Among the Pokémon franchise’s most signature features is the Typing system, by which every unique Pokémon creature designed is assigned one or two ‘Types’ out of a possible eighteen. No Pokémon lacks a Type and no Pokémon has more than two. Understanding the Type chart is crucial for new Pokémon fans as it is the game’s central mechanic. But Types are more than a marketing stunt or a flashy gimmick to make Pokémon characters stand out from traditional video-game monsters. They are, instead, a core reason for Pokémon’s success, and a masterclass in creating and executing a ruleset.
We briefly covered Types in the article about introducing Pokémon to new players. However, what we did NOT do was discuss the implications of the Typing system on the franchise’s success, for I believe the Typing system is the bulwark between a family-friendly game for all ages and a brutal animal-fighting travesty. But why?
There’s a two-pronged answer.
Prong 1: Intuitiveness
Firstly, the Typing system is shockingly intuitive and by extension, simple. Charles Darwin once noted, “Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write [no kidding on that last one—EN].” Darwin’s point was that some things come to people easily without training or education, as in the case of a child who picks up a human language by walking through the world. In other words, these activities are intuitive. On the other hand, some tasks require formalised training because they are not intuitive, such as baking a bread. If you don’t follow the recipe, the bread will burn.
The way Types interact in Pokémon games are closer to the ‘intuitive’ side of the spectrum and thus are easier for new players to figure out after picking up their first Pokémon game. Furthermore, the explanations for why each Type is Super Effective/Not Very Effective are drawn on real-world relationships, allowing the player to bring their own understanding of the world into the games with them.
To see this play out, let’s briefly look some Type relationships. To keep things simple, we’ll use the three starter Types, Grass, Fire, and Water.
In the games, Water Type Pokémon will take Super Effective damage from Grass and Electric Type Pokémon; they will take Not Very Effective damage from Fire, Water, Steel, and Ice. The reasons why make sense and are, crucially, easy to imagine. Why is Water weak to Grass? Well, every time you water the plants in your back garden, the plants get stronger and grow even faster. Clearly water won’t slow them down. But what about Electric types? Well, water is a conductor of electricity in the real world, hence the reason your lifeguard closes the pool upon hearing thunder in the distance.
But what about the Water Type’s strengths? Water resisting Fire is pretty easy to understand because everyone knows what happens when the fire department rocks up to a burning building: they pour water on it. As for Water resisting Water, well that makes because add more water to a lake isn’t going to shrink the lake. Ditto for putting a bag of ice-cubes in the lake, hence the resistance to Ice. Steel is the least intuitive of the bunch, but it’s not a big imaginative leap to guess what happens when an industrial-grade water cutter slices through sheet metal.
This same logic applies to all of the Types to varying degrees in explaining their strengths and weaknesses. Moving over to Grass Types, they take Not Very Effective damage from Ground, Water, Grass and Electric Type Pokémon. Again, your imagination won’t have to work hard to deduce why. For instance, your grassy front lawn is growing on a patch of dirt aka the ground, hence the resistance to Ground Types. Ditto for the already discussed Water type. Grass Types resisting their fellow Grass Type Pokémon makes sense because, as with Water, adding Grass to Grass doesn’t reduce the amount of Grass. And resisting Electric-types is related to the reason Electric-Types are weak to Ground Types: when lightning hits the ground, it loses all its power and it’s not like grass conducts electricity.
But on the flip-side, Grass Types takes Super Effective damage from Fire, Flying, Bug, Poison, and Ice Types Regarding the Fire and Ice weaknesses, anybody from California can tell you why fire obliterates the grass around them in the same way Floridians like me can tell you that our citrus crop freezes and dies when snow gets on them. As for the Bug and Poison weaknesses, the logic is, as ever, quite easy: bugs eat flowers and grass, and grass will die if sprayed with poisonous chemicals. Grass’s weakness to Flying Types seems unintuitive, but what happens a flower gets caught in a windstorm or finds itself on the receiving end of a bird beak?
Rounding out the final start Type, Fire, the real world parallels remain as consistent as ever. Fire takes Not Very Effective damage from Bug, Steel, Grass, Fire, Ice, and Fairy. Why is that? Well, what happens when you put a bug, a grass patch, a slice of sheet metal, and an ice cube in an Australian wildfire? They either melt, burn up or disintegrate, giving fire the clear upper hand. The Fairy Type weakness is the weird one because Fairy is the newest Type, but the logic is similar to the Grass Type weakness; fairies in mythology are associated with nature and don’t do well in forest fires. By contrast, Fire takes Super Effective damage from Water, Rock, and Ground type moves. Water for fairly obvious reasons, but what about Rock and Ground? Well, why do firefighters dig a rocky trench to stop a wildfire from spreading further? Because the rocky ground absorbs the fire and slows it down.
All of the imaginative exercises I’ve elaborated on require a person to simply exist in the world to make the logical connections between them. No first-time player is left out which is why changes to the Type chart have been sparing during Pokémon long history.
But though the intuitive nature of Pokémon Types matters for chaperoning new players into the game, that doesn’t explain why the Type relationships helped Pokémon become so successful. For that, we need the second prong of the answer.
Prong 2: Universality
When it comes to the acceptability of various behaviours, cultural norms are often the difference between an established right and a taboo. For example, in the West, a person taking off their shoe and raising it in the air towards some other person looks very stupid and is probably innocuous. However, in Islamic cultures, raising your shoe at someone can be highly offensive due to cultural restrictions on showing your feet. Of all cultural barriers, different languages are perhaps the most salient. An English speaker and a Mandarin speaker can’t understand the babble come out of the other’s mouth.
But though difference between cultures can be stark, there are some elements to humanity that are universal, shared by everybody. For instance, vomiting a half-eaten burrito on your subway neighbour is absolutely taboo regardless if you’re in New York, Paris, London or Tokyo. Sure you can do it, but it would draw immediate censure.
Universal things link all peoples together and the list of them is endless. We all live on Earth, we all need to eat and drink if we want to survive and so on.
Also on the list of universal things is the aforementioned intuitiveness of the Pokémon Type chart relationship. The way Types interact in the game do not require an understanding of certain cultural norms for players to figure them out. The elements of the eighteen Types are more or less applicable to all persons because of their empirical character. For example, pouring a bucket of water on a campfire will douse the flame everywhere on earth. It’s not like, for example, Koreans fire departments battle Seoul’s house fires by throwing sand packets at the building because water somehow doesn’t put out fires in Korea. Every Pokémon fan can draw on a shared intuitive understanding of the world to play the games.
But making the Type chart universalist in nature was a crucial to Pokémon’s success because Types are the central mechanic by which one understands how the game works. All Pokémon have a Type, all moves have a Type, and the Type effectiveness is foundation of all Pokémon battles. Playing the game without having knowledge of the Type chart is impossible. So by having that element of Pokémon intuitive to everybody, Pokémon’s creators widened their potential audience to include any interested person.
However, when it comes to generating interest, a game company isn’t sufficient. For that, we need to turn to Pokémon’s other key mechanic: their collectibility.