We Must Get The Crypto Bros Playing Pokemon
A Modest Proposal
Here’s what you need to know about Axie Infinity. It’s a “play-to-earn” video game in which players battle their team of little blob monsters, called Axies, against others to earn rewards. These rewards, which I have to stress people pay real money for, are called Smooth Love Potions and Axie Infinity Shards; they’re bought and sold using RON, the cryptocurrency token undergirding the game’s economy. Because the point here isn’t playing for enjoyment, the point is to sell your potions and shards to other players so they can do various chores to improve their critters to increase their battle performance so they can win more of these same resources to sell in turn.
With a player base primarily located in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Thailand, Axie Infinity uses this framework for a deeply ugly game in which every aspect is monetized. To play the game at all, you first need a team of three Axies. Both Edward Ongweso Jr. at Vice and Patrick Redford at Defector compared the game to Pokemon, with Redford elaborating that it “looks like shit, seems boring, and is breathtakingly unoriginal.” But whereas in Pokemon catching your monster pals is a core gameplay mechanic, and also, you know, fun, in Axie Infinity you just buy them. Because they’re not just bits of code in a game, they’re NFTs. You own your Axies, the pitch goes, and they retain their value as assets outside the game, which is a little like saying there’s value in owning Microsoft Office even if you don’t have a computer. For most of the game’s lifespan the price of a single Axie hovered above $1000, though it’s fallen closer to $300 since hackers stole more than $600 million from the game and cratered its entire economy.
I was pretty annoyed when I read about all this, not because Sky Mavis, the company behind the game, and its backers, which include venture capital firm Andreesen-Horowitz, are out more than half a billion dollars—that’s very funny to me, actually—but because I’ve long believed the solution to our crypto/NFT/cartoon ape nightmare is Pokemon. And here before my eyes was an entire game making the comparison obvious and obsolete. Obviousness aside, I went deep into the world of obsessive Pokemon collecting and trading during the pandemic and what I saw there mirrors the crypto world in eerie ways.
As part of the micro-generation hit hard by the original wave of Pokemania when the first games and anime reached the US in the late 90s, I’ve had a hot and cold relationship with the series for the majority of my life. I killed countless AA batteries playing my original Red Version, followed by Yellow, Silver, and Crystal, on my Game Boy Color. I reacted strongly against the third set of games for reasons that seem hilariously quaint now (“Another bird??”) and quit the series for what felt like a lifetime—approximately eight years—before dipping back in for the Silver remake SoulSilver in 2010. I went all out and sought for the first time to fulfill the franchise slogan and “catch ‘em all.” I came pretty close—my PokeDex numbered 473 of the 493 distinct Pokemon in existence at that time—before burning out again. The latter years of college followed by the whirlwind period afterward of joining “the real world” firmly took my attention off the series.
That is until the pandemic hit. Just before I stopped seeing anyone other than Liz for months on end, Nintendo announced an add-on application called Pokemon Home. It’s basically cloud storage, allowing players to migrate their Pocket Monsters from their old games to the digital ether, where they can live free from the threats of cartridge battery death or memory corruption that could erase your creatures forever. It’s also a surreally literal translation of the system in the Pokemon games, in which all your Pokemon not currently in your party are stored inside the PC. Unlike in the games, where the service is free, a subscription to Pokemon Home carries an annual fee of $16.
Upon reading about Pokemon Home my thoughts went back immediately to my last game, still languishing in a bin at my mom’s house. I hadn’t thought about those Pokemon in years—but my collection was so impressive! Suddenly, I needed to find a way to migrate them into the present.
Doing so wouldn’t be easy though. The number of Pokemon games, and Pokemon species, had roughly doubled since I checked out. All Pokemon games are paired so SoulSilver and its counterpart HeartGold were part of the fourth “generation” of Pokemon games, while the current games, Sword and Shield, on the Switch, are Generation 8. In between had come Black and White, Black 2 and White 2, X and Y, Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, Sun and Moon, and Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon—plus numerous spinoffs we can’t get into here. To rescue my collection I would first have to move them into Black, White, Black 2, or White 2, from there to Pokemon Bank (a precursor to Pokemon Home I wasn’t aware of), and then into Home. The first step took the form of a tedious target shooting minigame that transported a measly six Pokemon at a time; at least it had catchy music because I listened to it for hours.
