The Poke Man

What is the "soul" in videogames? A look into ontology with a slide of Freudian pokemon talk.

Pokémon, is a portmanteau of Pocket and Monster. You know what else is in your pocket? Experience

If you are in Times Square, ready for the rapture while the world looks and laughs at you, how do you make them see your pocket-experience?

Imagine you're at a bustling party, and there's a bunch of people talking simultaneously. Everyone has a voice, a hand in a pocket and a hand holding some wine.  Why is it that anything said there, we swallow with a dash of alcohol and a pinch of salt?

It’s hard to transfer this experience. It is however, easier to “sell it on” and then keep “selling it on”.

A popular watered down version of Hegelian recognition is the mirror test. A kid learns their place, himself and the chain around him by seeing himself in the mirror when their mother tells them that’s them.  What if that kid was in a hall of mirrors?

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There is of course, numerous reasons why Pokémon is the franchise it is today. However, though years of complaints and boycotts, it’s still attracting new players and kids. Even me, who didn’t play anything past Platinum, was taken aback by how unbelievably terrible but engaging Pokemon Scarlet was in all it’s 10fps glory. I had played Coromon, a deliberate adult clone game that was well made and presented but it turns out Pokémon without the PokeSoul is just a kind of mediocre RPG.  

Did you know Earthbound (Also known as àMOTHERß in Japan) is widely considered a timeless masterpiece despite having nothing but a mediocre RPG system underneath?

If you cut the umbilical cord of experience, your “reasonings” alone don’t become a replacement. This goes for remakes (and translations to a lesser extent). You might’ve become a mother over the original experience which now is considered childish and in need of elevating, but this leaves you standing alone from the original mother, the original experience that founded upon the game. Much of the hysteria of the state of translations in gaming is because of the translator imposing, rather phallically (ironically), over the original experience; as we’ll see later the “soul” of the game lies somewhere in the original “frame” of experience, and no matter how far down the degrading “frames” of experience a raw essence – or soul – can still be detected. Hence the outrage.

It is incredibly hard to share experience, Dainton’s VR4 and anal*tic philosophy of mind be damned. You can at least, transfer culture or history easier through a medium, sociologists be damned.

Nothing shows this oedipal frustration than the day a failed indie game developer snapped and drew a 4 part comic about quirky earthbound-likes. While it specifically targeted one popular game of the time, Omori, it absolutely completely missed the ball. This is the power of living on the full reason, to deconstruct but not to learn. The comic became a fun repost to try start fandom fights or create a spectacle of fighting about how their game is so different. Yet in all of this, cutting through the upper layers and struck gold, an anonymous poster commented something rather different seemingly understanding:

[link for readability]

See this is why Luhmann's ontology, with its emphasis on the recursive nature of communication and the autopoietic nature of social systems becomes so great with interactive mediums. From books to television, it is a one way, decaying transfer that requires some sort of social-communication for the experience to be received. The replication is always “infected” with the medium as you go down the relationship chain. Videogames transcend this in two ways that are both fascinating but curious when it comes to Pokemon and it’s clones. The mutualistic nature of the player and the game.

This idea of transferring something down the lines, beyond nostalgia (as we’ll cover later) is not new but it’s interesting when done in an interactive medium. Itoi preserves a mother-son relationship in a sense, handing the child bits of his knowledge and experience in a performance, ritual, teaching way. Gives players his memories of travelling, childhood wonder and all of his little criticisms of being a child so naïve. Not supposed to be nostalgia, but the warts and all interactional, inter-generational relationship. Your dad calls you every couple hours in-game to go touch grass and play. The shop items are esoteric, going only by barely readable names mimicking how a kid interacts with the newfangled world of economy, but also how adults end up scammed by doll’s house chair on ebay. The world of earthbound, or Mother (because eventually, a child must go back to its mother and rest.) is a pure expression of childhood imagination and exploring the world.

