A couple days after picking up Pokopia, I messaged a friend about my journey, how the game had me unexpectedly teary: “all of these Pokemon are Hachiko, waiting for their trainers to come home”.
I hadn’t considered until now that, in trying to render my experience explainable, I shifted my phrasing from “I” to “these Pokemon”… and in that act of translation, removed myself from the world. Your words resonate— thank you, from a fellow traveler in this strange and beautiful game.
I like this article, but at the same time, I am probably more of a 'lore master' than a lot of players. I love immersing myself in a story and a world, and a core part of the fun in games for me comes from exploring and learning more about the world, especially if there are enough nuggets of information that it feels worthwhile doing so.
It's just.. how I engage with games, I suppose. The search for information on the setting, the chasing of mysteries, regardless of whether answers actually exist or are just seeds that may or may not become something in the future (though I dramatically prefer something presented as a mystery to actually have a resolution). I never expected that building to have any follow-up, but I think it's cool from a meta perspective that it did. Honestly, I had little interest in Pokopia (at least not enough to want to get it) until learning about all the references, and now it has my curiosity and attention.
Several of my favourite franchises are long-running and filled with background/tangential information that promotes communities making theories and discussing the information and what it could all mean, what it could lead to in the future, and explaining inconsistencies in a way that is consistent with what we know, and that enriches the experience of the game for me. I'm always a little conflicted when I hear the term 'reddit game', I'm not sure I fully understand the phrase, but I'm less interested in being told by another person "here is what the story is" and more "here is how I interpreted the story" and to engage with them about how our interpretations differ or align. It makes the game bigger to me than just The Game.
I guess that's more about my experiences with the experience of a game, rather than with the game itself, though?
I can relate to this! I love games that make me do the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme, while I explain some long forgotten minutiae of a game to my long suffering husband. But I want to find that and feel it rather that “just look it up”.
"I am a dog waiting for my owner to come home." -- this got me misty-eyed. A wiki plot summary can't compare.
A couple days after picking up Pokopia, I messaged a friend about my journey, how the game had me unexpectedly teary: “all of these Pokemon are Hachiko, waiting for their trainers to come home”.
I hadn’t considered until now that, in trying to render my experience explainable, I shifted my phrasing from “I” to “these Pokemon”… and in that act of translation, removed myself from the world. Your words resonate— thank you, from a fellow traveler in this strange and beautiful game.
I like this article, but at the same time, I am probably more of a 'lore master' than a lot of players. I love immersing myself in a story and a world, and a core part of the fun in games for me comes from exploring and learning more about the world, especially if there are enough nuggets of information that it feels worthwhile doing so.
It's just.. how I engage with games, I suppose. The search for information on the setting, the chasing of mysteries, regardless of whether answers actually exist or are just seeds that may or may not become something in the future (though I dramatically prefer something presented as a mystery to actually have a resolution). I never expected that building to have any follow-up, but I think it's cool from a meta perspective that it did. Honestly, I had little interest in Pokopia (at least not enough to want to get it) until learning about all the references, and now it has my curiosity and attention.
Several of my favourite franchises are long-running and filled with background/tangential information that promotes communities making theories and discussing the information and what it could all mean, what it could lead to in the future, and explaining inconsistencies in a way that is consistent with what we know, and that enriches the experience of the game for me. I'm always a little conflicted when I hear the term 'reddit game', I'm not sure I fully understand the phrase, but I'm less interested in being told by another person "here is what the story is" and more "here is how I interpreted the story" and to engage with them about how our interpretations differ or align. It makes the game bigger to me than just The Game.
I guess that's more about my experiences with the experience of a game, rather than with the game itself, though?
I can relate to this! I love games that make me do the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme, while I explain some long forgotten minutiae of a game to my long suffering husband. But I want to find that and feel it rather that “just look it up”.
This piece is yet another banger.
Though I will say, I liked the references in it :)
But how will my Gengar with Psychic and Thunderbolt ever make use of its 130 SpAtk in this region full of Water and Poison types? /s