Do other people care or know that you play Pokemon?

[noobcubed]

I think the situation is best summed up by the following table:

Call of Duty: age of target audience, 18, age of real audience, 7
Pokemon: age of target audience, 7, age of real audience, 18

In short, Pokemon's demographic breakdown is bloody weird. It includes:

• The five- to seven-year-olds it's aimed at, fairly gender balanced by video game standards. They play it because there isn't a lot of competition in the market for video games that can be easily beaten by people in that age range.
• The ten- to fourteen-year olds who have played it for a few years and continue to do so because their responsible parents won't get the games they really want them to buy. Maybe a few of them are smart enough to enjoy the deeper competitive experience. There are certainly fourteen-year-olds on Smogon.
• The college students who were kids at the time of the Pokemon craze of 1998 or thereabouts and who still love the games. These will probably be gamers anyway and will just be looking for the occasional nostalgia trip between more serious titles.
• The college students who played the games as kids but are more drawn in by the deeper experience that competitive battling brings. They are quite often members of this site, and conversely most Smogonites are in this category. Mostly male.
• The occasional housewife who's spent hundreds of hours playing Brain Age and Animal Crossing and whose favourite part of X & Y is Pokemon Amie.

And yet, for some reason, Pokemon is still seen by many people as a kids' game. And not just people who don't play video games: your stereotypical "bro gamer" probably does too, (even if he is in fact nine and hiding in Battlefield deathmatches behind a veil of profanity and the fact many adults are that immature and stupid too).

And so being an adult or even a teenage Pokemon fan can be hard. Personally I don't tell other people unless I know they have similar interests, not out of shame, but out of not wanting to bore them. I keep it off my Facebook profile but then I keep as much off that as possible, because I am quite a private person anyway. But I'd like to know, for others out there, do other people know about your fandom? And if so, what do they think?

 

[Celever]

I don't think it's right to categorize players of Pokémon like you have done. It's more like this:
1) Young children who saw an advert, introduced by their parents who played it or just introduced to the series because it's fun Nintendo and Pokémon are cute :3
2) From about 11 or 12, it's just people who enjoy strategy, exploration games (kinda) or just something about the Pokémon series in terms of gameplay and game mechanics
3) Nostalgia (BAN ME PLEASE)

Of course on a website like this is would appear that lots more people play Pokémon who are teenagers or older because of COPPA, and the fact that many parents only allow their children to use sites such as forums or IRC when they are "mature enough", I think. However, if you did a survey or something of the sort, the results would undoubtedly surprise you. A lot of children buy and play Pokémon, at least double the amount of 13+ players imo.

However, relating to your earlier examples of CoD compared to Pokémon... well this paragraph is very generalized. Basically, a lot of children these days (particularly in the U.S from what I've heard, but it is likely the media misconstruing everything) "think at school, relax at home". Because of this, games such as Pokémon tend to not appeal to characters like that as it requires thought and strategy to complete several of the battles in some of these games. This is also apparent by how easy the series is becoming in general. CoD, despite what some CoD fans may argue, requires far less thought and strategy. It introduces children to other fighting games much better, as well, as they learn tactics such as camping and sniping, which can be used well in fighting series' such as Super Smash Bros.. I don't see young children playing CoD as a bad thing at all, honestly. Children know about guns, death, murder and the like from a young age now. I've never really understood the arguments about why young children playing CoD is bad. What, it turns them into gun-abusing psychopaths? Pokémon is just as likely to turn them into animal abusers, cockfight club owners, satanists, Nazis and racists. (can't get enough of that article lol).

Basically, both Pokémon and CoD have fanbases ranging from child-elderly, and the majority of players in both of the franchises is children/young teenagers.

 

[TheGamedawg]

I was one of those kids who played it a lot as a kid, stopped playing for years, then got back into it later. I'm in college now and quite often I find other people with the same story and that are very open about their love for the series.

 

[kabbes]

I'm 37 years old. My wife gets pissed off with me playing it, as it means I am half-focused on something else when I am supposed to be talking to her. Nobody else knows I play, because I play the role of a respectable professional IRL and this is not what you spend your spare time doing if you are a respectable professional.

I just enjoy deep games though. I grew up playing chess, this is just way better.

 

[noobcubed]

Okay Celever, responding point by point:

I never said all of these demographics were equally sized, and yes, kids play Pokemon, obviously. The two lines at the top of the OP were a humorous exaggeration of reality, but Pokemon retains a large adult following. Yes those will be largely nostalgia (BAN ME PLEASE), but they have still stuck with and/or come back to the series for very different reasons. Nostalgia alone cannot maintain an audience.

