Pokémon was engineered as a social medium rather than a passive commodity

Evidence

As Allison (2004, 41) notes, the game’s primary designer was motivated by a melancholic and nostalgic naturalism that harkened back to a childhood of collecting and battling insects in a world lost to today’s children growing up in the cities and apartment buildings of postmodern Japan. The seminal Pokémon video game mobilized new advances in Nintendo’s Game Boy portable platform that allowed players to battle and swap their Pokémon if both owned the device and the game, creating portable public spheres of shared knowledge, discourse and imagination (Allison 2004, 42; Kollar 2009). In general, Pokémon was designed less as a personal possession than as a social medium: it did not seek merely to replace children’s shared imagination, creativity and agency with privatized commodities, but to suggest itself as an expedient, a tool or a vector by which these could be expressed (Buckingham and Sefton-Green 2004, 21–23). — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 365

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ADDENDUM ‘Grafting & Growth’ article’s theme of objects-as-infrastructure: Pokémon as a relational medium parallels trees as connective infrastructure. Also speaks to the financialization cultural argument the reader is bridging to deWaard. — connects to: Pokémon’s cuteness aesthetic reconciled Japanese ambivalences about capitalism and childhood. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 352; Games let people play with the forms of sociability itself; In social games players perform the very structure of society itself — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 379 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Games let people play with the forms of sociability itself #expands (0.82)
• In social games players perform the very structure of society itself #expands (0.80) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 379
• Individual motives become social only through forms of mutual interaction #expands (0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 194