Satoshi Tajiri, a founder of Game freak, was worried at the time, that future children would not be able to catch bugs or roam the wilderness as he did. He didn’t have such a dim view of video games as Itoi, but wanted them to be a pocket. For what he would experience in catching bugs, in a type of childhood optimism world, is his pocket memories to you. Create a journey in a world specifically crafted to be a journey. You have to “grow up” in a sense and go through the adventure yourself, craft your personality with the game. EVs and IVs aren’t just wanking for sweaty neckbeards on Smogon, it’s to make you have a programmed “bond” with your Pokémon, for it to grow with you. To make a wild Pokémon become strong with you, and be unique to you. All the things modern MMOs did with their skill trees that took thousands of dollars’ worth of psychology reports, replicated by some raw experience. Pokémon’s innocent, optimistic world, where everything is fair game is a precise, deliberate fantasy. A snapshot of time of rural Japan.

But it is, to be for you, and you must craft it yourself. It can only ever be for you.

Both of these things however can get easily confused. You have built your own narrative with the tools you were given but that is yours, and yours itself. To pass this on, becomes an empty nostalgia that then instantly decays upon transferring.

The type of ontology that Pokémon and Earthbound exonerate is a direct connection between experience, medium and player. You cannot have this if there is a machine, rational, churned out bare bones experience. You cannot have this exact adventurous, snapshot of childhood optimism and belief of rural Japan, if you never had anything real in the first place. This is why you cannot rip the womb out of the mother and declare yourself the new mother, because you’ve lost the points in which your experience had touched any reality, Bear with me, let’s go a bit more technical.  

While videogames are different, in the transferal of information they do still fall under Niclas Luhman’s commentary on mass media and the nature of information passed through fframes. These “frames” came from Kant, who argued that our perception of reality is inherently shaped by our mental structures, and that we can never know things as they are in themselves, but only as they appear to us through these mental fframes. Consider your “frame” or your “pocket”, you can’t see it or interact with it directly. Luhmann believed that just as our individual perception is constrained by our cognitive frames, then this goes through various amount of “mirrors”in a Hegelian sense. They construct a version of reality that we perceive, much like how Kant's transcendental categories shape our understanding of the world. So, in a sense, Luhmann's mass media ontology echoes Kant's idea that there's a gap between the world as it is and the world as we perceive it – only in Luhmann's case, it's the media that mediate that perception.  In videogames, it’s complicated by the vector and the interaction, but you can still pull out the raw “soul” so to speak.

To put this simply, Pokémon looks like this:

And Coromon ends up looking like this:

Something like Cassette Beasts or Palworld are operating a little differently. In a sense, they are being honest to never claim something they fully completely aren’t. Cassette Beasts is what happens when you get multi-levels of symbolic decay from experience

Now you can get far enough down the ontological chain that you break from it into something new, but even then the original lived experiences of the eighties “decays” from this second-third-fourth order.

If you get down so far you end up at Palworld then you are essentially in a hall of mirrors, holding up the mother’s womb. You’ve rationalised yourself into something that connects everything socially, it means it’s much easier to achieve Palworld’s development than it is for a AAA company to sell their latest superhero game – that when the level of decay through so many levels that it becomes nothing but a psychotic unfounded mess of rationalisations. Remember; there’s a reason why Akagi/Cyrus is a Pokémon main villain, he represents anti-vitalism and the full machine-rationalist.

