There is a rare pokemon in my garden and it is luring the public into my personal, domestic space.

This was the apparently unlikely complaint recently brought by Jeffrey Marder of West Orange, New Jersey. The prospect that benign hunters of rare Magnemites, Snorlaxs and Bulbasaurs might be better construed as criminal mass trespassers facilitated by Nintendo’s hit game raises interesting questions about the interaction of networked social/ game media and the boundaries of the private realm of the home.

From numerous media stories it has become clear that the search for the small monsters has become concerted – stories of kids lost in caves, dangerous drivers, the invasion of private buildings and other places becoming an almost daily event. The apparently random or selective placement of the monsters using algorhithms and socio-demographic data was perhaps always likely to generate boundary problems between public and private spaces populated with the monsters. Marder’s claim might generate some sympathy, though it is unclear what form the intrusion took and Niantic, the developer of the game, have already argued that users must ‘adhere to the rules of the human world’, including avoiding trespassing on private property. The future possibilities of augmented reality gaming may yet be dictated by the 200 or so cases likely to be brought against Niantic’s game in which players can see the monsters in the ‘human world’ via the screens on their smartphones (in case I need to tell you!).

What is also interesting about this case is the way in which private property rights are invoked as a means of challenging the architecture by which players throw their poke-balls at Squirtles in innumerable gardens across cities globally. Perhaps more worrying is the possibility is that the aggressive defence of the private domestic realm will not yield some human tragedy at the hands of an anxious or gun-toting homeowner given past such events. The pokemon stories being relayed also suggest that the domain of the private home is being eroded or renegotiated in previously unforeseen ways. Despite the sense of the home as an inviolable space the rise of Pokemon Go and future games like it raise the possibility of massed forms of trespass and surveillance by goal-directed users. Like dumpster hunters for personal details in confidential waste, or computer viruses and internet predators, the precise form of future threats to the domestic home from new technologies are hard to fathom until they arrive in the front garden.