, Columnist
Pokemon Paranoia Goes Beyond Iran
There are lots of reasons for governments and consumer groups to be worried about augmented reality.
Fun's over.
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It was only a matter of time before some country banned Pokemon Go, the addictive location-based game. Now, Iran has claimed that distinction. Others will surely seek to regulate the augmented-reality game too, for a simple reason: Pokemon Go poses too many questions that do not have satisfactory answers yet.
Iran may have had some Islam-related reasons to ban Pokemon Go: a fatwa, or religious ruling, was issued against earlier Pokemon games; it rejected, among other things, the basic idea that one could speed up the creatures' mutation to make them more powerful as it hints at evolutionary theory. But Abolhasan Firouzabadi, the country's internet czar, has been quoted as saying security concerns prompted the ban.