I mug you, Pikachu!

ON JULY 10th police in O’Fallon, a Missouri town of about 80,000 people, made a statement about the modus operandi of an armed gang that had been using “Pokémon Go”, a video game, to prey on the locals. “You can add a beacon to a Pokéstop to lure more players,” the lawmen explained. “Apparently they [the muggers] were using the app to locate people standing around in the middle of a parking lot or whatever other location they were in.”

If that sounds like gibberish, it might be best to consult your nearest millennial. “Pokémon Go”, an app for smartphones published by Nintendo, a Japanese video-gaming firm, has proved a smash hit since its release on July 6th in America, Australia and New Zealand. It is the latest instalment of the Pokémon franchise, which began as a video game in 1996, before branching out into collectible cards, toys, books, TV shows and comics, and grossing ¥4.8 trillion ($46 billion) in the process. Players take part in a sort of lighthearted digital dogfighting, in which the protagonists are not canines but cute magical animals discovered and trained by players.