Influences

Pokemon has affected my life outside of gaming more than any one other IP.

At the core, it is a very basic JRPG, but it was engaging, simple to learn, and portable.  Combined with themes of sportsmanship, friendship, and teamwork (and a half hour daily commercial, trading card game, and near infinite line of merchandise), these three elements made it popular not only with it's "target" demographic of young children, but with players of all ages.  Ostensibly, the game is about being the very best: mastering the typing chart, collecting the gym badges, defeating the Elite Four, and eventually becoming the League Champion.  However, the true secret to its success was in the marketing tag line's appeal to gamer lizard brains everywhere: "Gotta Catch'em All."

Collecting is kind of what nerds do.  It's taught to us from an early age, you have to get all the power-ups, all the pieces of the triforce, and in Pokemon, every monster.  But you cant.  At least, not by yourself.  That was hard for me to come to grips with, because after elementary school, I didn't meet a whole lot of gamers. 

I'm going to go off on a tangent here for a bit.  In my elementary school, after the NES came out, kids would gather at recess and lunch to talk about games.  Advice, rumours, and war stories were how we spent the majority of our time. ("No seriously, Samus is a girl!"  "No way!").  This was a painfully short period of my life.  High school came and it seemed that everyone else "grew up" and stopped playing games.  All of a sudden, sports and girls became more important, and games weren't even for nerds, they were for kids.  University was more of the same, except the range of acceptable activities broadened to include drinking, writing bad poetry, being into bands you've never heard of, anything but videogames.

When I started working at EA, I was suddenly surrounded by people who could discuss genre and design and it was a revelation, but even in the largest studio in Vancouver, I couldn't find anyone  who was willing to trade Pokemon with me.  I was forced to go to Pokemon TCG events full of kids as young as 5 to find partners... and being in my mid-twenties, I kind of stuck out.  Parents got it, though.  A lot of them played, too, so they understood the compulsion was as sinister as my intentions got.  I wasn't trying to kidnap their kids, just the kids' poke-thralls.  I still remember the day I got Mew at Metrotown, surrounded by a sea of waist high trainers and their incredibly patient guardians.

A wise man once told me, "You will never get rich trying to get money, you have to have other people get money for you."  And while I haven't figured out the trick of having people get money for me, one day I got wise and founded Vancouver Gamers Group.

For the first few months, it was just me.  I sat at the food court with my DS, playing games for four hours at a time by myself every Friday night.  Weird, right?  As time wore on, people slowly started finding the group.  The first big boost to membership came on the release of Dragon Quest IX, another "single" player game with deep social hooks. Over time, people came and went, but a core group eventually formed, and I kept seeing the same faces week after week.  Eventually, without really meaning to, I found myself at the center of a community.

I would go to my desk job during the week and be surrounded by people who didn't really understand my hobby (and a lot of who would disregard it, and me, as being childish), but when I went to the meetups, all of a sudden, I was with peers. Every month or so, Ellen and I would host a party at our place, and twice a year, there would be an open house.  The last one we had, it was standing room only, and we counted in excess of eighty people.  All for the love of games.

In the five years since I started the group, I have made some of the best friends in my life.  But I still haven't caught them all.