Reporter caught playing ‘Pokémon Go’ at State Department briefing

It appears the “Pokémon Go” craze has infiltrated even the highest levels of government.

State Department spokesperson John Kirby was in the middle of delivering his daily press briefing Thursday when he noticed that one reporter wasn’t paying attention.

“You’re playing the Pokémon thing right there, aren’t you?” Kirby asked, interrupting a discussion on the U.S.-led coalition to fight ISIS.

“I’m just keeping an eye on it,” admitted the reporter, who has been spared the embarrassment of being named in news reports of the exchange.

But Kirby didn’t let him off that easily. After concluding his comments on the coalition, he returned to the preoccupied reporter to find out if it was worth getting busted. “Did you get one?” Kirby asked.

He hadn’t.

“The signal’s not very good,” the reporter explained, to which Kirby smirked and said, “I’m sorry about that,” before moving on.

“Pokémon Go” — a mobile version of the popular video game — is essentially a real-life scavenger hunt for virtual creatures. Since its launch earlier this month, the game has led players into some pretty compromising — and even dangerous — situations.

Distracted Pokémon fanatics have crashed cars, fallen into ponds and walked off cliffs while playing the game. One women even wound up discovering a dead body in a river while “trying to get a Pokémon from a natural water resource.”

Historical sites like Arlington Cemetery and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. have gone out of their way to request that visitors refrain from playing the game on their premises. But that hasn’t kept Pokémon from popping up in plenty of other inappropriate places, like a funeral or at the hospital while one player’s wife gave birth, or — as in this case — during a State Department briefing on ISIS.

Of course, that reporter is hardly the only member of the media whose succumbed to the Pokémon craze. Upon arriving at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland last week, Yahoo News’ Hunter Walker quickly discovered that the Republican National Convention site was teaming with Pokémon — one of which he managed to capture during Donald Trump’s acceptance speech Thursday night.