You say that Pokemon is not appealing to young children because of it requires them to think? Like, when? Certainly not in battles, that's just a case of "oh what has a super-effective move? I'll use that!" The games' puzzles in my experience are solved by trial and error rather than any more satisfactory logic and in any case the puzzle elements are being removed from the later games. I conversely think it appeals to kids partly because they can beat it without too much thought. By a country mile it has the simplest combat system of any turn-based RPG out there: no manna to conserve, no twitch-based elements, and generally only one Pokemon to think about at once rather than a party of several.

I'm not bashing Call of Duty (wow seriously CoD is not the topic of this post, I guess I was ranting about it without even realising), it's just that Call of Duty is the standard example of an M-rated game played by minors (when it is, in fact, an M-rated game played by everybody). The problems with the video game industry a far greater than this one franchise. I do find it slightly worrying that it is considered "relaxing" though. I do not think that war should be considered a relaxing experience. I've started up a thread in The great library called "the point in video game ratings" if you're interested to continue discussion there.

 

[kabbes]

I have no nostalgia for Pokemon. It came out after I had already grown past the age that the cartoons would appeal. I got into it as an adult purely for the depth of the competitive battling experience.

 

[MikeDawg]

Not really, though they really wouldn't care. I think that it's more "taboo" to play competitive pokemon than it is to pick up a ds game and play it.

 

[Detective Barricade]

Most who know me may have some idea that I play Pokemon. I like playing Pokemon, among a few other "childish" things. I like what I like and frankly don't give a damn what others think of me for it.

 

[Hulavuta]

I don't think it is possible for any reasonable person to change their opinion about you based on just learning what games you like. Unless you are already seen as childish for other reasons, nobody halfway mature is going to stick it on you just because you play Pokemon. Throughout middle school I met plenty of people who thought Pokemon and some of my other interests were "gay" and childish but I never had a bad relationship with any of these people because there was way more to me than just Pokemon.

For playing in public and getting judged for it, I feel like the real implication here is that you are playing games instead of socializing or seem so addicted you have to do it no matter where you are. Same as if you see someone using their phone in public. It may or may not be true, but it is hard to not get that impression.

As for me personally, I don't really go...evangelizing...but I do say it if I'm asked. Although I find most of the time it's just part of a broader question (What games do you like to play?) so I just say Pokemon as part of a list, it is rarely about Pokemon specifically.

 

[Goddess Briyella]

Of the few friends I have in real life, all of them know I'm into Pokemon. I've even gotten a few of them to like it too. A few of them got turned off from it after I tried explaining some of the more complicated things, such as EVs, however.

All of my friends also know I'm actively involved in Smogon, though they don't really understand most of it.

 

[Kiga]

I got into Pokemon back when I was eight, and still liked it even after it stopped being "cool" two years later. After that, my brother was the only one I could play with, and our little sisters and a close cousin took a passing interest in it, but that was about the depth of the crowd that I could play with. Eventually, my brother lost interest in it toward our senior year before re-engaging for Black and White, and we both play it passively now. We still get hyped up for new games, and then beat our respective versions in about a week. While my brother tends to move on after that, I tend to go into the deeper aspects, such as filling the dex, getting all the stars, and more recently, breeding and battling.

I am a twenty-three year old female college student, and while I may not broadcast my interest in Pokemon to the world, I won't deny it either.

 

[-Flygon-]

I find that breaking out my DS in school gets attention, and people are always talking to me about Pokemon or their favorite Nintendo games, so I think it's a positive thing to let people know what you play, especially since almost no one can say they've never played or liked Pokemon.

 

[Odd Sponge Out]

People know. My live-in boyfriend is driven a bit crazy by it, since sometimes it's all I can do NOT to multitask while "spending time with him." My mom thinks I need to "grow up" because of it, but nobody else really cares.

 

[Mackenzie]

I don't remember much when I first heard about pokemon (I was about 4 or 5), but my brother told me that I didn't like Pokemon at first when they bought it on gameboy. But who would have thought that by the time GSC came out that eventually I have been following the series (mostly the games, not so much the anime).

So fast forward, I don't think a lot of my friends even know that I play pokemon, and I don't think they care at all (a select few, however, know and are actually fellow poke fans themselves; they belong to about 18-20+ years old range so yeah they really support the series, but I doubt they've heard of the competitive battling side, well most of them anyway).

However, an old classmate from grade school who I still keep in touch with eventually bought pokemon X/Y (my classmate is also a pokemon fan since early 2000s) and started asking me about Pokemon specifically about the competitive aspects of the game. I believe if it wasn't for getting into gen 3's metagames and randomly stumbling upon smogon about 5 years ago I wouldn't have been able to relate to my classmate as much as I'm doing at present.

