Pokemon was and still is a global media sensation that first swept childhood culture in the late nineties. The kids who are graduating from college now are the first post-Pokemon generation. These are kids who grew up with ubiquitous social gaming and convergent media as a central part of their peer culture.
After Mario, Pokemon is the second most successful gaming franchise ever*. Pokemon was a breakthrough media form in a number of ways. First, it created an integrated and synergistic relationship between analog and digital media, but in a way that positioned interactive gaming at the center of the transmedia enterprise.
More specifically, it placed portable gaming formats of game boy and trading cards at the center of game play. What’s so important about portable media is that it changes the kinds of environments, both physical and social, where gaming takes place. Gaming escapes the confines of the home, as kids carry their game boys in the car, to the park, or to school if they are allowed to. And this is not just about gaming infiltrating more and more physical settings, but about gaming infiltrating more social settings and relationships. Kids are gaming in more diverse places and with more diverse people when they are engaged with portable gaming media.
The other day, I was on a plane with my son, who was about seven at the time, and he was playing Mario Kart on his gameboy DS. The teenager in the row ahead of us peeked through the crack between the seats to see what he was up to, and pretty soon they were racing each other, connected through the wireless connection of the DS. The fact that they were both packing a portable, connectable game device changed the social space of opportunity for them – it allowed them to connect with a stranger and transform the space of the plane into a social gaming space. The DS could have been a deck of cards too – but the key feature of the media is that it is portable, and that it involves social interaction.
In addition to portability, the other important thing about Pokemon is that it developed a new format for the narrative content of a children’s series. The story centers on a game-like narrative based on the acquisition of Pokemon and knowledge about how Pokemon perform in battle. Currently there are almost 500 different Pokemon, each with it’s unique characteristics, powers, and ways of evolving. The series is not particularly complex in the ways we think of in traditional narrative, like character development and complex narrative arcs. But it is an incredibly rich knowledge ecology because of the sheer volume of esoteric content generated by the series. Traditional children’s narratives have a very limited set of characters – a good guy, a bad guy, a sidekick, maybe a love interest. Creators of children’s media assumed that kids couldn’t grasp a whole lot of complexity. Pokemon blew that assumption out of the water.
And it’s not just that there is a lot of content. The key is that the content is about gaming and social action – in other words, the content invites collection, strategizing, and trading activity. It is media that mobilizes kids to do something with it.
(via Mimi Ito: Media Literacy and Social Action in a Post-Pokemon World)