Over "thanksgiving" we had a similar experience. Pokemon has this board
game which all the kids were playing which reminded me of D&D. I know on our
end it has become very controversal in the school arena with teachers being
accused by parents of stealing kids cards for their own collection.
In many ways the game puts our theories of childhood in question - from what
I have seen there is a complex level of "abstraction" even with the youngest
participants. From what I have read so far there is an expicit marketing
ploy involved in which Pokemon is the testing ground. It is supposebly an
appropriation of Japenese marketing into the American context and has proved
very successful. It entails a lot of integration - cards, videogames,
computer games, CD's, movies, as well as the game, rules, and complexity
being emergent and changing through time. The intent is so the little
monsters (Pokemon's not the kids) have everlasting appeal and do not simply
become a fad.
In discussing the upcoming season with my son, I mentioned it was the "in
thing" and wondered if he wanted a pokemon christmas - he wisely reminded me
just because everyone else is doing it, he doesn't have to.
In general, I have mixed feelings because on one end it does function as a
ZPD of sorts and breaks down some of our assumptions about children, but on
the other it definately is a marketing ploy in which our children are the
testing ground. If it (marketing) can be successful with the children then
it will enter other areas of the market. Exploitation comes to mind on my
end.
Nate
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Dillon [mailto:dillonph@northcoast.com]
Sent: Monday, November 29, 1999 11:33 PM
To: XMCA
Subject: Pokeman ZPDs
Hello all.
While recently taking my 6 yr old son to fly unaccompanied back to his
mother I observed a series of interactions between 4 boys between the ages
of 2 and 10 that struck me as truly amazing. As many of you might know,
Pokeman is something of a tidal wave youth phenom, making it even to the
cover of Time. At first I thought it was something akin to any other video
game promo/marketing scheme (Mario Bros. for example) but as I've learned
playing with my 6 yr old it is something much more complex. Its something
like a Teletubbies Dungeon and Dragons.
The interactions between the kids I observed at the airport involved
Pokeman. Basically, beginning with the two year old and my six year old in
the ticket line, and later with two other boys who were flying in the same
plane. All of them had some Pokeman artifact or other, a trading card, a
book, a Pokeman ball with one or another Pokeman inside. Immediately upon
seeing each other's items, these total strangers began sharing and showing
each other their various Pokeman objects, reading descriptions from their
Pokeman books, testing each others knowledge of the Pokeman and their
attributes including: elements, evolutionary paths, powers, subordinate
powers, etc. My son boarded the plane engrossed in this with the other boys
and took off into the cloudy SF Bay skies. When I talked to him in the
evening he said the oldest boy had read out loud from the Pokeman book
during the flight.
It occurred to me that the Pokeman "world" is a fine an example of
Wartofsky's tertiary artifact in a unique, novel way that reaches to a much
younger age group than anything to date. To appreciate this I think it is
necessary to read a little on the organization of the Pokeman "world" to
understand its complexity and both cognitive and moral levels. Maybe
similar examples of tertiary artefacts among young children is more common
than I suspect but I'm not aware of any having attained such magnitude?
The game "Magic" is perhaps closest to what's going on with Pokeman but
Magic is not accessible to younger kids as is Pokeman. Pogs and similar
fads doesn't seem have the "rules and conventions" characteristics of a
tertiary artifact.
What blew me away at the airport, I guess, was (a) the fact that these
kids, quite independently from any direct orientation from their grinning,
perhaps bewildered parents, were suddenly co-inhabitors of a sort of ZPD
where a process of learning and discovery was taking place, they used
Pokeman to mediate their self-organization into this group; (b) that it had
sprung up among kids who (i) had never seen each other before and (ii)
bridged pretty large age ranges. To me this bespoke something of the
universality of the highly totemic, Pokeman "imaginary world" in which 99%
of the Pokeman can only say their own name--some with greater, some with
lesser ranges of expressiveness. Hence communications of the form
"Squirtle!" "Squirtle!" "Squirtle!" "Squirtle!" similar to those
monosyllabic communicative exchanges commented upon by Bakhtin and
Volosinov.
Any comments?
Paul H. Dillon