Here’s my Pokemon 102 class. LOL! I’ll be your Professor today. You can’t take this class until you’ve completed the requisite Pokemon 101! This is part of our 8bitlibrary.com series of classes on Pokemon in Schools & Libraries. Pokemon is probably the most important video game IP for schools and libraries.

Gender plays two roles in the game.

Firstly, in order to breed Pokemon, you need (for the most part) a Male-Female partnership. As the game tries to reflect parts of natural biology, both partners need to be happy & healthy in order to mate. Female Pokemon in the game are generally sought after more than Males, because the Female Pokemon can almost always do everything the Male Pokemon can do, plus reproduce. Males, I’ve found in my experience, are slightly more abundant in the game, which adds to why Female Pokes are more sought after. Since there are going on 500 Pokemon types, there are small variations in species so these roles aren’t set in stone. Some Males evolve to more beautiful Pokemon than the Female of the species will, and in some cases it’s opposite. Vespiquen is an example of a far superior, rare, sought after Female Poke.

Can you see now how you can use Pokemon as a basics-of-Biology lesson or library program? Basics like mating, genders-within-species, and evolution are all ideas that kids already understand within the context of the game. If kids understand these ideas in this media, that means a good teacher or librarians can transfer this understanding to other media.

Secondly is the gender roles among “human” characters in the game. In the game, the character you chose to control throughout your gameplay can be either male or female. There is only a single circumstance throughout all IV generations of the game where your choice of gender matters, and it is a small and insignificant one. Because of this, Pokemon is a game whose gameplay reach extends across genders (which you find in most games; female Nintendo DS users outnumber males). Anecdotally/in my experience I’ve found a majority of “kids” who play Pokemon are male, and “teens/college age” Pokeplayers are female.

The in-game stories focus on your adventures catching Pokemon, but there are little love-story bits thrown in there. These are the traditional Male-Female relationship; GLBT love interests have yet to appear in the game. There are, however, some clear GLBT characters in the game, but not clear enough for young players to notice. This is probably to avoid controversy, and you can only speculate where the series will lead in that regard. The real issue is your relationship with the Pokemon, though, and the love-interest stuff is very quick and not prominent.

Violence is another touchy in-game issue.

All great works of fiction have some level of violence. Pokemon, in Banned Books Week fashion, has been marred by accusations of “too much violence”. This is mostly spurred on by the Pokemon anime cartoon series, as the two are confused by people outside of Pokeunderstanding.

The main goal of this game (as opposed to the more-violent cartoon) is to catch and train Pokemon. You are training your Pokemon to “battle” other Pokemon. But this is just a plot device; there are no animations of actual violence, and although there are very cool animations for their “moves” that they “battle” with, the point of this game is to love and care for your Pokemon. I tend to lean toward the Vatican’s official stance on Pokemon:

…on December 9, 1997 in the midst of the early Pokemon mania, the Holy See declared Pokemon to be “‘full of inventive imagination,’ has no ‘harmful moral side effects‘ and is based on the love-thy-neighbor notion of ‘intense friendship.’”

We, as teachers and librarians, come across this all the time: a parent or concerned citizen who is not truly familiar with a work of fiction asks for it to be banned. And, for the most part, after a thorough review of the work of fiction, is found to be meritorious. Here at 8bitlibrary.com, our goal is to get schools and libraries to look at video games as a new media, just like books/TV/web2.0/radio/texting/any other form of media out there. As such, individual games should be looked at as works of (fact or) fiction and not “games” (per se) and some GOOD video games are meritorious, just like a good book.

In the end, the only ones qualified to review the content of the game are parents, and I’m sure after a parents reviews the game, they probably won’t share it because they are playing it themselves (KINDA like when they review a book because of violence and end up loving it…)

I’m thinking our next class will be lesson plan and library program ideas. Thanks for the read! Professor JP