general

Well, PokéStops and gyms are the results of three years worth of work at Ingress. Ingress is also a game based around locations. Ingress is a sci-fi game, the locations are puzzles in Ingress, players can control portals to power them up, to link them together, to form fields, or two teams. These portals – when we started that project with with Google – we seeded that database of global locations, with historical markers, and a database of public artwork, and statues. There were a few hundred thousand of them, it was enough to get the very early data of the game started, and then we encouraged of user within the game to submit places that they thought should be portals within their neighborhoods where they were playing Ingress. And we gave them... you could earn a medal for that, you could earn badges for submissions of portals. And we established some guidelines: It should be safe and publicly accessible; it should be a work of art, important piece of architecture, or unique local business; and then we had a group of operations personnel that reviewed those submissions and approved the ones that seemed to meet our criteria. Those had then been edited and revised over the past several years, new submissions throughout that time period, but also people correcting the location, adding names and descriptions, and deleting things that weren't good portals. It’s not perfect, but it’s become a pretty good, a pretty mature, global data set of these public visible, visually identifiable locations. So we used that, and select a subset of that for the gyms and PokéStops.