I needed help. My mom mailed me my SoulSilver and Nintendo DS, my Pokemon buddy in college and friend of the newsletter Lauren mailed me her copy of White 2, and my coworker Shane loaned me his 3DS to use Pokemon Bank (sorry I still haven’t returned it lol). Finally, my digital pets were saved.
At this point we were living in lockdown and obsession was setting in. I had had to beat White 2 to unlock the migration function and had accumulated a good number of the Pokemon new to that entry in the process. If I was going to keep a collection in Home, I reasoned, shouldn’t it be a complete collection? So I began catching everything I could in White 2, filling in the old gaps in my SoulSilver PokeDex along with the 156 creatures new to Gen 5.
Soon Pokemon had taken over my thoughts entirely. With the zeal of José Arcadio Buendía in One Hundred Years of Solitude decoding the scrolls of Melquíades, I was scouring the Pokemon wiki and making lists of which legendary Pokemon were exclusive to which games and plotting out the most efficient set to buy to further my quest. For instance, after playing through SoulSilver, White 2, and X, I was still missing Gen 3 legendary Kyogre. I knew at this point I was going to have to order either Alpha Sapphire or Omega Ruby—with Kyogre only available in Alpha Sapphire, my choice was clear. The hours I was pouring into Pokemon at this point were unreal, but I had a lot of time to fill.
Here’s an even worse example of what a total Pokemon degenerate I became. Harder to obtain than legendaries—which are generally one of a kind within one’s individual game but catchable as part of the main story—is another class of Pokemon called Mythicals. Mythical Pokemon cannot be caught in the wild and are generally only available from special distributions put on by Nintendo. As in, you have to go to Gamestop with your game and have an employee literally give you Mew, or Celebi, or Jirachi, etc. One of these mythicals is Manaphy, a weird jellyfish sort of thing. One way Manaphy was given away years ago was as a bonus to players who beat the spinoff Pokemon Ranger, in which you play as a sort of Pokemon parks department employee and engage in tedious, touchscreen-based gameplay. I found a copy of Pokemon Ranger for sale on Amazon from a used game shop—but if the Manaphy had already been claimed the game was useless to me. So naturally I emailed the store asking them to boot up the game and confirm the menu you claim Manaphy from hadn’t been unlocked yet. I ended up buying the game and playing through it in its entirety, just for that one special Pokemon.
With that formless, beginningless, dreamlike quality that pervades so much of the online experience, I found myself visiting and participating in the subreddit Pokemon Trades. Finally! Here was a community of like-minded collectors who took it as seriously as I did. The world of high level Pokemon collecting is surprisingly rife with scams, it turns out, so Pokemon Trades employs a number of security measures to protect traders. With the tagline “The Place for Legitimate Pokemon Trading,” the message board is policed by moderators who will not hesitate to put trades on hold or even order them reversed if rules and procedures are not followed. When any mythical or “event” Pokemon is offered in a trade, for instance, “full details” must be provided: its original trainer’s name, associated ID number, and how it came into your possession; the rules are extensive. The sub also employs a flair system in which users are prominently labeled along a progression that one advances by logging trades—the better your flair, the more trustworthy you are and the more privileges you accrue.
Much like the NFT world—which I’m getting back to soon I swear—serious Pokemon trading and collecting rests on a certain strain of magical thinking around the idea of authenticity. Since Pokemon are, fundamentally, bits of code in a game, the really rare and special ones are very easy to fake. Mythical Pokemon, as well as “shiny” variants—the 1/4096 alternate color palette of each creature—can be whipped up in programs and inserted into the game. But for collectors that takes all the fun out of it. The point is to hold the genuine article—a mythical that someone really claimed in person or a shiny that someone really beat the odds on, presumably after hatching hundreds of duplicates in vain. One could invoke Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction to belabor the point about how even fully digital objects participate in the process of acquiring “aura” by passing through the hands of numerous owners, accumulating history and meaning, but I’ll spare you the exegesis.
