ABSTRACT
Since the launch of the Nintendo console 14 years ago (the video game device produced by the Japanese company worth $85 billion USD), two million Pokémon games for the Nintendo console have been sold. The so-called next generation of the Pokémon Black and Pokémon White video games for the Nintendo DS took Japan by storm in 2010, and hit American stores in 2011. The last Pokémon games produced, HeartGold and HeartSilver, sold more than 8.4 million copies worldwide. Pokémon, also known as Pocket Monsters, fundamentally symbolizes a world of imaginary relations and endless consumption. It offers entertainment in a variety of forms; it offers them through the forms of electronic games, trading cards, animated cartoons, movies, comic books (also known as manga), as well as tie-in merchandise. The basic premise of Pokémon is a virtual universe inhabited by wild monsters that players seek to capture and domesticate to use as tools in capturing more monsters. Inhabiting this playworld, with its magical topography of towns, forests, and caves, are the 151 original Pokémon (which has now expanded to 649 species of Pokémon); the goal of playing the games is to capture all the Pokémon. This process, known as getto suru in Japanese, and “gotta catch ‘em all” in the US ad campaigns, is perhaps repetitive, but, nonetheless, increasingly complex. With its quest for continual accumulation, Pokémon mimics capitalism. However, countering this fact and also interwoven with it is an alternative agenda of interpersonal and cyborgian communication—building ties with others, both human and virtual, in order to reach your goal. Encouraging kids to befriend other players and monsters, and encouraging them to endlessly expand their control (by acquiring more monsters in hopes of becoming the world's greatest Pokémon master), Pokémon breeds compulsive acquisitiveness while fostering cooperation and intimacy.2 This tension is at the heart of the game's logic, and at the heart of its seemingly universal appeal.
