portals. When they corrected this, they didn't change much on the text, and the images got a lot less clear. The easiest way I can think to correct them, instead of this sliding thing, would be to normalize the number of portals to the population density. When I look at them, the most portals appear to also be the most populated, and disparities would be easier to see if you corrected for this. I mean, I'm not surprised this is true, but it would be a more powerful argument if I could see the effect, you know?

Also: Is this a US phenomenon? Or does it extend to the rest of the world as well? I know anecdotally, in Vancouver it is a lot harder to find Pokestops in Richmond then some other areas.

Also: If you wanted to export the map, it doesn't seem like finding perfectly shaped coloured dots on a white background should be that hard...
posted by Canageek at 3:55 PM on August 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


I feel like Omari Akil's article was interesting when it came out, but I think it's a bit of a distraction in this thread (I know it was cited in TFA, but I am not sure it was appropriate for inclusion there either).

The distribution of PokeStops is something that Niantic has control over. It's reasonable for us to expect them to own and mitigate any racially discriminatory effects of the way that they chose to populate their database, however unintended those effects might be. It's a hard task though, so I wouldn't expect perfection, but if six months from now they aren't making progress on that front (or at least acknowledging the issue) I'll be disappointed. This is part of why I want to see measurable data.

The fact that racially discriminatory law enforcement keeps some PoC from being able to comfortably enjoy the game is different though, because there's nothing that Niantic can do about racist law enforcement. Fixing unwarranted gaps in Stop coverage in majority minority areas might help (poke-loitering near your own home is probably less likely to draw trouble than going into a neighborhood where you might visibly "not belong"). But cops are overwhelmingly discriminatory to PoC even in PoC-majority areas.

That being said, I think that the time since Akil's hot take has put the lie to his statement that P:Go asks anyone to put their lives in danger in order to play "as it is intended and with enthusiasm." Mainly because there are lots of ways to play the game. People have meetups where they go sit in parks. Libraries and other public spaces have Stops, if not gyms. There are ways to play P:Go while staying relatively stationary (it will cost you money for lures and incense, but the Pokemon will pretty much come to you). The changes to the tracking features have all but eliminated the necessity to look like you are walking around aimlessly in order to be most effective at "hunting."

There are some tweaks that Niantic could make -- one-on-one battles could make the game fun to play in your friend-circles without the collecting aspect being so important, for example. But it seems like the only thing in Niantic's power to make Akil comfortable playing would be to pull all the connections to the real world. And there are already lots of Pokemon games like that.

So yeah, Niantic should work to ensure that Pokestops are probably created at Places of Interest even in minority areas. But it's on law enforcement to stop discriminating against PoC. And because of P:Go, hopefully things like this will happen more often.
posted by sparklemotion at 3:58 PM on August 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


Yeah, it's going to be really difficult to pick out differences between the white and black parts of the map when it's overwhelmed by the variation in population density. (Obligatory XKCD) Sliding back and forth on the maps, what jumped out at me were the commercial districts, which had a high number of stops but a low number of residents.
posted by RobotHero at 6:54 PM on August 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


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