Growing up in Celebration, Florida, was great, ain’t no other way to say it. I was a mile down the road from Walt Disney World and living in the middle of Florida. While every child feels like the world is their playground, my experience with the concept was a bit more real than usual. Unlike most children, my imagination was supplemented in the real world by theme parks near my house, the beach a few hours away, and, courtesy of the 21st century, a firehose of entertainment.
But of course, not everything could be endless leisure. I still had to go to school and I did so at a Montessori School. Many fond memories were formed there and it was objectively the right place for me, even if I didn’t appreciate it at the time. Among the memories form there, and most relevant to this blog post, was what I did every morning.
After arriving to school, we students would duly troop across the street to a playground where we had an hour to do whatever we wanted. One of the activities we created was a game called “Throw Up”. The rules, if my rusting brain can remember them, were fairly simple. There were two teams who stood on either side of the monkey bars. We had a ball, usually a soccer ball, and we threw it up (get it?) over the monkey bars. But the ball could not hit the ground. If it did…the player was out. First team out of players lost the game.
If I flagged down my ex-classmates, I doubt they’d remember the game the same way, but that doesn’t matter: the game was created spontaneously based on the equipment we had.
This is the fate of most games. A fun idea whose rules are created based on what’s in front of you. When something new comes along, the game changes or disappears. I know this because Throw Up has, to the best of my knowledge, not taken the world by storm.
However, some games do catch on, perhaps exponentially so. One of them, obviously, is Pokémon, subject of this blog series.
Pokémon’s video game sales, never mind the card game, runs into the tens of millions. The antics me and my schoolmates used to regulate Throw Up—where the official policy is ‘Make It Up As We Go’—won’t do. No, no, Pokémon need something else, something a bit more formal. In the same way a small enough tribe of people can afford to adopt a Lord of The Flies-style government, but when the tribe gets big enough everyone needs Hobbes’s Leviathan, so too does Pokémon need a way to boot its tournaments into reality with an official series of rules.
Which leads me to the following document.
What Is This Thing?
Ladies and gentleman, say hello to the Play! Pokémon Video Game Rules, Format, and Penalty Guidelines. Read it here. To anyone who is not a Pokémon fan, the document in the link is about as fascinating as the construction permits of a Welsh office building. Even for Pokémon fans, this document might be a tad boring because it’s little more than the Terms & Conditions for entering a competitive tournament.
Over the course of its 24-pages, players entering competitive matches officially hosted by the Pokémon Company will need to familiarise themselves with the rules of team construction, held item limits, and checking which Pokémon are permitted to be used on a team. Certain Pokémon might be excluded from tournaments hosted during certain time period.
Understanding these rules and following them is not the same as following a government advice guide on saving more money. Breaking the rules in an official Event Space comes with real penalties with varying degrees of severity.
The guide recognises this. It says, “Play! Pokémon Professors [event staff] should seek to create fun, safe, and non-stressful play experiences for our players. For this reason, the application of penalties should be handled in the most polite and discreet manner possible.“ What makes this guide even more self-aware is its awareness of who these penalties are being applied to: “As a general rule, Judges should take an especially easy approach with the Junior age division. Younger players are often prone to make mistakes due to lack of experience or from the intimidation of playing in a competitive environment. Pokémon Organized Play recommends starting with a Caution for most penalties applied to players in the Junior age division.“
Most penalties, though cloaked in Pokémon specific language, are no different from the usual anti-cheating rules found in most board games tournaments. For instance, a player may not look at their opponent’s game system, called “screen peaking”, a clear form of cheating.
Other penalties reveal just how “official” these tournaments are. For example, severe penalties where the recommended sentence include “game loss”, aka immediate forfeiture of the match, include “showing up late to a match” and “playing the incorrect opponent”.
Reading the penalty section can leave you feeling like you’re reading the criminal code rather than a user manual because when these rules are enforced, they’re as good as the law.
Cool, Cool, But Explain Something To Me: Why Is Any Of This Interesting?
The rules themselves are not interesting; it’s the fact they need to exist at all that’s interesting. Their existence shows not only how enormous the Pokémon franchise has become, but how sophisticated this one aspect of Pokémon has become.
The Pokémon Company has incrementally created a proper e-sport with the addition of each subsequent Pokémon game in the franchise as a side activity. Competitive Pokémon matches are completely optional. A Pokémon player can play every single game in the franchise without ever needing to interact with these competitive rules. A competitive team is not necessary to beat the single-player campaign of any Pokémon game. And of course, these rules have no bearing on the card game (that has its own set of rules), the anime series, or any of the other merchandise attached to the franchise. But for the subsegment of video game players who decide to create competitive teams after the main story’s completion, the seriousness by which they engage in competitive matches requires these rules.
The mechanics introduced in the franchise over the years—from Abilities to held items to one-off generational features like Mega Evolution—have slowly stacked up to create a multiplayer game as sophisticated as chess. Official chess tournaments are also no joke, requiring a series of implementations that two people playing a game in their homes would never need. The rules in the above document are merely the endpoint of that evolution.
In order for rules like these to be necessary, you need to have 1) a game in the goldilocks zone between simple and complex 2) a zero-sum outcome where one person wins 3) a large enough player base whereby there will inevitably be cheaters, hackers and other nefarious individuals 4) a strategic element whereby the results of the game are mostly if not completely determined by the actions undertaken by players with their own agency and 5) the ability to replicate all of the above on a large scale.
Only sports and large-scale board games like chess are able to pull this off, and those entities have a value economy in the tens of millions attached to them. Pokémon is clearly one of these extremely high-value games.
Conclusion and One Question
Sports, especially massive sports that have thousands of dedicated players, millions of fans, and more money than the GDP of Slovenia, have a unique cultural status. They feel like the common property of all. Amateurs can play them in their backyards while pros play them at an elite level in massive stadiums.
As these official rules for Pokémon reveal, this franchise has become such a sport, albeit an e-sport.
However, the similarities to sports don’t end there. Sports feel like the common property of all because they are not attached to a singular inventor. Who invented baseball? Who invented football? The answers don’t come as easily as the answer to the question who invented the lightbulb? Sometimes, there is no inventor. I’ve often asked sports fans this question: “are you not curious where this game came from?”
Pokémon is the same and I would argue answering the question is more important. Pokémon didn’t emerge spontaneously like sports; it was invented. It was—is—an idea, an idea worth 95 billion dollars.
This idea is so intellectually rich that its application demands a really technical rule manual for a small subset of players that gets updated every few months. For competitive players, that manual matters a great deal.
And to every single one of them, I ask: “Are you not curious as to where this idea came from?”