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[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Prism International, Volume 7, Number 2, The University of British Columbia, Autumn 1967

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I CHOOSE YOU, POKéMON

If I were held at gunpoint and forced to say what my favorite video game is, i'd say: “Well, I guess I'd have to say that my favorite game would be an entire series of games, not just a single one”

That series of games would be the Pokémon series. I received my first Pokémon game when I was in the first grade. That year, I asked Santa for a game boy and a Pokémon game to go with it. On Christmas morning, I found a game boy advance and a copy of Pokémon gold underneat the tree. It was one of the happiest days of my life. Since then, i've had a love for Pokémon games. In fact, I kept playing Pokémon long after I had stopped playing pretty much every other video game I used to play. When I was a younger boy, I had a game console for the TV set, and some games for the computer that I would play regularly, but I never play any of those games anymore, but I still dabble in Pokémon. That's how special the world of Pokémon is to me. The real power behind the success of Pokémon is how the game lends itself to a social style of play.

In a Pokémon game, the supposed goal of the game is you've “gotta catch 'em all.” However, the creators of Pokémon were tricky about this. You can't catch 'em all with just one Pokémon game. The original two Pokémon games in America were Pokémon Red Version and Pokémon Blue Version. There were Pokémon on Red that you couldn't catch on Blue and vice-versa. So, to catch 'em all, you either had to have a friend who had the opposite version of Pokémon in order to trade over the unattainable Pokémon from the other game. This aspect of a couple versions of each Pokémon game helped the game achieve wild popularity kids in the late '90s and early '00s. To 'win' the game (nothing really happens once you catch 'em all, you just feel accomplished) you had to persuade your friends to buy the game too.

But, even if you could manage to catch all the Pokémon, the game still had appeal. Much of the in-game play of Pokémon consists of battling other Pokémon trainers and wild Pokémon. But, the player can also challenge their Pokémon-owning friends to battles, which could lead to fierce competition, tournaments, and more and more children getting Pokémon games.

As technology progressed, Pokémon games became more sophisticated, and now people can battle and trade with each other over the internet. Numerous communities have sprung up over what serious Pokémon gamers call 'competitive battling.' Perhaps the largest community of Pokémon battlers is the website smogon.com, which includes forums, chatrooms, a wiki, and even an online magazine, all dedicated to battling Pokémon.

Pokémon is a social game, which is why it has become so popular, and continues to be so popular. I must admit though, part of the reason I still love Pokémon is nostalgia. It was the first video game I ever owned! I've played more Pokémon than anything else, and I doubt I'll get ever get sick of playing new Pokémon games. Interestingly, I'm no the only one that feels this way about Pokémon. Pokémon games' popularity peaked when I was around elementary school/middle school age, which is the target audience of Pokémon. As Pokémon's popularity has decreased, the average age of the Pokémon player has increased, according to this article. Pokémon may no longer be the sensation that it was, but it will likely always remain popular among my generation.

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