The subreddit also introduced me to new frontiers of collecting and obsession. For example, in the games you can employ a variety of different Pokeballs with different attributes and specialties. The games remember which ball a Pokemon is caught in and it’s even passed down to offspring when you breed your critters. Those ball varieties are split into “shop balls,” which are sold at Poke Marts in the game and are a dime a dozen, and “rare balls,” which are generally very limited in supply per game or are somehow onerous to obtain. Many members of the subreddit, in possession of a full collection of Pokemon species but wanting more somehow, then turn their focus to balls. The goal shifts from having one of each Pokemon to having each Pokemon in as many of the rare balls as possible. I spent untold hours grinding to obtain rare balls and even more recatching Pokemon I already had, much to Liz’s bewilderment.
One more example. There’s a 6th Gen Pokemon called Vivillon. It’s a butterfly that sports 20 different color schemes, determined by the geotag of your real location on earth. Some variants are thus very rare and essentially impossible to acquire on your own. One power-user of the subreddit, named Jemma, bought four 3DSes in order to manipulate the location data and acquire a complete set. She bred each regional variant until she hatched a shiny version and gave away her extras on the subreddit. I took part in her giveaways and now own a complete set. I can’t overemphasize how valuable these giveaways felt at the time.
This brings us back around to the apes. For the blessedly uninitiated, I’m referring to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a mind-bendingly unappealing series of images of cartoon monkeys that sell for exorbitant sums of money. Despite their infinite reproducibility as a digital image, crypto aficionados are willing to pay astounding sums of money for them—as of last month, the lowest sale price of a single ape, which again is literally a JPG file, was $262,630, with the priciest going for $2.85 million.
Why are people willing to pay this much? First, because they’re suckers. But secondly, because they’ve bought into the fiction of NFTs. Non-fungible tokens are another piece of the crypto puzzle, essentially receipts that live on the blockchain. They refer to something, in this case an ugly ape, but, crucially, are not that thing. An NFT is a bank slip that proclaims “This ape is the true ape!” but that’s all. There’s nothing more to it. Put next to each other you could not tell the difference between the NFT-backed ape and a copy, because there is no difference in the things themselves.
This is not far off from Pokemon, where a hacked or cloned mythical is indistinguishable from a legitimate one. The difference, in both cases, is one of belief. By believing one is more authentic, more real, than the other, we invest it with value. With Pokemon, that value was mostly just warm feelings. For these poor souls who think the apes are the future of art, it’s to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also they seem to get scammed constantly.
You can see where this is going. The main NFT projects out there are based around series of some sort, the apes being just one. The appeal, as far as I can tell, is to collect as many in the series as possible—to “catch ‘em all,” one might say. All the itches that Pokemon scratched for me when the walls were closing in seem to be the same for NFT freaks, except I kept my money and am not engaged in burning down the planet. For the hustle and grind types who want to flip Ethereum and Bitcoin for profit, Pokemon Trades has cycled through several ad hoc currencies in my time there—first Master Balls, then other rare balls, and finally Ability Patches. The thrill I got when I negotiated a particularly good rate and felt like I’d gotten the upper hand in a transaction is, I imagine, close to the high crypto traders are chasing. If you have an ape lover or crypto evangelist in your life, here’s my simple advice: get them into Pokemon.
Oh and for anyone wondering, my Pokemon quest ended one short. I collected and traded for every legendary and every mythical save one: the diamond Pokemon Diancie, distributed once in 2016 and never again. Maybe it’s better this way. As Jean Baudrillard wrote of collecting in The System of Objects:
One cannot help but wonder whether collections are in fact meant to be completed, whether lack does not play an essential part here—a positive one, moreover, as the means whereby the subject reapprehends his own subjectivity. If so, the presence of the final object of the collection would basically signify the death of the subject, whereas its absence would be what enables him merely to rehearse his death (and so exoticize it) by having an object represent it. This lack is experienced as suffering, but it is also the breach that makes it possible to avoid completing the collection and thus definitively erasing reality.
Actually, fuck that. If you have a Diancie you’re looking to unload please get in touch. I’ll pay.
Not sure if you've dipped your toes into Pokemon TCG Pocket, but I can assure that it is possible to "catch 'em all" even without giving into the monetization scheme. Then again, we should probably both just read more books...