Daniel Graus late last month started noticing that some users editing OpenStreetMap, an open geographical database, were creating beaches in the strangest of places.
None could be considered a beach, even by the most generous of interpretations.
Graus, 37, quickly figured out why users were adding fake beaches around the world to OpenStreetMap, which is often described as “Wikipedia for maps” and used by businesses, companies and governments around the world. Niantic, the developer of Pokémon Go, updated the augmented reality game late last month, creating new biomes or habitats where certain pokémon would exclusively appear.
OpenStreetMap users were making fake beaches to increase their chances of catching a rare pokémon — the garden eel Wiglett. In the process, they were changing the public open-source mapping program used by millions of people around the world.
“It’s frustrating people ruining a project that’s been in development since 2006 just to get a small advantage in the game,” Graus, a particularly dedicated volunteer contributor, said, adding: “They just think very selfishly and only about themselves. If everyone was to do that the map would be useless.”
Niantic spokeswoman Laurie Jones said “we don’t tolerate behavior that interferes with the intended gameplay in Pokémon GO, as part of our Niantic player guidelines” but didn’t answer direct questions about how often the company updates its OpenStreetMap data.
Last month, Pokémon Go announced its #RediscoverGO event, urging people to explore the world around them.
“From lush forests to bustling cities, tropical beaches to rugged mountains, you can immerse yourself in the diverse landscapes within Pokémon GO,” one advertisement for the update said. “Who knows what Pokémon await you on your journey?”
Some players turned to OpenStreetMap to predetermine the answer to that question. Once the update was released, Graus started noticing questionable beach edits in OpenStreetMap.
“They’re trying to cheat at the game,” he said.
It was not the first time Graus, who lives just north of Sydney and plays Pokémon Go daily, had seen something like this. Pokémon Go launched in the United States in 2016, and technologically savvy players quickly figured out it was powered by data from mapping apps, including OpenStreetMap. Players noticed that some pokémon spawned more often in parks and, since they now had the power to edit an open database, some started accurately mapping the parks in their community. Others, however, created fake versions in the hopes of luring and catching pokémon without traveling to an actual park.
Graus helped beta test Pokémon Go in 2016 in the months before its public release. Later that year, his interest in the game led him to OpenStreetMap. His first edit: He mapped and coded a local cemetery in the hopes of attracting graveyard pokémon — Gastly and Gengar.
That effort never panned out, but it was the first of more than 10,000 edits he’s made in the eight years since. He has no issue with Pokémon Go players making good-faith edits to the map in hopes of luring pokémon, because it makes the map better. But players who create a park over their house or a beach at their local baseball field are defacing a tool used by transportation agencies, navigation companies and ride-sharing apps.
And they’re defeating the purpose of the game, Graus said. Since Pokémon Go was released, developers have said that one its best qualities is that gets players outside exploring their communities and places they might never have gone to otherwise. If they cheat so that a certain pokémon appears in their house, they might as well play a video game on a traditional console, Graus said.
“The whole dream of Pokémon Go is to have pokémon in the real world and to reflect your real experience,” Graus said.
Plus, their gambits will almost certainly fail, said Mikel Maron, a member of OpenStreetMap Foundation’s advisory board coordinator. Although Maron said he doesn’t know exactly how often Niantic updates Pokémon Go with new data from OpenStreetMap, it’s certainly not instantaneous and may even take months or years. In the meantime, editors like Graus are finding and correcting the changes, and in some cases, users are banned from the platform as a result.
“People all over the world have eyes on it,” Maron said. “These things get caught very quickly.”
Eric Eborn, 42, is one of the players who has created fake beaches to try to catch Wiglett. Although he hated all things Pokémon for years, he started playing Pokémon Go in January 2023 to spend time with his 14-year-old daughter and has since been charmed by how the game keeps him active and connects him to other players in his community.
Eborn estimated that he’s made four or five fake beaches at baseball diamonds and a duck pond near his home in Roy, Utah. There are legitimate beaches on the Great Salt Lake and Bear Lake, which are about an hour and 1½-hour drives away, but Eborn said he didn’t check to see if OpenStreetMap classifies them as such.
Eborn criticized Niantic for not thinking out the biome concept “terribly well” by releasing a beach-specific pokémon that’s not particularly accessible to people who live in the mountains or live inland. So players like him have to get creative about hunting them, even if it means bending the rules.
“I’d argue that we’re trying to make lemonade out of these lemons that they offered us,” he said.
When asked about Graus’s contention that those changing the map to make catching pokémon easy are cheating themselves out of the fun of exploring their environment and engaging with their community as the game is intended, Eborn paused.
“I could see how that argument could hold water,” he said.
