The Lure of Pokémon
by Nakazawa Shinichi
I get most of my game design books from Humble Bundles; with digital texts, I graze on them through my phone over the course of a few weeks or months, and I don’t take notes. Reverse Design: Chrono Trigger or Uncertainty in Games or The Art of Failure are just for me, the same as reading e-flux or The New Yorker. I’m simply not set up to create a review for something I picked at on my cell phone while I sat in the dentist’s waiting room. It is an arbitrary distinction, and a refreshing one: reading without the self-imposed burden of note-taking or the mental pauses to chart out what to excise for review keeps me in the text, much like when the Nintendo Switch shunned system-level Achievements and playing games felt free, like the dawn breaking on a crisp winter morning.
Semifortunately, I recently discovered my local public library’s game design catalogue (why am I getting prompted to write “catalog”? Am I archaic already?). Many of them are dated—in the way videogames from 2008 are “dated” before they wrap back around to “retro”—and it might behoove me to cross-review a bunch of similar texts (Ludomusicology x Game Sounds?) rather than let them slip past without an attempt at writing something up. Unexpectedly—even heavy with personal digressions that as it is, Procedural Storytelling in Game Design steadily continues to be one of my most-viewed articles. The appetite for casual discussion on game design books is out there, I think.
After collecting my immense pile of design texts, I started with what seemed to be a relatively simple entry point, The Lure of Pokémon: Video Games and the Savage Mind. Let us first address the elephant–“Video Games and the Savage Mind” immediately raises hackles, in 2023, through employ of the term “savage mind” (almost as haunted as the space between “video” and “games”). It’s a reprint of an essay from 1997 that was originally written in Japanese. It directly cites Levi-Strauss’ La Pensée Sauvage, which I have less jarringly heard translated as “Wild Thoughts.” I think that would have fit a bit better, given that “a wild ____ appears” is Pokémon meme-bait, but….well, I’m not the boss of the Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture. Regardless, the concept of the “savage mind” is not about diminutizing other cultures or lauding the Western-centric technological present as an inevitable march along the path of beneficent progress, but about the human mind free from cultivated indoctrination for outside societal or structural goals. Put another way, we go to school every day not to learn facts, but to learn how to sit still and subsume ourselves into a larger collection of integrated human capital:
Rather than repressing the urges that seep out from the edges of consciousness, the adults who created these [Ultraman] monsters provided those desires with a pathway into the visible world by giving them ambiguous forms marked by change and instability. The did not deny the existence of edges or gaps in the world of science, or of the things that appear from these cracks in the system, but acknowledged that the system of language is not complete and provided appropriate interim shapes to the urges that slip through those fissures.
Now that we’re over that hurdle, the fact that an anthropologist critically engaged with both a bedrock anthropological theory—wild thoughts—and the then-rising trend of Pokémon is great. I have read a lot of mid-aughts game design books and a common theme is the proviso in the opening pages about how, “Video games have overtaken film as the highest-earning entertainment media landscape.” “In a capitalist society–where money is the only points system–videogames now have the high score.” “See, mom, we’re not wasting our time!” It’s a little bit sad, a little bit defensive, and as a posture it has largely fallen away from cultural videogame criticism. The need to make sure videogames are taken “seriously” based on economic bookkeeping isn’t how Lure opens, so even as one of the older videogame theory books I’ve read, it feels remarkably modern.
Lure of Pokémon is an academic text, not a industry manual. Even if a reader can’t engage with it completely from a lack of sturdy grounding in cultural anthropology, the text is narrow enough to make a clear point: Pokémon is a smash hit because it speaks to the objet petit a, the Lacanian object that “is a remainder left behind from the world that has been symbolized using language…it appears precisely on the boundary between things that can be made conscious after being grasped through the power of language, and unconscious desires that cannot be symbolized through words, making its source impossible to express.” Pokémon–videogames writ large, but Pokémon firstly and specifically–attach to a particularized aspect of humanity that manages discovery, exploration, and pattern recognition.
There exists in a created world an understanding wherein repeated actions receive continuous, replicable, and most importantly comprehensible responses: this, to me, is the foundation of videogames and the font of their appeal. It is unbelievably rewarding at a base level to be able to uncover definitive rules about the world, and it contrasts directly with our impossibly complex reality. Thus, the true magic of videogames is in making seemingly complex systems actionable and navigatable through the employ of a sparse handful of verbs.
Videogames can seem limitless with a rearranged handful of context-based button presses; this makes them less similar to cinema and more akin to basic linguistic structure: words are finite and graspable, but they can be employed in near-endless variety. No matter how much a language/framework seems like it can touch the eternal, however, it remains mere words.
