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Kids Still Playing Pokemon Like It's 1999
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.')"
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I'm vaguely surprised that Pokemon hasn't been replaced by something newer, but I'm not surprised that its still around.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.
Pokemon championships? You're already lost.
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.
Things are a tad different now.
*cough*ponies*cough*