“Gotta Catch ‘em All”. That was the motto that drove a whole generation -my generation- down a wonderful journey that now has lasted for twenty-three years and made what is probably one of (if not the) most solid and profitable franchises in the entirety of Capitalist history. In order to get the formalities out of the way -and just in case you don’t know what Pokémon is, in which case I congratulate you from reaching our time, traveler from the past, and ask you to share your secrets- you can read SingingBreakman’s Franchise Festival entry on Pokémon, an excellent, exhaustive history of what and how Pokémon is a thing at all.
Pokémon has meant a lot for people, my age and much younger, not just because it happened at an opportune time, but because it legitimately represents a lot of things we hold dear; it was a power fantasy crafted for children, and more powerful than cocaine; a kid out on the world, no parents around, living on his own, training intelligent and powerful pets on a world without death, even defeating the mob with the power of friendship? No kid would resist that.
That element of fantasy world-building has always been Pokémon’s strongest suit, but the games, before it got to that, have a deeper attractiveness, not in the fantasy anymore, but in other fundamental processes of human psychology: Pokémon is based on two things: Collecting and Fighting.
Collect And Fight
From the times of the Roman Empire, we have always loved to watch violence, the thrill of confrontation by proxy; today, thankfully, we’ve moved to virtual forms of it; where before it was the Gladiators, today it’s Soccer; where before it was Boxing, today is Esports; where it was the Greek Agora, today is Debate; where it was playfighting, today it’s Pokémon.
Much has been said -and all of it disingenuous- of the vaunted comparison between Pokémon battling and real cockfighting or dogfighting, brutal, barbaric practices that take us back to the time when slaves would slaughter each other for the roar of a crowd; however, the critiques -as misguided as they are, since they don’t enter the fictional pact with the world Pokémon presents to us, cherry-picking what they accept and what they don’t as the reality of the fictional world- do have a valid point, in what it says about that thrill of confrontation we hold so deep inside, even if it’s expressed in bloodless means; the thrill of a good pokémon battle, I can attest, is something rarely felt; it’s tension, it’s strategy, it’s anxiety and a feel to dominate. It’s intoxicating.
The second aspect pokémon mastered so well is our drive to collect, or at least the drive some people have to collect, (defined here as “the activity of gathering more of a thing that falls under a conceptual category” through various means of acquisition, considered pleasurable or satisfactory”). We, as human beings, define ourselves by the connections we make with things we identify with, giving them subjective meaning, and internalize as part of ourselves; Pokémon has that down to a science; anything you like, anything you believe, any aesthetic style, any creature or reference you prefer, Pokémon either has it or will have. Today Pokémon has 809 unique species, with numerous alternate forms, and there’s still an unknown new generation to come (although, there is always an unknown new generation still to come); there’s something -even if just one thing- for everyone, and those things create strong bonds, with masterful design that is generic and simple enough to not alienate anyone per se, but also wide and precise enough to create those specific bonds with any specific person who is open to them. That makes collecting easy, the drive to possess, dominate, enclose the world -or a part of it- so it is under our control, our view, so it is safe, and with it, the part of ourselves we derive from it, as the philosopher Walter Benjamin says in“Unpacking My Library”:
“There is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order. […] a very mysterious relationship to ownership, […] a relationship with objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value -that is, their usefulness- but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate. The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual values within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property.”
The pull of collection is stronger when it stops being a volitional action and it becomes fueled by social or cultural pressures (like the idea that collections must be complete to have value), or by our own compulsion, wherever it may come from (OCD, obsessional neurosis, or simply fear of loss or paranoia, for example). But our collection also means memories, as Benjamin points out; for Pokémon, memories of childhood, of battles, of friends, trades, victories, that first surprise when we found out our beloved virtual creature could evolve into something different, the disappointment when it changed too much, or elation when it became even closer to what we already held close. Pokémon doesn’t rely on nostalgia, it is nostalgia, for how close it keeps it to its conception of the relationship between a player and their pokémon, and between the player and their childhood.
In short, collecting is a form of acquiring and controlling our emotional investments on external objects, sacralizing them; we can define it as an attempt to synchronize their external existence -a rhythm, if you will- with our internal existence -another rhythm- to scaffold our identity.
Pokémon is, before anything else, a product of our cultural capitalist age; pokémon makes money, and it is extremely good at it; to make money it relies on games for different markets and demographics (core titles, spinoffs, mobile games, for new players, for experienced players, trading cards, and more), collectible cards, TV series and movies, merchandise from stationery to plushes… the breadth of Pokémon-branded options to spend your money on is staggering, even more when you multiply that for twenty-three years.
