But That’s Cheating! The Culture of Unconventional Gameplay in Pokémon
Back when I was a kid (hold on, let me find my cane), games were simple. You rescued a princess and you liked it. Everyone ran to the right. Black was black, and white was a sort of light green. And if you didn’t play the game the right way, you were cheating. Easy enough.
You see, back in those days (brb, chasing the kids off the lawn), if you wanted to play a game in any way other than it was intended, you were using a Game Genie, a device that forcibly altered the game code to something else. The glitches and gameplay breaks allowing one to do things the programmers most certainly did not intend largely didn’t exist or weren’t yet known.
Games were simpler, leaving less room for holes. The online gaming communities at the time were small and obscure, removing many possibilities for collaboration. And the programmers and codesmiths of today were yesterday’s students, cutting their baby teeth on BASIC by playing around on their TI-86s when the math teacher wasn’t looking.
Then along came Pokémon, which threw a Mankey wrench into that black and white thinking. (more…)
Longtime writer, temporary office minion, and nerd of all trades, tiakall is a fan of lengthy subordinate clauses and the Oxford comma. She enjoys plants, cats, puns of varying quality, and making cannibal jokes before it was cool.
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