They Took Away the Story Mode and Something in Me Broke

I want to talk about Pokémon Champions, and I will, but first you should know what this website did to me before I even got to the article. Some kind of pop-up slides in from the side like a construction crane and asks if I want notifications, and I did not click yes, I did not click no, I clicked the little X, and it took me to a different page entirely, a page about vacuum cleaners, and I have still, to this day, not confirmed whether I want notifications from Video Games Chronicle. That is the relationship we are starting from. That is the trust level. In 1982 a magazine did not follow you into the kitchen and ask you things.

So. The director. Some fella — I don't have his name in front of me and I'm not going to pretend I do — comes out and says the new Pokémon game, this "Champions" one, is going to keep the turn-based battles, which fine, good, whatever, the turns can take turns, I don't have a dog in that fight, except I did have a dog, we'll get to the dog, but the second part of what he said is the part that's sitting on my chest like a cinder block: no single-player campaign. No story mode. You just battle. Battle, battle, battle, forever, against other people who also apparently have nothing better to do than sit inside and fight invisible lizards on a screen instead of going outside and fighting real lizards, which by the way we did, my brother and I, behind the Amoco station, and one of them bit him and he cried and told our mother it was a "big one" and it was not a big one, it was a normal-sized lizard, but that's not the point, the point is nobody needed a campaign mode to have a lizard adventure, we had a curb and a shoebox and functioning legs.

You know what had a campaign? Everything. Everything had a campaign in 1982 because a campaign is just a fancy word for "a beginning, a middle, and an end," which is a structure human beings have used since caves, since fire, since the wheel, and now some director — young fella, I'd bet money, I'd bet the whole jar of coins on my dresser, the good jar, not the fake jar with the buttons in it that I keep for scaring off the neighbor's cat — decides we don't need the middle anymore. Just the battling. Just the friction. No arc. That's not a game, that's a hallway with no doors.

And another thing — and I want to be careful here because I know how I sound, I know I sound like a man shaking a rake at a cloud, but hear me out — the turn-based part, everybody's cheering about the turn-based part like it's a moral victory, like they held the line at Antietam, "thank god they kept turn-based," and nobody's asking the actual question, which is: whose turn was it, historically, to decide that stories are optional? Because I remember when the turn belonged to Mr. Passarelli. Mr. Passarelli ran the hardware store on the corner — not the corner by my house, the other corner, the one with the bakery that later became a shoe repair place and then, I believe, a place that just sold phone cases, which tells you everything about the arc of this civilization right there, hardware to bread to shoes to phone cases, that's not progress, that's a countdown — and Mr. Passarelli would let kids sweep the floor for a nickel, and he'd tell you a story while you swept, and the story never had a point either, come to think of it, so maybe I'm not so different from these game directors, maybe I'm the original single-player campaign with no ending, ha, no, forget I said that, that's not the thesis.

Here's a story and I promise you it has nothing to do with Pokémon. In the summer of, I want to say '82 because everything in my head is filed under '82 whether it happened then or not, my Uncle Ray — not my real uncle, a man we called Uncle Ray because he lived two doors down and had a riding mower before anyone else on the block, which back then made you basically royalty — Uncle Ray decided he was going to enter a fishing tournament on the reservoir, and he did not own a boat, so he borrowed one from a man named Dutch, and Dutch's boat had a hole in it, a small hole, "nothing to worry about" Dutch said, and Uncle Ray went out at five in the morning with a thermos and a transistor radio and came back four hours later towing the boat behind him, swimming, pushing the boat, because it had filled with water exactly like you'd expect a boat with a hole in it to do, and he never once let go of the thermos, held it over his head the whole way like the Statue of Liberty, and to this day I don't know what was in that thermos that was worth drowning for, coffee, probably, or something stronger, and I never found out if he placed in the tournament, and I never asked, and Dutch — this is the part — Dutch charged him for the boat repair. Charged his own friend. That's the kind of decade it was. Consequences. You want a campaign mode, there's your campaign mode, right there, a man and a hole and a thermos, no tutorial, no continue button.

But we're not talking about Uncle Ray, we're talking about a video game company deciding kids don't need a beginning-middle-end anymore, they just need "engagement loops," which is a phrase I read somewhere and it made my arm go a little numb, engagement loop, like a noose, like a leash, like the retractable kind that lets the dog think it's free until it hits the end and gets snapped back, which, incidentally, is exactly what happened to Chief, the dog two houses down, not my dog, belonged to the Hendersons, big dumb sweet animal, part something part everything, and Chief had one of those retractable leashes and one day he saw a squirrel and forgot physics entirely and hit the end of that leash so hard he did a full backflip, a genuine backflip, like an Olympic gymnast, and old man Henderson just stood there with the handle in his hand laughing so hard he had to sit on the curb, and Chief got up like nothing happened and immediately went after the same squirrel again, no memory, no growth, no campaign mode, just the loop, battle battle battle, and I think about that dog more than I think about most historical events I was actually taught in school, and I don't know what to do with that information, I really don't, I'm just telling you because it's in there and it wants out.

And another thing — single-player. They act like single-player is some fringe indulgence, some little side hobby for hermits, when single-player is the whole reason any of us learned to sit still and finish something. A campaign teaches you that effort has an ending. You beat the game. You saw the credits. Do you understand how load-bearing that is for a person's soul, to know that if you put in the hours, something rolls credits at you? Take that away and replace it with infinite competitive battling and what you've built, structurally, spiritually, is a slot machine with a hat on. I'm not saying that to be dramatic. I am saying that as a factual description of the architecture.

Now — I want to be extremely clear, because I know exactly where this rant wants to go next, it wants to go marching off toward "back in my day we made our own fun" and "kids these days" and some tidy little sunbelt-radio-host bow on top of it, entrepreneurs pulling themselves up by their joysticks, and I am not going to do that, I refuse, because half the reason 1982 worked is that the phone company was a government-sanctioned monopoly and nobody complained about that either, so don't go thinking I've got a tidy philosophy here, I don't, I contain multitudes and most of them are confused.

Because here's the other side of it, the side that doesn't fit on a bumper sticker: maybe the turn-based battling IS the story. Maybe two people sitting across from each other, or across a server, taking turns, waiting, watching, reacting — maybe that's more of a real human exchange than a scripted campaign where a fake narrator tells you you're special. I had a chess set with half the pieces missing, we used bottle caps for the bishops, root beer caps, and some of the best afternoons of my entire childhood were just turns, just waiting for a man named Skip — not his real name, nobody remembers his real name, everybody called him Skip because he walked with a limp and it looked like a skip if you squinted — to move a bottle cap three inches to the left and then sit there for six minutes thinking about it while a fly landed on his ear and he didn't even flinch, didn't even move, absolute stone. No story mode there either. No campaign. Just turns. And I loved it. I genuinely loved it. So maybe the director's right. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just old and scared of hallways with no doors.

I don't know. I don't know what I think anymore, and frankly the fluorescent lighting in most modern buildings has given me a headache that predates this whole article, and none of this is really about Pokémon at all, is it, it's about the bottle caps, it's about Dutch charging his own friend for a boat repair, it's about a dog that couldn't remember a squirrel from one minute to the next and honestly seemed happier for it —

and I never did find out what happened to that vacuum cleaner ad.

— Edgar