There has been no small amount of waaaambulance calling lately amongst forumers saying that the community is dying, we need more articles to drive traffic, why can't Syd post more, why don't we post more instead, why don't you whiners recognize that writing is hard and Syd is busy, none of you have even tried to write anything, I only come here for the forum you crybabies, etc.
In response, I am posting a humorous essay about my experiences with pokemon. Prepare yourselves for a giant wall of text.
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Why Do We Play Pokémon?
In September of 1998, seemingly overnight, the cultural landscape of America was changed irrevocably. Caught off guard and unawares, our nation allowed its children to be struck by a capitalist sucker punch from across the Pacific Ocean. Just as the Germans smuggled Lenin into Russia during World War I, Japan enslaved the hearts and minds of American youth in a single swift stroke by shipping the first of the Pokémon games for the Nintendo Game Boy. I was nine years old at the time, and with very little cajoling I was completely won over to the other side. My life had been given new meaning; its predestinated purpose and my strongest desire were sublimely made clear to me by the inarguable wisdom of a franchise trademark. I had to catch ‘em all.
Over the years my religious fervor waned, as slowly but surely I lost my faith. A zealot during the days of the Red and Blue versions, the first generation of Pokémon games, I was mildly amused by the sequels Gold and Silver, and was never initiated into the mysteries of Ruby and Sapphire. Today, I watch children play games with names like Diamond, LeafGreen, and Battle Revolution, and feel no emotional connection to the world of Pokémon as it currently exists. In the right mood, I can fondly recall hours spent training a Dratini until it evolved into Dragonite, but I could not for the life of me imagine spending even one second trying to catch a Haxorus, Karrablast, or any of the newer creatures introduced with each successive generation. Everything about today’s Pokémon looks different than the Pokémon of my childhood, and to my mind, everything about them looks dumb.
As elitist as I would like to be about the superiority of my childhood pastime to the idiotic lunacy of Pokémon Platinum, the more I think about Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue, the less I understand about why my entire generation was so obsessively enthusiastic about these games. I like to think that I was a fairly bright child in the third grade, but my zeal overcame my sense of reason, and I failed to see the obvious: nothing about these games made any sort of sense.
Even the games’ basic premise lacks any semblance of sanity. The character you play is a child, and like all good children in the Pokémon universe, he has become a Pokémon trainer, which means that at the tender age of ten, he is going to leave his home and family to travel the world alone in his quest to capture wild animals, train them to battle, and engage in unlicensed Pokémon fights with every single stranger he runs into along the way. Your character’s mother is fine with this scenario. Everyone is. In the world of Pokémon, this type of childhood is considered the norm.
I understand that the Pokémon games are works of fiction, and that children’s stories need not operate by the same sort of logic as the real world, but the normalcy of your character’s childhood is woefully inconsistent with the story that the game depicts. Pokémon die. Over the course of the game, you run across a Pokémon cemetery where trainers grieve over the Pokémon they have lost. Trainers die too. Your character’s father used to be a Pokémon trainer, but game dialogue hints that he has been dead for as long as your character can remember. My best guess is that after his Pokémon collapsed from weakness, he died in the tunnels beneath Mt. Moon as he was slowly bitten to death by wild Zubats.
The inherent danger involved in Pokémon training doesn’t exist solely in the game’s back-story. Most of the games’ challenges involve run-ins with Team Rocket, a shady organization that can be best described as a Pokémon mafia. The members of Team Rocket abuse their Pokémon and use them to commit crimes, which in the games include but are not limited to petty theft, grand larceny, kidnapping, blackmail, industrial espionage, the running of a pyramid scheme, and murder. I’m also fairly sure that the thugs hanging around in Saffron City could be accurately described as loitering. Dialogue throughout the games indicate that Team Rocket’s actions are common knowledge and that everyone knows about the average Pokémon trainer’s routine conflicts with its members. However, no parents see anything wrong with hanging around their homes all day while their children travel the world in constant danger.
As horrible as the home life of the average Pokémon trainer sounds, no one has it worse than your rival. He is clearly supposed to be portrayed as an arrogant jerk, but I no longer feel the hatred for him that I felt as a child. Instead, I pity him. Your rival was raised by his grandfather, a man who does not even know his own grandson’s name. I understand that it is a common video game convention to allow you to name the major characters, but the way the game embeds the name-giving process into a conversation in which Professor Oak asks you his grandson’s name raises implications that cannot be ignored.
In deference to the name he was given in the cartoon and to honor him with the dignity that he deserves, I will henceforth refer to the rival as Gary. Gary’s grandfather Oak not only does not know his name, he does his best to demonstrate his lack of love for him. While the old professor goes out of his way to help your character on his journey, he cuts off Gary midsentence whenever he tries to speak. Is it any wonder the boy is often surly and rude? Doomed to live forever in your shadow, Gary starts off on his own Pokémon training journey, but every time he experiences a victory, you come along and do it better. He even suffers the indignity of being Pokémon League champion for all of fifteen minutes before you wrest the title from him. This child is not a rival to be defeated and scorned. He is a tragic hero.
Aside from startling depictions of criminal negligence in the way that the games ask us to feel a cruel callousness towards Gary’s dreams and desires, perhaps the most shockingly ridiculous aspect of the first generation Pokémon games are the completely unrealistic ways they depict the relationship between technological advances and the economy. All wild Pokémon are captured in devices called pokéballs. These technological marvels, which cost only a couple hundred dollars, convert the Pokémon from organic matter into pure energy. With the push of a button, a pokéball will release its captured Pokémon and reassemble it into matter without error. If a Pokémon is unneeded, its energy can be encoded into binary form and stored in a computer, causing the Pokémon to cease to exist in the material world until it is read from another computer and converted back into energy when needed again.
While this seamless conversion from matter to energy to information and back raises intriguing philosophical questions about the nature of existence and identity, I think the most important question is how the computer storage system can operate without cost, and yet a bicycle costs over one million dollars, a price so high that it is literally impossible to own that much money in the game. I knew the value of a dollar when I was nine. I saved my money and bought my copy of Pokémon Red myself, and I was vaguely aware of how much money my father made in a year and how far it got our family. Yet nothing seemed strange to me about the bizarre economics of Pokémon, nor did considerations of economic eccentricities stop me from fighting as many lost and frightened children as I could, beating their pidgeys and rattatas into submission so I could take their money and use it to buy more pokéballs.
The irrationality does not end here. I could continue on about the inability of the four most elite Pokémon trainers in the world to build team rosters with any semblance of strategy, or the ethical implications of enslaving Pokémon such as Alakazam, who have intelligence levels surpassing those of their trainers, but I am unsure that I could make those arguments with the same sort of emotional fervor. For one thing, putting all ethical dilemmas aside, I loved using Alakazam. The species was one of my favorite Pokémon, and as its name might suggest, watching one launch a psychic assault on some unsuspecting Hitmonchan can fill you with a sense of magic.
Perhaps it is this magic that today’s children feel when they play the newer Pokémon games, a magic that speaks to the current zeitgeist in a way that Red and Blue embodied everything that a videogame should have been during the time of the Lewinsky scandal. Despite my protestations of how stupid these games are, this magic can still cause me to pull my copy of Pokémon Red out from time to time. Surprisingly enough, it is even more enjoyable to pound Gary’s Pokémon into the pavement when you imagine him spiraling into depression afterwards, seeking solace in prescription drug abuse, blowing his money on an ever increasing gambling debt, and having no friends save his divorce attorney.
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