First of all I just want to ask how many tin cans could the U.S. army consume?

Caillois made the argument that games and play needed to be outside the realm of real life.  He states, “In effect, play is essentially a seperate occupation, carefully isolated from the rest of life, and generally is engaged in with precise limits of time and space” (p.6).  Anne Allison, in her Millennial Monsters, uses this premise to explain the importance that Japanese play culture has on its followers.  She makes the argument that due to the immense pressure that modern society places on its children to succeed within rigid, nonimaginative confines, children are developing unwanted characteristics.  To exemplify her argument she sites several examples of antisocial behavior observed in Japan’s youth (i.e. youth crimes, shut-ins).  With increased connectivity, the modern Japanese are actually becoming more introverted, at the expense of developing meaningful relationships, even with family.  Where her argument becomes interesting is when she claims that  the issues exhibited within Japanese society are really the result of its facsination with market commodities, due to its hyper-consumerist economy. She describes it as “a national obsession with material goods” (p. 67).  The designer of the Game Boy game Pokemon, Tajiri Satoshi,  was looking to counteract the ills modern children were facing in world without meaningful relationships, and no real natural environment to explore, like he himself enjoyed to do as a young boy.  Allison states that Tajiri’s two motives for creating Pokemon were, “to create a challenging yet playable game that would pique children’s imaginations.  The other was to give kids a means of relieving the stresses of growing up in a postindustrial society” (p. 201).  Pokemon with its accessible game play, paired with the encouraged interaction between other Pokemon players through the trade and collecting of  Pokemon monsters.  A Pokemon culture grew out of the inherent interconnectedness of the game, resulting in increased interaction and shared interests between Japan’s children and eventually the world’s. Allison does cite antisocail behavior exhibited amongst Pokemon players, like the teenager that beat his baseball teammates with a bat, and later his mother, or the stealing seen among American collectors. Antisocial behavior can be seen with any commodity, blame is hardly only on the Poke-world. Thus Allison and Tajiri align with one of Caillois tentents of what makes play “play.”  Play is to be outside the pressures of the world, this escape is what makes Pokemon and other indulgences like it such a powerful social force in modern society.  Interestingly, Pokemon is a consumable commodity itself, an extremely capitalist one at that.  Just another thing for Japanese youth to consume not just in game form, but also in cards, manga, cartoons, toys, and even airplanes.  So Pokemon soothes the ills that an ultra-capitalist economy creates, while also fueling it