Pokémon = Life

David Long, GamerDad
May 28, 2004

Pokémon, as you all know, is an extremely successful series of video games made by Nintendo originally but now produced by a wholly owned subsidiary of Nintendo. The base concepts of the game haven't changed much from the original Pokémon Green and Red that debuted in Japan back in 1998. The games follow the exploits of a young person (boy or girl in the current Sapphire or Ruby) as they travel the land and fight both wild and trained monsters with monsters of their own. Its success has spawned everything from an excellent trading card version of the game to plush versions of your favorite Pokémon and just about any article of clothing that can be emblazoned with a Pikachu. What a lot of folks, especially parents, don't realize is that the game has at its core a very basic parallel with growing up.

When you start playing the current iterations of the game, you're moving into a new house and begin meeting some of the folks that live in town while getting the very basics to set off on your adventure. Right there is the first place that the designers marry typical adolescent fears and experiences to the game world. Most kids seem to have one instance of this in their years of growing up. Move to a new town or even just across town and have to make new friends. Nintendo takes that one step further into fantasy and plants kids into the world of pocket monsters. From there, the journey of the adolescent child has officially begun. Armed with very little knowledge of the world, you're able to go explore it and conquer its challenges. Pretty cool for a simple little role-playing game, eh?

That's the key to the success of Pokémon and what seems to have made it a timeless property for Nintendo. This is a simple game. It's about growing up. As the player, you travel the land challenging new monsters and adding them to your travelling band. That's not unlike life where you overcome challenges, sometimes even failing at them before finding success, and then adding those experiences to your own to be a better person. In Pokémon, you attempt to add weakened Pokémon to your group. Their abilities are known to you at first, but like life, even those things which are familiar (like your Treecko) can evolve and gain new abilities. As the player of the game, it's up to you to understand those abilities and make good use of the newfound skills. Then, to top off this excellent bit of juxtaposition, you end up facing off against other trainers, humans that have attempted to master similar and/or different monsters. These confrontations are often friendly, sometimes not. Isn't it true that this is just like the real life of an adolescent? Learning how to use what they're given or are able to understand and applying that to get ahead?

It leads you to understand just how the original game is so brilliant in its simplicity. This is the role-playing game stripped to its barest essentials. You have a group of monsters. They fight. Simple numbers and choices determine the outcome but it's all up to you how to apply that and "win". Sure, there's a story behind the scenes, but even that is simple as can be. For me, what's so cool is how that story peels back to deliver the real life parallels described above, if you're willing to look for them. That's a lot like how you can find hidden abilities among your Pokémon if you're willing to dig.

In an especially revealing moment, and the one that will make this all click if you're a parent, you as the player have to challenge your own father to a duel. Dad won't take you on until you've beaten four other Gym Leaders. Here we see another real world parallel where parents will take the time to teach their children, but also must send them out into the world to gather their own experiences first. When you return to meet Dad and win, he's encouraged by your having grown but is at the same time lamenting that you've grown up. How cool is that?! Every father looks forward to the time that their son or daughter can come home and tell them of some kind of major accomplishment and teach the father new lessons they themselves never learned. But yet deep down the father will also be a bit shaken by the fact that the child has surpassed them. This is a bittersweet moment to be sure and one that the game portrays so accurately while still sending the player on their way to meet even greater challenges ahead.

To go any further would give away a bit too much of the game but I hope as parents you're a little more encouraged to give Pokémon a try now. The play mechanics of these games are so simple and yet so very deep. Similarly, the story is on the surface rudimentary about a young child going out into the world and coming of age. These are two of the most common things found in role-playing games and here they're distilled down to their most basic. It's that fascinating delivery and the consistent surprise and wonder you find throughout this journey that endears Pokémon to you as you play. Whether the designers had all of this in mind from the start is hard to ascertain. Surely the game fits with a lot of what I've read about Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto and his wonder at exploring the world so it's not out of the realm of possibility that all I've discovered under the surface was planned. But even if it wasn't, it's good to know that some games can be interpreted this way. It's good to know that once in awhile even a game succeeds on such a large scale that can teach kids some good things about life even if they're not completely aware of it while playing.

So don't just discount Pokémon out of hand if you've never played it. There's far more to it than you think and there's definitely a very good reason that kids get hooked on it. They can identify with its challenges and its simple story of just plain growing up. They might not realize why it works so well for them, but the appeal is clear. If you're a kid at heart, you can relive your younger years through this game too. Pokémon is life in a simple game.