 

[Xen]

Although I don't go around proclaiming I play Pokemon, quite a handful of my friends know I play and they're all fine with it. Many of them grew up playing the old generations like me. One guy I had classes with last semester in uni even plays competitive VGC.

It's worth pointing out that the streetpass feature of the 3DS does blur the line of public knowledge of Pokemon a bit, provided you actually use the feature. Oftentimes when I go walking around campus I'll take my 3DS with me, and you'd be surprised how many Pokemon steetpass tags I get, one of which was actually the quarterback of our football team.

 

[Gokuzbu]

My friends know I play Pokemon and if they have a problem with that they are not worth having. I don't exactly parade it on like a date or at work though. If someone else likes it though I'll love to talk about it with them. Being ashamed of doing something you enjoy is silly, and the people who call Pokemon childish are usually immature teens who try too hard to look grown up.

 

[Age of Kings]

I've been in the fandom since childhood and have loved Pokemon for the majority of my life, and I've seen it all. Been there, done that. Your categories are a little too narrowing imo; all kinds of people love Pokemon. However, as mentioned many times in this thread, people aren't really open about it unless asked.

When I was younger, I was picked on for it, but I never gave up on it based on peer pressure. I express myself as a fanatic irl lol even though I am friends with many people who don't like Pokemon. But the first thing most people learn about me is that I fucking love Pokemon. I guess it's because I make friends based on like hobbies, and since it's such a large part of my life, it usually comes up first. The amount of merch I own is a giveaway too, sometimes I'll be wearing a shirt lol. (inb4 ur loser nerd) Being a fan is an absolute must in a relationship, although my SO doesn't have the same amount of zeal nor does he play competitively outside of VGCs every so often :(

I haven't run into any problems because of it. Past high school, the only people who have seen my fandom in a negative light also happened to be some of the most petty, immature drama queens I've known who hated on people for no reason, undesirables whom really shouldn't have been in my life anyways. I work in finance and I have a Vaporeon Pitapoke, Mewtwo figurine, and Substitute plushie in my cubicle so it's not a death sentence in the professional world if you keep it subtle. On casual Fridays I wear the dotsprite polo with the female PC from B/W on it :)

The college students who played the games as kids but are more drawn in by the deeper experience that competitive battling brings. They are quite often members of this site, and conversely most Smogonites are in this category.

(Actually I'm a college graduate) I guess of the categories listed in the OP, this applies to me most. I would not have been interested in Pokemon this long without the competitive metagame. However, I wouldn't be as interested in competitive play if I didn't enjoy the aesthetics, the world, the mons themselves. It's kind of a reverse catch-22 for me? Stays in the game for the competitive play, stays for the competitive play because of the casual aspects of the game. Anyways, I feel that I have a greater love for Pokemon now than I did as a 6 year old in the days of RBY; genwunners and the "Pokemon is boring because it rehashes the same thing QQ" crowd always mystified me because the games have improved with every generation.

Mostly male.

I count three women in this thread (including myself) without going into profiles. The idea that most vidya fandoms are majority male is one that people should be weaned from, because from experience I can tell you a lot of women are scared of getting involved in fandoms because of creepers and misogynist attitudes, not because the subject doesn't interest them. This isn't exclusive to Pokemon, but most nerdy things in general.

 

[Mulan15262]

I think you underestimate how many people fall into the "middle schooler who plays competitive pokemon" category. When I was that age, most of my friends who play pokemon were competitive pokemon battlers, and the one that wasn't . Sure I was mostly hanging out with the smart kids, but that does mean quite a few would be competitive.

From what I've seen, a lot of middle school kids simply do not care one way or the other, while (at least, at some high schools) pokemon is popular among high-school students. I started playing pokemon about half way through my last year at elementary school, and didn't talk about it much, so I wouldn't know how it is talked about there.

And yes, a lot of kids here in America do not like to do anything that requires thinking when not at school. I'dsay another large group of middle-schoolers simply use whatever they can (like the typo I intentionally put earlier this post) to make fun of someone else to make themselves feel better. And those kids are the ones that call pokemon players childish (and I say who cares about a kid's opinion, especially if he/she isn't sane enough to respect mine whether or not they agree).


Going into profiles, but not into PMs, VMs, or post history, I see 5 female and 7 male, ignoring those who I can't find their gender at a quick glance, but including me. If this is an accurate representation of the ratios of genders in the pokemon fanbase, then it is mostly male, but not by much. Another amusing fact is that posts by males were more common at the beginning of the thread, and posts by females are more common right here, at what currently is the end of the thread.

