A bench with armrest bars across it in Pokémon Legends Z-A. Image: Game Freak / Nintendo
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Gamers are once again racing to catch ‘em all as Nintendo’s latest Pokémon game – Pokémon Legends Z-A – is released. But it’s anti-homeless benches that are sparking as much conversation as Pikachu and pals.
Footage from the game’s reveal back in February showed a bench in the game’s Paris-inspired Lumiose City setting with bars across it. Now the game has been released, gamers have found the bench with bars still intact.
The bars are a big deal because they represent hostile designs, or anti-homelessness architecture as it is already known. The bars are typically used in towns and cities to deter people experiencing homelessness from lying down on them to sleep.
Real-word examples of these benches – and other hostile architecture, such as spikes on the pavement or planters blocking doorways outside shops – often attract attention on social media when photos are posted online.
Pokémon Legends Z-A’s benches have had the same reaction with several posts going viral across X and on Reddit in 2025.
Well that's screwed up, why the heck does Z-A have their benches be anti-homeless? Glad the community is more supportive of people as opposed to the company that makes the game! pic.twitter.com/sC0CHr66oG
The phenomenon has included plenty of chat about the real-world inspirations behind the benches.
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One user wrote: “Anti-homeless benches. Neighbourhoods gentrified to be Pokémon safari zones. Maybe the Pokémon world isn’t too different to real life.”
Another added: “Ever heard of real world inspirations? Ever been to Paris? That should help you better understand this.”
Some users quipped that the bars were there to prevent Pokémon from sitting on the benches, acting as an “Anti-Snorlax bench” instead.
A man sat on a bench with armrest bars across it in Pokémon Legends Z-A. Image: Game Freak / Nintendo
Pokémon games are not the only video games to provoke outrage about anti-homeless benches.
When Overwatch 2 – a five-vs-five multiplayer ‘hero shooter’ game – launched its Midtown level based on New York City back in 2022, developers ended up swapping out a bench with bars on it after complaints from players.
Hostile benches have also been in conversation following the release of one of the year’s biggest games, Hollow Knight: Silksong, too. The game uses benches to let players save their progress and one particularly dastardly example features a switch that unleashes a trap that damages the protagonist when players try to activate the checkpoint.
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But the Pokémon Legends Z-A example triggers more insightful conversations about anti-homeless benches in both real and virtual worlds.
We asked two experts in hostile architecture – Rowland Atkinson, a professor at University of Sheffield’s School of Geography and Planning, and Dr Simon Stevens, a lecturer in political philosophy and political thought at De Montfort University – what they thought about the anti-homeless bench’s inclusion in the game.
Atkinson points that the Pokémon franchise has a bigger connection with the real-world than most video game series through the runaway success of Pokémon Go. The 2016 game demands players go out on walks or reach real-world locations to capture specific Pokémon.
While that blend of virtual and real worlds is one thing, the inclusion of benches in the more traditional Pokémon Legends Z-A video game presents challenges.
“Products like Pokémon Go create experiences that are at least partial reflections of the world around us, in a way showing us aspects of our world back to us,” said Atkinson.
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“But these copies have a real-world consequence, potentially reinforcing the impression that this is the world we really live in. The risk is that we feel what we see is real or ‘normal’, but we should also consider that a programmer might simply see these kinds of benches as real examples of street objects, which they are, but have no exposure or interest in the debates that have raged around their use.”
Dr Stevens said Pokémon Legends Z-A’s benches demonstrate just how much they have become a part of the urban fabric across the globe.
That is now being reflected in cultural works.
“I think, for me, with the game, they are either making a real statement about hostile architecture or they’re not. It’s actually worse if they’re not because there’s not even any thought about what this thing actually means. Now it’s just a chair,” Dr Stevens told Big Issue.
“That means anti-homeless architecture is now part of the normal aesthetic in towns and cities, which is terrifying.
The benches in Pokémon Legends Z-A were already widely shared on social media before the game released. Image: Game Freak / Nintendo
“We are more increasingly likely to see this stuff to be normalised and, therefore, think uncritically about it. If you think uncritically about it then that’s a problem because it’s not just about hostile architecture itself but the hostile architecture represents general attitudes towards homelessness, whether that be indifference or that they don’t really matter.”
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The rapid development in technology driving video games over the last three decades has boosted the fidelity that developers can render on-screen and that has allowed them to create game worlds in increasingly minute detail – and inflated development costs.
Players of open-world or free-roaming games like Pokémon – so-called because gamers can go where they please – often talk about how immersive these worlds feel.
That is often down to ‘realism’ with even details such as what benches look like all playing their part.
But is crafting that level of detail without the vital social context serving the player?
“We could say that if Pokémon only had benches with flat surfaces it would be unrealistic, glossing the reality that hostility in urban design is really present,” said Atkinson.
“So we need to make some kind of decision here – do we want realism, at what level, should there be some kind of signposting of the wider social issues. This may seem irritating – it’s just a game! Perhaps the core point here is that a game, particularly one that is a kind of new set of glasses onto the real world outside it, is never JUST a game. The real world is being re-presented to us, aspects are being highlighted, the messiness of aspects are glossed over, social problems are ignored. There are no easy answers to this stuff.”
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