We’re playing a dangerous game with Pokémon Go

For a moment, I thought the man was looking for his date. Surely only a bloke on a Tinder bender walks into a pub with his iPhone held up at eye level. Then a friend pointed out the Pokémon Go sign outside the door, and my heart sank.

Desperate to cash in on the craze, pubs and restaurants across the UK have been paying £100 a day to populate their establishments with virtual creatures – often employing someone to spend all day dropping virtual “lures” around the neighbourhood.

According to the marketing managers at eateries such as Maxwell’s burger restaurant in Covent Garden, harbouring Pokémon has brought in an extra 2,750 customers – or £70,000 in cash – in the fortnight since the app launched in the UK. With “Pokémonics” like that, who cares if an establishment has all the atmosphere of a gaming arcade?

Not me: now that I know what those circular signs on blackboards by the door mean, you’re more likely to find me eating in a restaurant with laminated photographs of the dishes outside than “lured” into the seventh circle of smartphone hell.

Slightly more worrying than the state of our restaurant scene, however, is the issue of messing with youngsters’ minds (old gamers, embarrassments that they are, can mess with their own minds if they want).

Because whereas virtual reality has the dubious benefit of being 100 per cent fantasy, augmented reality blurs the line between fact and fiction to a surely dangerous extent.

After all, isn’t augmented or heightened reality the reason substance abuse is as enticing, widespread and harmful as it is?

Call it a hunch, but getting inside people’s minds – and people’s realities – might be confusing to the more fragile psyches.

We’re always being told that mental health is a huge issue. And yet there we are quite literally playing with it.