From the beginning, Pokémon has sought to harness that compulsion to collect that is at the core of our identity formation; “gotta catch ‘em all” is not just a cute catchphrase to finish the catchy theme song of the anime, but a command: You’ve got to catch them all. And many -when not most- followed suit. To catch them all, you need games, of different titles, different generations, different consoles even, as the years went by; you need to trade with other people, and even with yourself, for those who bought an extra console to play an extra game of the alternate version (Pokémon, since the beginning, has never had multiple save files in their cartridges; at one point that would have been understandable, today it just seems cleverly sinister, since that means that a game can only be played one time), and those who managed those increasingly onerous feats (in time and money) gain not just the reinforcement we all gain through our individual bonds to the things we identify with, but a feeling of accomplishment, one not unconnected from that fundamental drive for conflict I mentioned before; the collection doesn’t just have intrinsic (personal) and even extrinsic (monetary) value in some cases, but it carries social capital, separating the proverbial wheat from the chaff, the serious from the dabbling, the pro from the amateur, even if only in the mind of the collector and his social circle based around collecting. In this, it not only fulfills that spirit of separation and confrontation, but it also fulfils the expectations of a society built in competition and comparison of value, of a so-called meritocracy, reflected perfectly in the second motto of Pokémon: “To be the very best, like no one ever was”. Collect, Fight. Accrue, defeat.
Monster’s Pockets
Pokémon has harnessed the intrinsic force of identity-formative bonds in order to generate a collective (used here in the sense of “collection” rather than of “a population of individuals”) impulse, facilitated only by the products it sells; this is very profitable, as I mentioned, since obviously you can’t get Pokémon outside of the structure of Pokémon, so Pokémon really has no intention (and why would it) to change that model.
However, that is not as much of a possibility as they -and many fans- would want. As I mentioned, it’s been twenty-three years and 809+ pokémon species, and Pokémon works with a model of constant growth, even if in the latest generations they have been more reduced in number than the original 151 (100 in GII, 135 in GIII, 107 in GIV, 156 in GV, 72 in GVI, 88 in GVII, and unknown in GVIII). Back in GI, it was possible to list every single pokémon in order (it was a whole thing, in fact), and slowly, it became more difficult. Keeping track of all Pokémon today would be a true feat of memory, and it will only be more difficult as generations pass and the world of pokémon becomes ever more unwieldy to human cognitive capacities, as each individual species involves a mnemonic network of information, between names, stats, appearance, locations, strengths, weaknesses, relations, moves, etc that would need to be stored and retrieved, not to mention assigned meanings, and the game data that implies as well, for programming purposes.
Today, on the eve of the eighth generation of Pokémon with Pokémon Sword and Shield, the franchise has come under fire from some fans for the reduction of the total availability of species to only the new generation plus a selection of older generations, when the fans wanted the full 809+ pokedex to be catchable. However, as mentioned, even if in this instance they got what they wanted, how sustainable that would be in the next one? Or the next one? Pokémon’s strategy is timeless and potentially eternal; as long as they draw on the same forces of quality design and human desire that they tapped in the nineties, they can continue indefinitely… except for the limitations of their systems, and our own.
The fans’ complaints have been nothing short of a storm, full of fire and fury, but thinking about it, how could they not be? As I said, fighting is in the blood of a Pokémon fan, collections are part of a person’s identity, and the impulse to collect is strongly rooted in the need to make order out of chaos, of holding the past and the object of love in a safe place, away from change and time. Benjamin says:
“every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: The chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire them became criminals.”
What we see here is a pre-loss version of the Benjaminian “invalid” and the post-acquisition version of his “criminal”; before the threat of losing the years-long investment in collecting, before the threat of losing the -assumed eternal- freedom of being able to catch your favorite Pokémon, the fans revolt against the company that makes and administers those goods that are collected -Gamefreak, the producers of the Pokémon games- fueled by the strength a person gets only when what they desire and own is threatened, the strength of a cornered animal, reflecting what they do with their pokémon in the game: Fight for their ownership.
But do they own what they desire?
Near the end of the essay, Benjamin writes:
“a collector’s attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner’s feeling of responsibility towards his property”
Benjamin here is referring specifically to book collecting, although his view is applicable to any collections; there is no doubt there’s a feeling of ownership that comes with the collected items, due to the strong relation they have towards our identity-formation. Those objects are us.
But there are other forms of relation, where a person with a self relates to something that, unlike a book, is not necessarily a tangible object, and it is necessarily under the control of separate institutions or people; Benjamin was by all accounts owner of his books, written by others, but the average Pokémon fan doesn’t own the abstract idea of a Pokémon, which is and always will be under the direction of Pokémon and Gamefreak, who control what they are, how they change in time and the means by which they become available. And yet, as Benjamin indicates, the collector develops a feeling of responsibility, responsibility that in this case, is impossible for them to have.
