Update: Niantic has responded to this story, providing comments about the situation:
"Campfire was built to create a better and more fun way for players to organize real-world play like Raids in Pokemon Go. Since launching globally, we’ve received positive response from our community, and we look forward to continuing to improve Campfire over time.
"We take the safety of our players very seriously, and behavior that violates our player guidelines is not allowed on Campfire. Players can also report any behavior that violates our Player Guidelines to Niantic so that we may investigate and take any appropriate action, and they can block any message requests from users who are not their friends by going to Settings > Message Requests > and toggling the switch to off. For complete information on our approach to safety on Campfire, please see our blog post and Safety Center on our website.
"To clarify access to Campfire: Those under the age of digital consent cannot use Campfire. Furthermore, child accounts for our games do not have access to Campfire."
Pokemon Go developer Niantic has been rolling out the Campfire app for months, but the messaging and coordination service has already been inundated with inappropriate messages and misuse of its functionality.
Campfire is meant to enhance Pokemon Go, especially for rural players or those who don’t have a community to play with. The idea is that you let off a flare in Campfire when you want to challenge a Gym, and other players can see it on the map and head over to you in order to tackle it together.
When the app was first released, there were multiple reports of people using it to set up robberies of unsuspecting Pokemon players. However, this was never confirmed and Niantic did not respond to the allegations. The current claims of sexual harassment, however, are corroborated with screenshots of Campfire’s messaging app.
Model Sonya Walker, who goes by u/sppwalker on Reddit, posted a screenshot of a message she received on the app to the r/PokemonGo and r/Campfire_Niantic subreddits, showing a player under the name of ‘HardForYou’ saying, “Your tits look nice”. Sppwalker says this is the first message she received on the platform.
The name of the account clearly shows that this is a burner, an account created purely to harass this person, likely with no personal information attached. If this person has a genuine Pokemon Go account, they will not have linked it to this Campfire account so that they can avoid the repercussions of it being traced back to them.
This is clearly unacceptable. Someone has seen another player playing Pokemon Go – likely another player in the same raid if they know about Campfire – and decided to create a whole new account in order to harass them. There’s an easy fix for this: Niantic could ensure that you can only create one Campfire account per device. This means that, even if someone is absolutely intent on harassing another player, they can only do it once before they are banned completely. While some people will happily make new accounts to avoid repercussions of their harassment, would they shell out for a new iPhone just to do it? It seems unlikely.
This wasn’t an isolated incident. While people commenting on Walker’s Reddit post didn’t provide proof or screenshots, many others admitted they’d been harassed on the platform as well. “I got added to a Pokémon go swingers group on campfire haha [sic],” writes u/Squeeesh_. “I didn’t know the person.”
Considering the number of children who use Pokemon Go, Niantic needs to act quickly and decisively to stop this behaviour. [Update: this is where Niantic was keen to emphasise that children under the age of digital consent cannot use Campfire. Provided they do not lie about their age, this is clearly a good safety measure to have in place.] Walker says she reported the account, but at present we don’t know what has happened to the harasser. However, recent allegations of a sexist, racist, "boys club" work culture at Niantic and the fact that it recently laid off 230 employees due to poor management imply that swift justice may not be high on its agenda.
There is always a risk when incorporating messaging capabilities into games – slur-laden voice chats in Call of Duty lobbies or horrible abuse via the Xbox chat after a FIFA loss are practically thought of as a rite of passage by many gamers – but these risks are increased tenfold when there’s a real-life component to the game. Harassment that starts on the app can be continued in-person, insults can become more personal, and real harm could be affected on someone physically as well as emotionally.
If you’re being harassed on the internet, you can block, report, and move on. It doesn’t always help, but you can step away from the screen to try to recover or at least regain your composure. If someone is harassing you on Campfire, and might be at a raid you’re currently battling, it’s impossible to step away. Heading home might lead to you being followed, thereby giving your harasser your address. Walking away from your raid group might leave you feeling unsafe and alone. These problems, as with most harassment problems in the industry, are further multiplied when women are on the receiving end, as they most often are.
Again, we come back to Pokemon Go’s core players, who are children. Nobody deserves to be harassed, but Campfire is already showing that the game is becoming dangerous for kids to play. Until Niantic does something about it, take your own safety precautions. Don’t go to flares alone, stay alert of your surroundings, and be aware that not everyone you’re raiding with will have the best intentions. It sucks that we have to say this about Pokemon Go, but be careful out there.