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Kids Still Playing Pokemon Like It's 1999

Posted by timothy on from the wait-it's-not-1999-yet? dept.

theodp writes "In 1999, TIME's cover warned readers to Beware of Pokemon ('For many kids it's now an addiction: cards, video games, toys, a new movie. Is it bad for them?'). But Pokemon wasn't as easily felled as Lehman or Bear Stearns. Thirteen years later, 16-year-old Manoj Sunny has his eye on a Pokemon world title, having earned the chance to travel to The Big Island with 35 fellow Americans for the 2012 Pokemon Video Game World Championships, which will be held Aug. 10-12. Sunny, who also captains his school's chess team, credits his success to a good memory, intuition, daily practice, the use of an online simulator, and a competitive attitude ('I hate losing. Once I lost, I needed to get better.')"

13 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Not surprised by vux984 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    My kids both like pokemon. I don't blame them... its collectible, and collecting is fun.

    What did we collect when I was a kid? Hockey cards? Baseball cards? Same idea but a hell of a lot less fun. Especially if you didn't really care about the sport...

    I'm vaguely surprised that Pokemon hasn't been replaced by something newer, but I'm not surprised that its still around. Nintendo has done well with the marketing.

    1. Re:Not surprised by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Interesting

      ... its collectible, and collecting is fun.

      Collecting was never fun for me. I never saw the point. When I was a kid, my dad tried to get me interested in coin collecting. He saw it as good "father and son time", but I hated it. We could have gone hiking or fishing, he could have taught me something useful. He was an electrical engineer, but he never taught me anything about electronics (I learned it all on my own). But instead of any of that, we spend our time going through bags of pennies looking for a rare 1939D. Bleh.

      Now that I have kids of my own, we do active outdoor stuff, we build things, we do science experiments. My daughter has a great collection of Barbie shoes, but I was not involved in that (other than as a source of funding).

  2. Aside from the games' rules themselves... by Pluvius · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The only important difference between competitive Pokemon and competitive chess is that chess is old and respected.

    Rob

    1. Re:Aside from the games' rules themselves... by King+InuYasha · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Perhaps these other games should be respected as well. They offer more complex rules and require far more difficult strategic thinking than classic games like Chess and Checkers.

      Personally, I love the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG battle system. It's very complex and offers a wide range of valid strategies to actually win a match. Pokémon offers a similarly complex system, too. In a way, these games have invigorated the flagging card game genre.

      While I have no proof to back this up, I suspect that games like these that were popular in the 1990s and early 2000s are the reason why casual puzzle and strategy games are far more popular on computer platforms.

      Of course, none of these games get any respect. Most "adults" denigrate these games and believe they are worthless and/or childish. Many of these games are great for mental development in a multitude of areas.

      For example, you may have not really thought of the Pokémon TCG as a way for children to develop a good understanding of economics, but it does[1].

      [1]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/717948.stm

    2. Re:Aside from the games' rules themselves... by Pluvius · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're confusing Pokemon with Magic. Also, if chess was invented in the 90s, I can almost guarantee you'd see similar bullshit marketing tactics.

      Rob

    3. Re:Aside from the games' rules themselves... by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Perhaps these other games should be respected as well. They offer more complex rules and require far more difficult strategic thinking than classic games like Chess and Checkers.

      Personally, I love the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG battle system.

      No. The benefit of chess is there is no corporate marketing campaign associated with it, and nobody owns the intellectual property.

      The more I think about it, the fact that chess is public domain makes in infinitely better than any game like Yu-Gi-Oh! that belongs to someone.

      And it's not just because Chess is free and you have to pay, at some level, to play Yu-Gi-Oh!. It's because chess belongs to everyone, to humanity, and I can go back and re-play the games played by chess masters 100 years ago and STILL not have to pay someone royalities. Two men of distinctly different backgrounds can play chess while incarcerated, in separate cells, as long as they can communicate somehow, either by yelling out the moves or by giving the moves to the screw patrolling the cellblock.

      There are volumes and volumes of chess theory and chess strategy and chess philosophy. I can ride my bike over to North Avenue Beach and play chess, right now, with a refugee from sub-Saharan Africa or an immigrant from the Ukraine (and get beaten by both, even though I've got a ~1700 Elo rating). You'll find retired Romance Language professors and backward hat & baggy pants-wearing teenagers playing one another for a buck a game.

      And there is something comforting about playing a game that has changed very little for the better part of a millennium.

      No matter how you look at it, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon will be an historical footnote when chess is still being played off-planet. They might be great games, but their proprietary nature and cultural framework keep them locked down.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    4. Re:Aside from the games' rules themselves... by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Funny

      I lost all interest in chess after 1997, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

      Princess Diana's death really hit you hard, didn't it?

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    5. Re:Aside from the games' rules themselves... by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't fully agree with that... computers have done a great deal to expand the realm of chess theory, and I expect to see chess become a "solved" game during my lifetime.

      It's already the case that even a low-powered computer system can play at the Grandmaster level and beyond.

      Does the fact that a car can go over 200mph stop people from running the 100 yard dash?

      Just because a machine can perform a particular task better than a human does not make any human competition in that task meaningless. A computer can fly a plane much faster and more perfectly than a man, but people still want to be pilots.

      The idea that computers "solving" chess will destroy the game is ridiculous. I mean, a stick of dynamite has been able to dislodge a castled king more effectively than a two-bishops attack since the 19th century, but people still play chess.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
  3. 'I hate losing" by ed1park · · Score: 5, Funny

    Pokemon championships? You're already lost.

    1. Re:'I hate losing" by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ... posted the Slashdotter on a Saturday.

      --

      "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

  4. What, Pokemans Card/Video Games? by CanHasDIY · · Score: 3, Funny

    Meh.

    Wake me when we start genetically engineering the little bastards.

    --
    An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
  5. Re:Get off my lawn. by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 5, Funny

    Things are a tad different now.

    *cough*ponies*cough*

  6. Misleading, but true to a degree by Archenoth · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well... Even to this day Pokemon is the second best selling franchise out there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Selling_Video_Game_Franchises

    The 36 people in this article isn't a very large number... A lot of the people that play Pokemon today are actually in our 20s. Addictive? Perhaps a little. But the games have gotten a lot more elaborate than they have in the past. It's more than just collecting them all now, it's about the literally hundreds of things to do in each of the worlds, the oh-so difficult Battle Frontier which very few have beaten, the Breeding to get Pokemon with higher stats and moves not normally known by a particular species, EV training, the mini games, random quests, all of the post-game quests, harvest-moon style farming, and of course, catching them all... Not to mention all of the new multiplayer aspects, like the launcher battles in Black and White (The newest games) which add a whole new depth to battles.

    tl;dr I am a Pokemon nut, this article misleads about the general state of the Pokemon franchise, and the age a majority of us are.

    --
    The arch foe.