Pokemon Essay

The main topic of this article is about Pokemon, but more specifically, how Pokemon functions and intervenes in narratives regarding audiences, media culture, agency, structure and the issue of pedagogy and learning.
The main argument that the author makes is that the novelty and popularity of Pokemon is due to the amount of activity required of the audience and that the other mediums of Pokemon, through other media outlets are designed to generate activity and social interaction. Through the author’s usage of Pokemon examples, the author suggests that agency and structure are interdependent and that the emphasis on activity in children’s media, such as in the case of Pokemon represents a new age in children’s media and that examining video games in general means to examine pedagogy and the dynamics between teaching and learning.
The author’s primary sources for this article include the original Pokemon games released for the Game Boy Color, the Pokemon anime, information about Nintendo sales of Pokemon related television shows, products and merchandise in the late 1990’s and interviews with the creator of Pokemon, Satoshi Tajiri.
The secondary sources for this article include a lot of academic articles and books that focus on consumerism, pedagogy and education in order to give the

reader a framework from which to analyze the Pokemon phenomenon. Additionally, the article also uses some of these sources to contextualize Pokemon’s meteoric rise and to bring up some popular theories regarding the connection between pedagogy, agency, structure, and teaching in the Pokemon universe.
The major contribution of the first article to American studies and to the topic of video games as a whole is to reveal that the interactivity of child media (and by extension, videogames) plays an important role in subverting traditional notions of structure and agency, and even traditional notions of education.

By stating that structure and agency can exist concurrently, this article upends the function of the concepts known as structure and agency in the context of media forms. Additionally, by critiquing the idea of education in relation to video games, it forces one to look at the pedagogical aspects of video games in order to determine whether a video game has “educational

value.”
One of the topics that I keep on turning over in my head is this idea of analyzing video games, specifically, either the Ace Attorney series or the Professor Layton games. My goal for the American Studies project was to focus on representation, but specifically how the Japanese elements in the games were represented to American viewers. But this article, which I looked up out of curiosity, is actually a pretty interesting take on the subject of media culture. After reading this article, I wonder if I could do something related to the interactive nature of the games and the idea of learning, especially since both of these games are heavy on text, story and character development. Both of these games upend what traditional gaming is supposed to look like and even at their most absurd, skills are developed in these games that test the minds of the people who play them and cause them to rethink about the game’s world, but also about how they view similar situations across the game.