However, this responsibility isn’t borne out of nothing; today, in the age of marketing and social media, brands seek engagement more than anything else, and engagement is driven by a sense of ownership; therefore, the task of marketing the brands have ahead of them is nothing short of instilling into their followers the illusion of ownership over the products they market, called Psychological Ownership; that ownership normally comes naturally with the process of identity-formation, but has an effective barrier in reality (after all, people don’t literally own the things they are fans of; regardless of how much brands might engage with fanart, fanfiction, hype, views, participation, events and other tools to gauge and stoke customer engagement, the person still lacks capacity to dispose of the object as needed); no such thing with psychological ownership, since due to the identity-defining investment on the thing the person makes, the product that is marketed isn’t the physical object, but the idea, the entity the object references symbolically. It’s not the Pikachu plush, but Pikachu, for the Pikachu fan; not the Air Jordans, but the power and skill of His Airness, for Jordan fans.
So that psychological ownership -stemming from desire, like all illusions- necessarily becomes delusion in the way the marketing structures have taken to modify and manipulate customers’ perception of reality, to break down that symbolic barrier of the relationship between the brand and the person, between the customer and the company, between the object-one-can-own and the thing-one-really-wants-to-own, becoming all-encompassing, a psychotic state of rejection of the possibility of not owning the concept, or not owning it fully (since one could say that psychological ownership isn’t entirely delusive, or in-your-head; contradictory as it might be, some form of legitimate partial ownership is necessary to make any theory of fandom-as-a-legitimate-phenomenon, and is at the core of Roland Barthes’ Death Of The Author and Umberto Eco’s Open Text theories, as much reality as the company’s formal ownership of the thing).
In our case, the conflict comes when incontrovertible proof of the non-formality of that psychological ownership appears: The situation as it stands says that if one wants to play Pokémon Sword and Shield, one must give up the -assumed sacred- freedom to have any pokémon one wants, or even most of them; the fans in this discussion often back up their discontent with the historical evidence of Gamefreak’s slowness in making standard industry and improvement changes to the games and their structure and the capacity they should have as owners of the highest grossing videogame and multimedia franchise in history to throw money at the game’s development to break any vaunted physical barriers blocking the inclusion of all 809+ pokémon; the evidence is valid (as I mentioned, they don’t even add multiple save slots to their games), but only a distraction from the deeper -and unconfronted- causes behind the outrage -that of psychological ownership and the psychotic structure of that ownership- especially since as mentioned, the growth of Pokémon is eternal, so this would have had to happen at some point, but more importantly, because despite the interaction between fans and Gamefreak happening in a market economy, the idea of the customer(-owner) being always right doesn’t really matter, because the power to decide always lies with the company that produces and administers the concepts it “sells” to the public.
Whoever Fights With Pocket Monsters
Gamefreak is very good at making monsters. That has been their entire business for twenty-three years after all, and -counter to the common complaints of them “being uncreative” that happen every single generation- they’re damn good at it. But there is a thing such as “too good”, for they accidentally created a new monster, one that isn’t circumscribed to the ones and zeros of the programs they make, or the intellectual property they control; they created a monster that feeds on everything they do -and, perhaps more importantly, what they don’t do- and gives it back to them twofold, and now they’re biding that attack. They’re not above responsibility; they, twenty-three years ago, decided to mobilize that primal drive to collect and fight as formative processes of identity, and targeted children; in the process, they unleashed a force they obviously didn’t comprehend, and made an obscene amount of money. Today, that little monster is all evolved and with twenty-three years of growth, angry that the franchise it adored and felt like it owned for so long hasn’t grown alongside it; it feels it’s getting away, focusing on children -which has always been Pokémon’s true market, let’s not kid ourselves- and leaving them behind.
I can sympathize; I am of that generation, I was there at the beginning and will be there at the end (or rather, I will be outlived by Pokémon, in all likelihood); as I write these words, I have under my monitor my charging 3DS, with Pokémon Ultra Sun inside. The pictures I took in it of me and my Pokémon headline this essay, my pokémon plushes look at me from the walk-in closet behind me, and in my library rests the folder with Pokémon cards from when I “collected” them; they’re not many, just my favorites, but they’re mine. But they’re also endless; only when I realized that it would never end, was I able to let it go. So I certainly understand the fear of losing something so important. Love like that never ends, it’s only transformed into new forms, as long as we have a need to make order out of chaos. But it’s important to not become a monster in our taking our love of monsters too far.
In the first Pokémon movie, Mewtwo, the genetically engineered super-pokémon in search of meaning says:
“I see now that the circumstances of one’s birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.”
These words are the culmination of his arc, and his search for meaning in the world; they mark the moment Mewtwo stops being a monster and becomes a being, keeping his past, but reflecting on his present so he can make his future. Pokémon may have made us who we are, but it doesn’t need to define us; we’re its product in that it has shaped us and helped us become who we are, but we must recognize that our feeling of ownership is confronted by reality, and ultimately, how we respond to that tension affects how we engage with the world and how we define ourselves; between being a person who gets bent out of shape out of thinking we “deserve” something from a company who never really cared (never can care) about one as an individual, or a person who takes from that company what they offer, and appreciates it for what it makes us, but knows that one doesn’t own it beyond that.
It’s not easy, but it is an evolution. For kids, Pokémon is about collecting and fighting; maybe for us adults it could be less about those, and more about evolving.