I’ve colour coded to help explain the mass media side of things. Yellow stands for a reality experience, something that happens to a person that is rooted in reality as far as it’s something tangible to you. Purple, is a construction, a medium that is a vector for transferring. Green, is something closed, a memory/experience/feeling. Now you’ll notice with the Coromon example, the original “reality” of Pokémon has been passed through two mediums and two experiences. It is a mirror, into a mirror into a mirror. This is made worse ten times over with Luhman’s take on mass media which, again simplified looks like this:

Remember you can’t really see or understand your own mental faculties in their entirety, they are transcendental to pure reason (hence Kant’s Critique) but you can rationalise them. Which is where the “soul grinding” aspect comes in with the difference between Coromon and Pokémon. When they pass through these mediumsm what gets imprinted on them is the person’s framework. This incessant exposure to mediated versions of reality can make it increasingly challenging to access the unadulterated essence of events, emotions, and experiences. Replicating, and then rationalising someone’s memory of playing Pokémon doesn’t work because it’s something disjointed to them. It becomes false at worst, inaccessible at best.

Remember that Luhmann's conceptualization of experience, especially with the media is contingent upon communication and social-based systems that can almost entirely be sandboxed the immersive nature of videogames. This doesn’t mean multiple-choice questions or flimsy moral dilemmas, but the way players navigate complex networks of interaction and meaning-making. We are playing in a subjective reality which goes beyond nostalgia. An interesting example to explore this notion is the concept of Nuzlockes. Nuzlocke, a type of hard-mode playthrough with self-imposed rules, came from a comic of a man drawing his experiences. So we get our first yellow block, and a purple block. The thing is then, it ends there.

You don’t even need to know the Nuzlocke comic, and many people haven’t read or don’t know of it. The term however, is less symbolic in nature but just a raw linguistical term. The rules surrounding treating the Pokémon as “dead” when “fainted” in game and forcing on oneself a degree of discipline doesn’t affect the core interfacing medium. The interface between player and game world becomes a crucible in which one burns their soul and forges it into something new with these rules, constructions and negotiations of subjective realities. This is still, mirroring Luhmann's emphasis on the constitutive role of communication in shaping individual and collective experiences but more primal. The players engagement is torn between maternal nurturing of the Pokémon adventure and a more phallic bastardised adventure of gore and death. I think keeping in mind this sort of soft psychoanalysis with this gets why I’m more sympathetic to Nuzlocke as being ontologically different enough, but less so towards Palworld or Coromon. We’re playing with people’s experiences in a constructed, subjective reality, it’s going to be hard to draw these fine lines.

Hell, even Nintendo of America were asked if they would make Nuzlocke official for Nintendo Treehouse, and Nintendo compared it to a romhack. A romhack being either an adjusted or a brand new experience depending on far the developer went from it. And it makes sense, Nuzlocke’s are like dreams – yours and yours alone. Nobody gives a shit about my Shedninja that was the only one left after a randomised gym battle in Pokémon Platinum as much as a bartender doesn’t give a shit about the drunkard’s dream of flying last night. It’s my narrative and my experience, as narcissistic as that sounds, but it is stuck just there. The inspiration from this article comes from a friend (who is autistic), playing a Nuzlocke run of a game I had never played. I get glimpses of drama and he excitedly tells me who lived or died and the heart break. It’s wonderful, and he’s having a blast during the start of the academic season. But it’s not mine to be able to experience or replicate.

Earthbound, however leaves us in a different spot, because Itoi seemed to have an inkling of what was going to happen. As the original anon who made the post had put it was keenly aware of this. The pursuit of objective knowledge, or deconstruct lead to things like YIIK: A Post Modern RPG, where you simply grind down beloved memories and core elements but don’t attach the authentic underpinnings to them. YIIK’s developer provided us with structured information and analysis, but it’s memetic material and the audience’s displeasure with the game came from the distance between the raw and unfiltered experience of the world. If we would try plot what the developer log said, we would end up with something like this:

Oh, and what do we see here? A hall of mirrors. The authentic experiences have been passed through a rational framework, and then became distorted.

