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“Is this not the origin of an important
theme, ‘the nomads as child stealers’?” (D+G 393) |
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[1] Pokémon, as a feature
of material culture, has at its center, a convergence of multiple “games”
(or discourses), which position children as its players, trainers, consumers,
producers, and subjects. In the Pokémon collectable card game
(CCG), “trainers” square off against one another through individualized
decks constructed from collectable cards which serve as the fetishes for
the imaginary creatures under the trainers’ control. On the other end,
is the narrativized “game” of the cartoons in which the imaginary
play is acted out by Ash Catchem and other trainers. The Nintendo Gameboy
editions provide a portable electronic version of play against other virtual
trainers while supplying an ongoing narrative that bridges the world of
the CCG with that of the cartoon. The Nintendo 64 versions provide even
further developments of the narrativized game with enhanced graphics and
sounds that create a bridge from cartoon to Gameboy. Surrounding these four
interpenetrating games are various toys, action figures, collectibles, soundtracks,
strategy guides, webpages,
meals, and merchandise which further connect the pieces to varying degrees.
The implied target of this web of “games” is the child, as demonstrated
in the person of Ash Catchem and the toyish nature of the merchandise. The
age of this “child” is irrelevant, but the games do enjoy popularity
with what we conventionally understand to be youth (for now, the “not-yet-adult”).
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the exteriority of the
“war machine” to the “State
apparatus,” proposing that “This exteriority is first attested
to in mythology, epic, drama, and games” (351). Not that this is
necessarily true, but taking this proposal as a point of departure for a
discussion of capital, Pokémon offers an ideal context for
an interrogation of the concept of an “exterior war machine” and
its relation to the State. |
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[2] The intertextuality of Pokémon
described above is best illustrated by opening moments of the first episode
of the Pokémon cartoon, “Pokémon I Choose You,”
which begins with an animated rendition of the Gameboy videogame display,
which becomes the Pokémon Stadium (both a Nintendo 64 game
AND an institution in the cartoon’s narrative), which becomes a TV
show (either a “sportscast” within the cartoon’s narrative
or a Pokémon cartoon within the cartoon’s narrative),
and ends with a view of Ash (the cartoon’s hero) who is watching these
layers unfold on his television, much like the “real-life viewer”
watches the unfolding process transpire from one strata above Ash (unless
of course, the show Ash sees is about us). The result is a relatively tight
and coherent bundle of concepts that permit a great deal of “agency”
on the part of the player, but only so long as the player generally interpellated
through the competing poke-discourses. In other words, the game’s simulation
engenders a “culture” which makes real many of the truths embodied
in the game—the principles advocated in the show are functional. |
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[3] Before I proceed with this discussion,
it might be useful to describe the different games that can be played, beginning
with the Collectible Card Game. To play the game, each player uses a deck
of sixty cards, which can be selected from a catalog of hundreds of cards,
some of which feature one of the 150 pokémon that have been identified
by pokémon researchers like Professor Oak. The goal is to construct
a deck that contains an array of pokémon, energy, and training cards
that will allow the “trainer” to draw the combination of cards
needed to beat the other pokémon “trainer.” The specifics
of the game are less important than the fact that decks are assembled from
a large number of cards and that having the right cards will enable one
player to vanquish another. As a result of this massive pool of cards and
the variable nature of the game, the “ability” of the trainer
relies heavily on the proper possessions:
In the Pokémon trading card game, one of your goals is to collect each
of the cards, similar to your goal of collecting each of the Pokémon
in the Game Boy game. But not all Pokémon cards are as easy to catch
as others. The Energy cards are the most basic and most common kind
of cards. Your Pokémon cards, Evolution cards, and Trainer cards come
in four different varieties: common cards are marked in the bottom right-hand
corner with a  .
Uncommon cards are marked with a  ,
and rare cards are marked with a  .
In addition, some rare cards are printed using holographic foil. These
"holo" cards are the hardest to catch and collect. In addition, a limited
quantity of each set of Pokémon cards is printed with the 
symbol, which shows that those cards are first-edition cards from that
set. The same cards may be reprinted in the future but never with the
symbol, ensuring that your first-edition cards will maintain their value!
