Cemeteries top the ‘weird places I found Pokémon’ charts

I love Pokémon Go. You love Pokémon Go. But apparently, in your efforts to “catch ’em all,” you do find yourself playing in some interesting places.

We scoured a new survey conducted by Pollfish, which includes responses from 2,000 U.S. Pokémon Go users about the Pikachu-powered phenom, and the results make for some interesting reading.

In fact, the respondents’ answers indicate that throwing Pokéballs in strange places might not be a fad after all and that Niantic and Nintendo may have a long-standing hit on their hands.

Eighty-two percent of Pokémon trainers said that they are determined to capture every last Pokémon. From Pikachu (your favorite virtual beasty) to Squirtle, Charizard, and Mewtwo, you want the lot. No question. In fact, the top two feature requests in the study make it clear that catching ’em all isn’t going to be enough for you — you want more free rewards, and, more than anything else, you demand new Pokémon.

Multiplayer functions and better battery usage are next on the list, which also includes requests for better data usage, better servers, and trading.

Most of you are getting out more, too. The survey shows that 40 percent of you have walked between 11 and 30+ miles so far. That’s right — some of you have already completed marathon distances with your head in your phone. No wonder people are falling off cliffs.

And almost 70 percent of you see yourself playing Pokémon Go after a month. That is outstanding in a world where mobile apps struggle to get past the seven-minute mark before being uninstalled and where we’re seeing a quarter-on-quarter reduction in app session time of 35 percent. The attitude of your Poké-peers doesn’t bother you either — 65 percent of you said that you’d carry on playing even when your friends have had enough.

In addition to these staggering usage and retention stats, one question in the survey stood out.

“Have you ended up in a weird place while searching for Pokémon?”

Yes. Yes, you have. In fact, half of you have admitted to wandering aimlessly into an odd spot, and we suspect the other half of you were just too embarrassed to ‘fess up.

Top of the “strange places” chart? Cemeteries. If you’re a Pokémon trainer, you’ll eventually end up walking among the dead while trying to capture the not-actually-living.

Other odd places on the list include corn fields; abandoned houses; and graffiti-laden, dark, spooky alleys. If this is by design, it seems that Niantic wants you to experience every horror movie cliché possible as you play the game.

Joking aside, Pokémon Go is a phenomenal success, which many commentators have attributed to a perfect storm of “surprise and delight” combined with a brand that has global caché and an install base of over 279 million units sold for its video game properties alone. But if there is one statistic in this survey that points to how clear it is that Pokémon will continue to be a huge success, it is this one.

Almost 40 percent of you were not fans of Pokémon before you installed the app. Given the high usage, incredible retention, clear indication to ignore peers, and fun you’re all having walking around in other people’s backyards, that stat alone spells success for the makers of the game.

Still, be careful out there, Pokémasters — we don’t want you ending up in the cemetery permanently because you weren’t looking where you were going.

If you want to personally dig six-feet deep into the survey responses, which include a raft of fun Pokémon Go stories (“my sister walked into three poles in a row — immediate succession — trying to catch a Squirtle”), you can do so over at the Pollfish website.