Simon Dor is an Associate Professor at Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue, teaching in the game development program in Montréal, Québec. He first played Pokémon games during the pandemic with his children Laurent and Thierry. You can find him on: TikTok , Threads, Twitter

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In Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! (Game Freak, 2018a) and Let’s Go, Pikachu! (Game Freak, 2018b), the main player-character is a Pokémon trainer on a journey to become a Pokémon League Champion. For such a quest, they must be the very best trainer, practicing their critters to fight efficiently; the player themselves have to fulfill that role by playing the game and advancing the narrative. Despite the fact that the player and the player-character have parallel goals, these goals are not completely overlapping: the player-character wants to be an exceptional trainer, while the player wants to beat the game. Although their goals have similarities in that they both are based on some sort of ludic competition, the campaign of Pokémon: Let’s Go, like the campaign of most Pokémon games, is a narrative device and not a competitive exercise per se: players follow the goal of their character to become an expert trainer, rather than develop their own expertise as competitive players. In this case, the depiction of a game within another game—the Pokémon League in Pokémon—is instrumental in setting a fictional universe rather than being played for its own sake. Since being an exceptional player is, by definition, an exception, I will argue that depicting a game within another game in Pokémon’s campaign is a way to express the ethos of exceptionalism in a competitive context to a wide audience. To put it more simply: the emphasis on the feeling of exceptionalism both through gameplay and narrative hides the strings through which they operate. Therefore, this article seeks to explain the relationship between the media itself—the video game and its conventions—and what it depicts to raise awareness on its hegemonic ideological discourse: that everyone can be the very best.     

The Pokémon League in Pokémon: Let’s Go is akin to what Jesper Juul (2005) calls a staged game: “a special case where an abstract or somewhat representational game is played in a more elaborate world” (pp. 132–133). For example, in Magic: The Gathering (MicroProse, 1997), the player-character is a mage who will have to fight for their survival in a hostile world where battles are enacted through the eponymous trading card game. Similarly, in the adventure mode of Puyo Puyo Tetris (O-Two/Sonic Team, 2014), each stage is embedded in a story where the characters must clear tetrominoes or critters, but the role they play in the narrative shifts between a friendly challenge and an alien menace. In both these cases, the embedded game is symbolic: specific game rules represent the fictional combat.

In Let’s Go, the staged game is fictionally embedded. When two trainers fight, they play by the rules of a turn-based classical Japanese role-playing game (JRPG). With very few exceptions, every fictional opponent that the player meets has less Pokémon in their team than the player. One would imagine that if someone agrees to play a game, they will want to play with the same constraints and starting conditions to make it fair. It is as if, in a game of chess, one opponent had only half the pieces of the other, and everyone would accept that as normal play. Moreover, AI characters will choose to send their Pokémon in a predefined order until they are knocked out, even though their fighters are weak against peculiar attack types and the wise strategy would be to swap them. If the player loses a fight, they can prepare their revenge with Pokémon types more adapted to an opponent that will simply repeat their strategy.

The narrative context does not change these unbalanced conditions: enemy non-player characters (NPCs) often play without using the maximum Pokémon capacity (six) whether the combat is in a competition or against a criminal organization such as Team Rocket. There is no narrative reason for an evil trainer to respect the rules of a fair Pokémon fight—such as sending only one Pokémon at the time—if they have malevolent intentions. As such, the turn-based role-playing game (RPG) rules represent any combat in the fictional universe, whether it is a formal competition or an hostile confrontation. Turn-based battles stand for any conflict in this universe.

A Decoding Game Depicting a Foreseeing Game

The thoughts of Alexander Galloway will help us understand the relationship between the turn-based battles and the diegetic fights in the game’s campaign. In his 2006 essay “Allegories of Control”, Galloway argues that contrary to simulation in cinema or literature, games are all about action, and thus they simulate a process or actions (war, combat, competition, etc.) through means quite similar to their referent (game actions). A process of internalization that Galloway calls the “gamic algorithm” implies that players must “know the system. And thus to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm …” (2006, p. 91). The actions represented in the game can be simultaneously interpreted as the action in the logic of the game itself, and as fictional actions ideologically charged considering what they represent (2006, p. 105). A Pokémon fight is thus as much a game device as a fictional combat.

Yet, the fact that everything in a game can be reduced to numbers and systemic relationships in an algorithm formalizes them, presenting video games as robust systems “that can subsume all comers under the larger mantle of continuity and universalism” (Galloway 2006, p. 101). In a strategy game like Civilization (MPS Labs, 1991), units and cities represent a society, and this society and its components are reduced to their value as part of a game system. In a similar way, in classical RPGs, conventional turn-based combat represents in a formalized way a fight that would probably be more chaotic. In Pokémon, the actions of the player correspond to the logic of a single-player turn-based RPG rather than present the complexity of what it would mean to nurture and take care of living creatures while training them for competition.

This competition embedded in the narrative presents itself as a balanced agonistic confrontation, while it follows a game logic of decoding the opponents to find the best course of action. It is a game following what I call the decoding paradigm. This paradigm is when a player has to optimize their own actions to counter the AI opponent’s patterns (see Dor, 2024, p. 10). Most boss fights are great examples: you know the opponent follows specific patterns, and it follows them even if it is very predictable. Foreseeing, on the other hand, implies that the opponents play by the same rules as the player: their action can be foreseen since they follow a shared and known set of game rules (p. 10-11). In chess, the opponent’s rooks move the same way as the player’s ones. Competitive multiplayer Pokémon works as a foreseeing game: each player knows which Pokémon their opponent can have and respond with their own accordingly. In single-player mode, on the other hand, the opponents are designed to be decoded, with their attacks devised in a way that gives more chances to the player to win. 

