Reading 11: I Think This Has Devolved into a Pokémon Blog, I’m Sorry Ashley Johnson
So this past weekend, instead of accomplishing literally any homework, I decided to watch Griffin McElroy’s “Nuzlocke Run” of Pokémon Y. In Pokémon, a Nuzlocke run is basically a run of the game in which you impose certain rules on yourself to make the game harder, such as Pokémon fainting = perma-death. However, when watching this series of YouTube videos, I realized that there is a mode in Pokémon called “set” mode that most gamers turn on if they are older than, like, seven. Apparently, it’s what makes the game interesting and slightly more challenging for adults. I’ve never really known what it was, and I certainly have never played with it on.
Honestly, when I first realized there was this difficulty in my favorite games that I had not been living up to, I kind of had the same reaction that a lot of straight white males had towards Scalzi’s blog post. I obviously didn’t find someone online to harass about it, but for a day or two I felt like a fake, casual gamer, and it made me (internally, at least) frustrated with all these people who had been playing in set mode and still doing much better than me in Pokémon. (I realize that this blog post is a way over-dramatized version of my internal monologue for like a single day, but stick with me.) However, what I eventually realized was that it was just all the more impressive (okay, but not that much more, Pokémon is still technically a children’s game) that everyone else had been fighting against this additional obstacle and still have managed to beat the game. I don’t know if I’ll switch to set mode at any point in the future, because I like Pokémon the way it is, and I don’t play for the intense challenge, I play because it’s fun. But now I have a healthier respect for what set mode is and how much more difficult it can make the game.
Basically, all this is just to say that I think Scalzi’s analogy was incredibly useful, and although he is playing on the “easiest setting,” I think it’s admirable that he’s aware of his privilege and is using it to help other, similarly-privileged people be aware of it too. We’ve discussed it in class before how one of the best ways to potentially counteract the racism and sexism in gaming is for straight white males who are popular in gaming to push back against it, and this was, to me, a good example of that. However, I do agree with Nakamura how it’s still so unfair that this privilege exists even when taking about privilege, and how even though Scalzi makes a good point, it’s ridiculous that his voice is the one that was heard even when hundreds of minority gamers have said the exact same thing before.