(Pokémon
Rules)
In other words, the CCG relies heavily upon the trainer’s ability to
collect the pokémon. The capacity to collect involves a level of
knowledge about scarcity, abundance, and demand. It involves the cultivation
of a connoisseurship in regards to what’s a good deal, what cards work
well in combination with others, and where to go to get the cards one needs.
Similarly, the social nature of the game asks trainers to participate in
an economy of trading, which involves not only getting a good deal on a
rare card, but also completing a collection, and getting the right cards
to make a strong deck. |
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[4] As described in the rules, to collect
pokémon cards is also to “catch” the pokémon themselves,
creating a parallel logic between the CCG, the Gameboy version, and the
cartoons. Interestingly, not only does the CCG insert itself into the world
of the cartoon’s narrative, but the narrative reflects back upon the
CCG in an interesting way. In the animated feature film, Pokémon
2000, the film’s villain explains how his descent into villainy
began: “I began my collection with a Mew card.” At the height
of the plot’s dramatic resolution, collecting emerges as a pathology.
The villain who nearly destroys the world through his desire to collect
the rarest pokémon, began his career with the collection of a rare
and desirable Pokémon card. Not only does this muddle the
boundaries between the narrative and spectator by suggesting that in the
narrative world, as in our world, collecting Pokémon cards
is a feature of everyday life; but it calls into question the difference
between the “collector” and “trainer.” By demonizing
the mere collector and affirming the power of the trainer, the film establishes
an aura around connoisseurship in which those who care most deeply for their
menagerie (real or otherwise) are the true winners. It’s not enough
to play, the true trainer has to love. |
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[5] The Nintendo Gameboy version of Pokémon
features an interactive narrative in which the protagonist (here the player
selects a name for his or her virtual persona) searches for pokémon
to capture and trainers to battle. This version loosely follows the narrative
of the cartoon, but allows the player to choose the itinerary. After many
hours of play, during which Willy (that’s my poke-identity) has been
the loving trainer of a Bulbasaur (whom I have nicknamed Lil Romeo), I have
found that aside from breathing life into the limited graphics of the Gameboy,
the cartoon has provided a number of incredibly useful strategic hints.
By imitating the cartoon’s Ash, my Willy has been able to defeat several
of the trainers and collect some of the badges he will need to proceed to
the tournament (which is also a reference to the CCG tournaments). |
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[6] But the mechanics of the Gameboy itself
provide an interesting means of replicating the logic of the narrative.
The Gameboy is a small, hand-held device which can go wherever the “trainer”
goes, enabling him or her to train at any given moment. By making play more
mobile than the already mobile decks of cards (which require another player
and a flat surface to play on), the game allows the player to move much
like the characters themselves must move in order to capture more pokémon
and fight more battles. Not unlike the cellular phone, which has liberated
the white collar worker and service worker from the land line, this type
of portable hand held technology is clearly a case of “the
becoming of everybody/everything, becoming-radio,
becoming-electronic, becoming molecular” (473). In the case of the
Gameboy, the fictional warrior world of the nomadic
pokémon trainer engenders a becoming- in which the “trainer”/player
in becoming-Gameboy, is also becoming-“war machine." The result
is a double process of becoming—a becoming-becoming-pokémon.5 |
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[7] Another feature of the Gameboy is that
it can, through the aid of a cable, be attached to another Gameboy, permitting
the two games to speak and interact, allowing players to trade pokémon
from one machine to another, giving actions in the Pokémon
narrative further “real-world” correspondence, for if the show
is to be believed, trading is the way to form “Pokémon friendships”
("Battle Aboard the St. Anne," episode 15) in which sideways movement
of pokémon from trainer to trainer could conceivably establish relationships
worldwide (a sort of “six degrees of separation”). In addition,
the Gameboy cartridges can be attached to the Nintendo 64 with the aid of
an apparatus, allowing trainers to bring their Gameboy-trained pokémon
into the world of slick three-dimensional renderings with stereo sound and
fluid animations—a becoming-cartoon—a transformation of the ordinary
pokémon images into the “animated substance” of the cartoon. |
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[8] The significance of the interplay between
the various games being played is that they function to create multiple
interfaces that can be implimented in a number of ways, both physical and
metaphorical. In such smooth terrain, “A rhizome ceaselessly established
connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances
relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles” (D+G 7). Rather
than force connections, the game designers, illustrators, writers, marketers,
advertisers, and programmers, (themselves a complex machine) create the
opportunity for multiplicity. Whether you see yourself as an Ash, Team Rocket
(Pokémon villains), Willy, yourself, or even me is not important, it is
only important to enact in multiples by becoming-pokémon (which itself becomes
synonymous with collecting). |
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[9] The looseness (smooth
space) that I’ve described here would seem in some scholars’
estimation represent a threat to the social order. To encourage this sort
of “play” might seem subversive, especially when directed at children.