Still, the game’s fiction suggests that each trainer plays by the same rules: catching critters, training them, and sending them strategically against an opponent. If the character and the player are both playing a game, why is Pokémon: Let’s Go designed as a decoding game rather than as a foreseeing game? Why pretend to play one game in fiction while playing another one? Which discourse is conveyed through these games?

The Ethos of Pokémon

When looking at the ethos of the Pokémon universe, this shift between two different games can be explained. Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca use the expression “ethos” to define the fictional expectations, mood, or values conveyed through a mediated world (Klastrup & Tosca, 2004). Sébastien Genvo (2016) coins the expression “ludic ethos” to specify how a game invites us to play according to specific modalities. Any given game genre or universe establishes a certain set of expectations that defines it and sets a certain coherence in the themes or in the mechanics. 

The ethos of the Pokémon universe insists on the relationship built between the trainer and their trainees. In the anime, for instance, when Damian abandons his Charmander in episode 11, his peers strongly shame him. Similarly, it is the love between Ash and his critters that saves him in Pokémon: The First Movie (Yuyama & Haigney, 1998), which the artificially created Mewtwo did not understand. In Pokémon the Movie: The Power of Us (Yajima, 2018), the collaboration between humans and Pokémon is at the heart of the celebration of the Wind Festival of Fula City. This ethos is manifested differently but consistently throughout the movies and anime.

Let’s Go, on the other hand, insists on the idea that the player must capture more Pokémon than they can train. As such, it is a strange case in the series that helps underline its conventions. To multiply their gain in experience points, the player must capture dozens of Pokémon of the same species. They can then transfer any duplicate of the same Pokémon to Professor Oak to get candies, which will upgrade the precious critters they choose to keep. It is never explained what a professor would do with such a huge quantity of Pokémon in captivity, and how it would affect the region’s ecosystem. While capturing several members of the same Pokémon species is normal in every Pokémon game (Surman, 2009, p. 172), Let’s Go gives bonuses to these combos. It seems like the game does not follow the      ethos of the anime, focusing on gameplay bonuses rather than relationships with animal companions.

Yet, this difference can be explained by another aspect of the Pokémon ethos that is also common throughout video game culture: exceptionalism. The narrative of the Pokémon TV series adapted from the first iterations of the video game series revolves around Ash, a pretentious but determined young boy who claims he will be a master trainer. The first phrase from the opening credits in English clearly states this ethos: “I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was.” Ash is inexplicably skilled at Pokémon training without many details as to what the needed skillset is. The video games Pokémon Sword (Game Freak, 2019b) and Shield (Game Freak, 2019a) push this exceptionalist ethos further: arena fights are represented as sportive competitions attended by massive crowds and the goal for the character is to rise to the status of a star.

The narrative of the Pokémon TV series is one of exceptionalism: the trainer is the exception. Of course, by definition, millions of Pokémon players cannot each be the very best. In the narrative of the single-player mode, every player should feel to be the exception in their own playthrough. In that sense, the game is the narrative embodiment of the desire of a young trainer who will reach their goal, rather than an authentic simulation for players to seek their own expertise. Through winning a decoding game, they can fulfill the narrative goals of their character to win at a foreseeing game.

I am not arguing that it is aesthetically or ethically wrong to substitute foreseeing play with decoding play. After all, video games can convey discourses and express ideas or emotions without mimicking their real-world counterpart. As with a typical JRPG where the player-characters have modest starts but end up challenging God-like figures, Pokémon is a narrative of a young trainer who dreams of being a master and our journey as players is to feel emotions with them through fictional play. While most JRPGs stage warfare combats and physical confrontation, the narrative of Pokémon stages a competition not far from the video game itself. The feeling of exceptionalism experienced in the staged competition can more easily be translated in the turn-based game, thus glorifying the victory without acknowledging the privilege through which this victory was made possible in the first place—the fact that we are not playing the same game. To deconstruct the process of mediatization and the ideology it helps build is, I argue, one of the key social roles of game and media studies.

References

Dor, S. (2024). StarCraft: Legacy of the Real-Time Strategy. University of Michigan Press. 

Galloway, A. R. (2006). Allegories of Control. In Gaming: Essays On Algorithmic Culture (pp. 85–106). University of Minnesota Press.

Galloway, A. R. (2007). StarCraft, or, balance. Grey Room, 28, 86–107. 10.2307/20442767.

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Game Freak. (2019a). Pokémon Shield [Nintendo Switch]. Nintendo.

Game Freak. (2019b). Pokémon Sword [Nintendo Switch]. Nintendo.

Genvo, S. (2016). Defining and designing expressive games: The case of Keys of a gamespace. Kinephanos, hors-série, 90–106.

Juul, J. (2005). Half-real: Video games between real rules and fictional worlds. MIT Press.

Klastrup, L., & Tosca, S. (2004). Transmedial worlds—Rethinking cyberworld design. 409–416.

Masuda, J., Sugimori, K., & Tajiri, S. (Directors). (1998, September 8). Pokémon. Pokémon USA, 4 Kids Entertainment, Creatures.

MicroProse. (1997). Magic: The Gathering [PC].

O-Two/Sonic Team. (2014). Puyo Puyo Tetris.

Surman, D. (2009). Pokémon 151. Complicating Kawaii. In L. Hjorth & D. Chan (Eds.), Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific (pp. 158–178). Routledge.

Yajima, T. (Director). (2018, November 24). Pokémon the Movie: The Power of Us [Animation, Action, Adventure]. Oriental Light and Magic (OLM), Pikachu Project, TV Tokyo.

Yuyama, K., & Haigney, M. (Directors). (1998). Pokémon: The First Movie [Animation, Action, Adventure]. Kids’ WB, Oriental Light and Magic (OLM), Shogakukan Production.