In the realm of videogames, you do not stand alone, it is the interplay between player and developer. You are to stand naked as the rebellious son and then to seek autonomy and agency within the virtual domain crafted by the developer, who embodies the authoritative figure. A games’ narrative and mechanics represents a quest for self-realization, a journey fraught with challenges and resistance from the omnipotent control exerted by the developer. This is supposed to be the soul-crafting, part of a game having “soul”. It’s a good test between Nikke, Bejeweled and Alter Echo, creating a sort of “sliding scale” of this relationship. From Nikke that whimsically serves it’s player to milk them, to Bejeweled which is neither here nor there and Alter Echo that was a bit too soulful and becomes impenetrable to the original “soul” or experience.  

In this struggle for agency, the player grapples with predetermined structures and narrative constraints imposed by the developer’s authority. However, unlike books and television, and much like the son's eventual reconciliation with the father in Freudian theory, the player's engagement with the game's design and narrative prompts a dialectical process wherein resistance and submission converge to shape the emergent experience.

This is far separate from nostalgia and sits as a big break from the two mediums. This is why I use the old theological term from Swindon in “Soul-crafting”. A part of the soul of the game is the way that within the iterative cycles of play and adaptation, the player asserts their individuality within the confines of the developer's creation. Eventually this forges something so unique and so experiential that it transcends the binary opposition of player versus developer, this is where YIIk’s developer fell off.

I’ve written about YIIK before, under the notion of postmodernism in a Deleuzian sense, instead of the artistic movement sense, so I’ll leave YIIK alone. What I’d like to turn to is the comic originally drawn to “dunk” on the quirky indie developers making an earthbound clone. What the comic is actually straight referencing is Omori. Now, I am not a big fan of Omori, but it poses an interesting question. Yes, it did seem to follow a degree of formula, but I would argue that perhaps it did come from a place of experience. For, it could be argued, that the only thing that could’ve elicited such a rage, was true authenticity. Despite the few things we knew about Omori’s dev Omocat, it at least points there to be a genuine interaction of trauma, mental illness and childhood. Of course we can’t confirm this. Shotacon-posting, problematic relationship liking, removed-from-xbox-store behaviour aside I mean hell, if there is one thing for a generation born in the world of mass media and second/third order experiences is that mental health is probably one of the few authentic things they experience.  

There is an extension to this and it presents a problem where the chain of ontology collides with something like the Nuzlocke Challenge or Cassette Beastm where it “breaks” the chain by being such a distorted, degraded version of the things before it becomes something new in the way of the struggle. Returning to in The Trash Man, about Bennet Foddy’s comments on the nature of “trash” and recycled assets. I mentioned later on about the sort of proto-teleological relationship that exists between developer and player. This is the struggle for authority, the son overpowering the father but ironically, only reinforcing it by completing the game and proving the developer’s will. But what if the person circumvents this?. These breaks in the chain though, become almost three levels down of the father-son battle where it’s a distorted earthworm being spat through multiple generations of the family. A third member, that desperately drives and chirps like a large cuckoo bird, destroying the relationship, the battle, the clash of wills. Youtube lets plays, data minings, leaks, all of these aren’t necessarily evil, just as the cuckoo is just surviving in it’s own unique way but it sits there eventually consuming, breaking the ontology chain and forcing the developers to now also accommodate extraneous players in their game. Live-services, Esports focus, and other cancers of video games keep being fed like a parasitical baby and as the cuckoo does, replacing the son’s duty to fight with the father. It’s not wrong, but it’s lower in a sense. Victims caught in the cuckoo’s feeding means that Coromon, and the various Pokémon regurgitations will forever be labelled as Foddy’s “b-game”. Not good enough to be “trash” and be picked apart by vultures. Not to be something given an authentic enough angered reaction like Pal World. It is the peak of the rationale, of Foddy’s worry about videogames and Itoi’s concerns. It becomes bland, nothing. Pushed forward by bland consumers desperate to scrape at the nectar of authenticity.

Or as Foddy remarks later:

“Now I know, most likely you’re watching this on Youtube or Twitch while some dude with 10 million views does it for you, like a baby bird being fed chewed-up food. That’s culture too.”