And some conservative groups have responded through censorship and burning
rituals directed at Pokémon as immoral (one group even issued
a fatwa against Pokémon).6
Others, conversely, might see Pokémon as a form of Capitalist indoctrination,
merely situating children within the economy of haves and have-nots while
reinforcing consumerist tendencies. And perhaps both are right to fear Pokémon,
but for the wrong reasons. Deleuze and Guattari share insights into the
reason for this crisis, “In the case of the child, gestural, mimetic,
lucid, and other semiotic systems regain their freedom and extricate themselves
from the ‘tracing,’ that is, from the dominant competence of the
teacher’s language—a microscopic event upsets the local balance
of power” (15). Rather than reproduce points on existing trajectories
(immorality, ideology), perhaps the child subjects are situated on a third
trajectory. |
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“Enjoy your last moments of freedom
Pidgee, because you’re mine” (Ash Catchem to Pidgee, “Pokémon,
I Choose You,” episode 1) |
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[10] The “child”
which Deleuze and Guattari refer to is the same “child” towards
whom Pokémon is directed. Rather than think in terms of years
lived, although this childishness certainly demonstrates generational features,
the new child is born of the coupling of technology and biology which is
alluded to in both Pokémon’s form and content. The atrophy
that follows the trainer-pokeball-pokémon assemblage, in which the
pokémon are biotechnical extensions of the body’s own capabilities,
produce an infantilization that sees its greatest fulfillment in what Virilio
describes as: “No future – the eternal childhood of the Japanese
‘otakus’ of the eighties – refusing to wake up to a life
by leaving the world of the digital imagination, by exiting from manga land”
(The Information Bomb 94-5). This bodily “youthfulness”
which is accompanied by the psychological youthfulness of consumer culture
potentially positions all subjects to be victimized by the “nomadic
child stealers,” but hardly in the conventional sense. Instead, the
theft will be accomplished through the stealing enacted in the trainer-pokémon
relationship in which childlike pokémon are abducted by nomadic trainers.
The “children” of today are increasingly snatched up and nomadized
within themselves, enacting the self-reflexive process of becoming-“war
machine.” This deterritorilization breaks down the boundaries between
the State and the war machine, not through an appropriation of a version
of the war machine by the State, but through a process of double-becoming
in which the State itself (as an organization of subjects) is deterritorialized
through the “becoming-imperceptible” (through bodily atrophy)
and the “becoming-animal”(the radical deterritorialization of
the biotechnical body) of its subjects. The State itself is the source and
container of the barbarian horde, the nomad is no longer outside. |
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[11] This new nomadicapitalist,
emblametized in the person of the child, finds its expression recent surges
and recessions in global capital and new treaties and associations of “States”
in which states effectively abolish themselves in their own self-interest.
The new barbarian, in search of smooth economic spaces to roam freely, is
the embodiment of a sort of guerilla capitalist, with no allegiances, no
ideology to guide or threaten, a mobile phone, and laptop. This new war
machine will itself steal children, always colonizing, in search of “the
special body, in particular the slave-infidel-foreigner, [...] the one
who becomes a soldier and believer while remaining deterritorialized”
(D+G 393). The new child-capitalist will not be without his/her pokémon. |
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