Between ‘Playing the American Dream’ and ‘How Japanese is Pokemon’ there is an interesting through line of games as both reflections and perpetuations of the culture that makes them. I’m genuinely happy that we got to read some material that brought that up, as it very much validates the analysis of games.

That being said, Pokemon is kind of an insane cultural thing to tackle due to it’s universal appeal. A huge part of this is the multiple ways in which Pokemon can be played, it virtually houses every conceivable method of play that might interest someone, from a single player straightforward narrative, to breeding’s optimization, to competitive battling. While that in itself is a significant part of its success, another major part is its inherent super capitalism.

Basically, Pokemon is a superform of capitalism in that its main two driving forces are 1. Find something (or multiple things) that you personally identify with and 2. Collect EVERYTHING. Even the way the games themselves are sold reflects this, with 3 copies each having a signifier as well as a limited pool of what things you have access to. This aligns interestingly with how HJiP describes Pokemon’s global significance, especially in terms of how capitalist media has managed to reach a status of near global appeal. Given the different forms of play, though, Pokemon doesn’t actually seem to produce much of an overt or consistent theme. Even the single player itself essentially doesn’t get any deeper than ‘Be nice to your pets’.

This is all a fairly surface reading of Pokemon, and I’m interested in exploring some of its sub-cultures, of which I am very familiar, or design nuance either in class or in a more elaborate text.