by Braydon Beaulieu
Fire Blast. Thundershock. Giga Drain. Psybeam. These words drip with nostalgia for those who played – or still play, in my case, as with many others – the Pokémon games. They are attacks that expel elemental energy from the bodies of creatures that populate the regions of one of Nintendo’s most successful game franchises – a franchise that has blossomed into card games, television shows, films, manga, et cetera. Pokémon pervades the imaginations of people around the globe, and not simply children. You’d be hard-pressed to find a gamer who wasn’t at least cursorily familiar with the mechanics of Pokémon. Catch ’em, train ’em, become a master. The player improves his or her team of pocket monsters by battling them against other creatures with increasingly powerful attacks and evolutionary forms.
The term used to describe unclean, out-of-control bodies is “abject,” a term that points to such bodies as peripheral and marginalised. Bringing representations of such bodies into critical focus can help readers, viewers, and players evaluate texts that represent bodies in different ways. It seems to me that Pokémon’s core gameplay revolves around abject bodies, bodies out of control; and yet the way these abject bodies are represented and treated in the games does not align with the moral thrust of the narrative, an ethic of partnership and equality. In A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory , Raman Selden et al. provide a simple but succinct explanation of abjection: “The ‘abject’ is what the subject seeks to expel in order to achieve an independent entity, but cannot, since the body is unable to cease both taking in and expelling ‘waste’ (body fluids, excrement, bile, vomit, mucus). The abject is therefore the troubled and recurrent marker bordering the clean and unclean, the self and other” (133). The abject, in the world of Pokémon, is the elemental energy the creatures produce and expel from their bodies. It’s the player’s job to capture and control these bodies and the energy they contain (and expel), to colonise Pokémon into teams of fighters.
And make no mistake, it’s battling that’s at the core of Pokémon. For all the games’ attempts to deflect concern over cockfighting with electric mice and sentient chandeliers – integration of Pokéathlons and pageantry Contests, narratives sermonising about partnership – it’s gameplay mechanics that register most with players. And in terms of those mechanics, it’s an uncommon occurrence in the games to befriend a Pokémon before adding it to your collection. In fact, most times this happens it’s outside the bounds of the game itself: Pokémon downloaded via Wi-Fi, joined up with on HeartGold/Soulsilver’s PokéWalker, or befriended on the website for the Pokémon Dream World in Black/White. In the games, the primary mode of “befriending” Pokémon is by dominating them in combat with creatures already under your control. And then containing them inside balls. In this light, Pokémon seems to be all about bringing abject bodies that are out of control under control.
Now, I’m not claiming that this is intensely problematic in itself or that Nintendo needs to be held accountable for marginalisation – Pokémon is and likely will remain one of my favourite game franchises and there’s much to be admired about the games. I’m simply performing a reading of something I see underlying Pokémon: a discord between the core gameplay mechanics and the ethics the series forwards through its narratives.
But those same mechanics have barely changed over the years. It wouldn’t be difficult for someone who last played a Pokémon game in the Red/Blue/Yellow era to pick up the Black or White versions and simply play. Little has changed. But Black and White were Nintendo’s attempts to revitalise a series that, according to many, has grown slightly stale. The two newest games, however, did little to revolutionise the series, because Nintendo chose to revamp the graphics and creature design, and add three-on-three battles. These changes do little but stretch new masks over Pokémon’s safe, tried-and-true formula.
Perhaps revisiting how the player interacts with Pokémon is key to jump-starting the series in a way that graphics overhauls can’t accomplish. Perhaps attention to the undertones of controlling abjection can point toward new gameplay mechanics that would genuinely change the face of Pokémon, would create a game in which the abject body is truly valuable in itself and not simply as a weapon or a collectible trophy. What if Pokémon practiced the parity it preached? What if electrocuting Pidgeys into smoking pulps weren’t the only way to gain experience in the game (short of stuffing your team’s faces with Rare Candy, a tactic that doesn’t much pay off in the long run anyway, as evolutionary experts will tell you). What if you could add Pokémon to your party in in-game ways unattached to battling? In short, what if the gameplay mechanics of Pokémon were extended in ways that genuinely displace Clefairy-on-Bulbasaur violence as the central focus of the games?
This is, no doubt, a relatively radical idea. I suspect nearly everyone who plays or has played Pokémon will have a strong opinion about it. But through examining the rhetoric of control in the Pokémon games, the mechanics of domination, it’s clear that there’s a pretty strong dissonance between what Pokémon wants to be about, and what people experience when they play the games. If the Pokémon series truly wants to revel in the intrinsic value of abject bodies, perhaps it needs to incorporate those bodies in ways that suggest friendship and equality, rather than capture and control.
