I find myself unable to resist games that have some sort of completionist aspect to them. A completionist is a person who, when playing a video game, has to collect all of a certain item, or complete something in the game 100%. The one obvious completionist aspect of Pokemon is that players can strive to 'catch em all', with the intent to capture and store all of the monsters in the game. This is kind of pointless, though, because the game is not entirely consistent with making all of the pokemon in the player's pokedex (pokemon catalog) available to the player. For example, players outside of Japan are not able to obtain the time-traveling pokemon Celebi without hacking because only the players in Japan were allowed to access the event that gave them opportunity to encounter a Celebi. This is only one example, but it's the example that I find the most frustrating--Celebi is so cute. :-(This, of course, makes Pokemon a bit of a masochistic game for the completionist in me. Yet the allure of catching all those other adorable animals keeps me from abandoning the game completely. I guess I also like the boring stuff like battle tactics and coordination of the pokemons' types and movesets. You know, the stuff that actually has an intellectually stimulating effect on me. I guess that's good too.
Very interesting term!: completionist. Is this a term that comes from gaming? So many new terms are being coined every day!
ReplyDeleteAs of now, I haven't seen this term used outside of gaming, so I think for now it is exclusive to gaming. However, I could definitely see it being applied to non-gaming situations in the future.
DeleteYou reminded me of my experience with Pokemon. I played all the versions on Gameboy. In the good old days there were no online gaming, so the best thing we could do was to connect to Gameboys with a wire and battle each other. I used to have this obsession that I have to catch all the strongest pokemons. That was the first reason why I started studying Japanese, so that I could understand their gaming books. Gaming now is more about strategies and hacking, but in my days, it was about patience. Usually it took days walking in the same area before you could encounter the pokemon you wanted - and in most cases you couldn't even catch them.
ReplyDeleteHaha, yes precisely. Role Play Games like Pokémon take so much time and patience, it's hard to have the patience to find all of the pokémon, and I have not been able to catch all of them yet. But I'm sure that with an obsessive personality like mine, I'll at least get close!
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