Magic favors this way of thinking precisely because, contrary to how magic is normally understood, it lacks a belief in the omnipotence of language. Science attempts to express “truth” using the system of language. Science has faith that what is hidden in nature will, with sufficient human effort, eventually become expressible in words. Magic, however, doubts the omnipotence of language from the very start.
Videogames share a similar limited omnipotence—once you buy into their framework, they contain the totality of the player’s possible existence. Words contain every concept a society can have, but there still remains things unspeakable—the objet petit a. In videogames, every door that exists is put there by a human designer—whether it can be opened and explored is hard-coded and not up to the player. There is a beneficence to a closed world—an inviting kindness—as every puzzle is created to be solved. Only when some player brushes up against accidental design—bugs in the codee or an unlikely confluence of events—does the unreality break through the flow state of simple drip-feed gameplay consumption. The difficulties that arise from unplanned difficulty spikes—when a videogame is not cleanly playtested or polished to a shine—is, ironically, the most real a game can get. It is only in this internecine framework that videogames force a reckoning with what it means to actually play.
The original Pokémon came in two versions in the U.S., Red and Blue. They each contain about 11 of the 151 monsters that the other version doesn’t, so if you want them all, you need to trade. You can start either version with one of three Pokémon: a fire lizard; a water turtle; a grass dinosaur (?). If you, like me, picked Charmander, the fire-lizard, you’d run into a pretty hard wall at the first boss’ rock-based attacks (the equivalent of bringing only scissors to rock-paper-scissors when you know your opponent only throws rock).
Brock? I know that guy.
Charmander, that special guy, and his Fire-typing, has heretofore been blazing through all the birds and bugs and rats that populate the first zones—the early grassy paths are rife with what in Pokémon language are considered Normal-type–and those creatures, if you catch them, aren’t particularly effective against the first boss either. The options for the player that picks fire first over water or grass are few, and specific—if you have playground chums or gameFAQs, a solution you might learn is to pick up the Fighting-type Mankey, who can punch through Rock with little trouble. However, Mankey happens to be one of the eleven pokémon not present in the Blue version of the game. So if you picked up Pokémon Blue and you started the game with Charmander, beating the first boss would be significantly harder than any other combination.
This is the joyfulness of videogames: not the destination—you’ll beat Brock eventually, it has to be solvable—but the differentiation between player journeys. Tell someone “Wow, that first gym leader is tough,” and if they started with Squirtle, the Water-pokémon, they’ll just roll their eyes (Water attacks are super effective against rock. Obviously.).
Overcoming obstacles, therefore, cannot be the true actualization offered within videogames: obstacles aren’t real, as there simply isn’t a scenario where the designers decided you could begin the game with Charmander and be hard-locked at the first boss with only the option to restart the game and select the grass-type Bulbasaur instead. Such reassurances do not exist in reality–sometimes you simply cannot continue to afford the mortgage your bank issued you, or catch that bus that you really needed, or find your phone after dropping it in the park.
This sequence of “chose Charmander, can’t beat first boss” remains notorious, however. Why does this linger in the public consciousness if it is not truly an obstacle that must be bested? The nature and reality of videogames—their heart—comes from discussing and differentiating your journey from someone else’s. Nothing else explains the rise of twitch.tv, or Let’s Plays or youtube lore dives. Videogames are, have always been, social storytelling frameworks:
When the game’s designers decided to try to make Pokémon a “communication tool” through adoption of the link cable, they naturally but perhaps unintentionally stepped into this realm of “the gift” as studied by anthropologists for many years. “Deeply immersive and solitary” forms of play like those offered by home video game consoles—or by auto-eroticism for that matter—usher one deep inside a single space where this sort of flow does not occur. In this situation, only the communication between the player and the game continues, intensifying the closing off of the individual.
Pokémon brings attention to the purported primacy of solo play—where one is cordoned off into an island of player and game—through forcing players to at least consider the link cable and monster trading. But even at its most basic, without trades or head-to-head battles, Pokémon forces each player’s journey to be slightly different. Consider: a player chooses a team of six monsters selected from 151. Each creature is limited to only four abilities out of a larger possible pool. And every version of the monster has randomized stats so that even an identical team with identical moves would be have slight variations. Even if one was to never once trade digital creatures through a link cable, one might still swap stories of how your team journeyed through the gameworld.
Discussion and distinction allow for expression. This is the lure of pokémon—even with hundreds of thousands of players all arriving at the same location eventually, it is nearly impossible to have the same journey as anyone else:
To put it differently, at the moment that the desire for a tale appears in the hearts of people, the world has already fallen out of balance: when one wants a tale, it is already too late; the original state of completeness has disappeared and cannot be experienced as such again. In acquiring one thing, another is lost forever, without any chance of being restored.
To complete any game is impossible—without lack, there is no desire. Without desire, there is no journey. And without journey, there is no game.