 

[kabbes]

A really good post, with some really good insights, Age of Kings.

I should note, though, that being a twenty-something in a cubicle with peers around you that are of a similar age and are consequently used to computer games as something one does is a very different thing to being a thirty-something responsible for a department and thus dealing with the fifty-something CFO, CEO and other executive group members as part of daily working life. I can't talk to our Chief Exec about playing Pokemon. It's not a question of him giving me abuse. He'd even feign an interest. But he'd think I was an infantile bloody idiot nonetheless. The generation gap is just too big.

 

[Hulavuta]

Going into profiles, but not into PMs, VMs, or post history, I see 5 female and 7 male, ignoring those who I can't find their gender at a quick glance, but including me. If this is an accurate representation of the ratios of genders in the pokemon fanbase, then it is mostly male, but not by much. Another amusing fact is that posts by males were more common at the beginning of the thread, and posts by females are more common right here, at what currently is the end of the thread.

Celever's actually male, just saying.

 

[Age of Kings]

@above: I still want to make the point that women aren't "rare" in fandoms. They just feel dissuaded from participating in them which could even mean posting on this site. This one thread is obviously a very small sample size but it is an example about how the gender ratio isn't as disparate as people think. (And the fact is pointed out that people can be untruthful in their profiles; goes both ways.) Getting a little off topic though, since I wanted to nitpick at the OP :P

A really good post, with some really good insights, Age of Kings.

I should note, though, that being a twenty-something in a cubicle with peers around you that are of a similar age and are consequently used to computer games as something one does is a very different thing to being a thirty-something responsible for a department and thus dealing with the fifty-something CFO, CEO and other executive group members as part of daily working life. I can't talk to our Chief Exec about playing Pokemon. It's not a question of him giving me abuse. He'd even feign an interest. But he'd think I was an infantile bloody idiot nonetheless. The generation gap is just too big.

Actually, besides interns, there really isn't anyone my age there. The majority of the people in my department are mid-to-late 30-somethings with kids, the people immediately surrounding me are in their 50-60s. If they play any games, they will be those casual mobile ones. I will say that I work at a smaller firm with a more relaxed atmosphere where people aren't expected to be soulless machines, so that makes a huge difference. Doesn't really have to do with age but the office culture I think; we absolutely are expected to be professional, but you can also be human. One of the guys in my department has a "Hollywood minute" where he discusses celebrity news as we do our morning processes lol. Obviously I wouldn't talk about it openly (I don't scream I LOVE POKEMON in the office), but I play my DS in the breakroom (playing it outside would be a huge no-no) and the stuff I brought hasn't gone unrecognized - no problems so far, as everyone knows I can do my job competently and don't look like a shithead when clients come in lol. Playing Pokemon changes neither of those aspects, but I recognize not all environments have the capacity to recognize that having hobbies =/= job competence.

As an econ major, I was one of the very few gamers, or nerds period, within my major (btw I graduated last year so not too long ago). Most of them were the "bro" types who barely got by on getting wasted, hooking up, and watching sports videos in class. I had a few friends within my major, but my social group was mostly comp sci and English majors. All anecdotal evidence but you can see that there is a lack of people who understand both video games and finance and why people bitch at Nintendo/Sony/EA/etc all the time ;) But yeah, age =/= understanding or acceptance of gaming hobbies. Not all young people are...."enlightened", shall I say. :)

 

[Kingriolu]

I am a 13 year old girl and I play pokemon quite obsessively(while I'm not maintaining my straight A's). I usually don't tell anyone about it but if I see that someone else likes pokemon, I gladly discuss it with the person. Other than my mom, other people don't really seem to care about it.

 

[megayokim]

Im in year eleven and am a 17 yr old guy but the reactions i get are only positive since well a good handfull of my peers like it and a few actually play online too , one guy went as far as asking me to teach him and we became good friends from me making him go from casual to competitive so I'd say the only ones whocare are those who see it as a good thing.

 

[Flamer]

I began playing Pokemon competitively around three years ago. A year before that, I started playing Pokemon casually again after I found the Crystal version that I stole when I was a kid. I began playing Emerald on an emulator and copped a bit of abuse. Nowadays, most of my friends know I play pokemon, I've even got a few of them into competetive battling, although they give up pretty quickly due to the mind games required. Most of the time, the only people that really care whether you play pokemon in a negative way are people who dislike you for some reason.

 

[Ausgirl]

Plenty of people. I even have a pikachu badge on my bag which I take with me into Uni.