Pikachu may now be more ubiquitous than Mickey Mouse, but it's easy to forget the moral panic that accompanied Pokémon when the franchise first took the world by storm. Time published "Beware of the Poké Mania", accusing the series of making children violent, while Associated Press went for a far less subtle "Pokémon stirs up crime".
While there may have been unfortunate and easy to sensationalise incidents where children got into fights about Pokémon, Pikachu and friends taught me an entirely different skill set. In many ways, my childhood obsession with Pokémon set me up for the job I have now.
At face value, Pokémon might seem like a simple game. Find monsters. Catch monsters. Battle monsters. But as any ageing millennial will know, there is a deceptive amount of depth. On top of learning the Pokémon themselves, there are type match-ups that determine who has an edge in a fight, stats that make certain moves effective, and a second hidden layer of stats that are incomprehensible to all but the most diligent of players.
The level of memorisation and understanding required to be a Pokémon Master translates neatly to tech journalism. Especially telco journalism. Much like Pokémon, there are now too many phone plans. It feels like they can change on a daily basis. Certain providers fare better against each other in certain situations. And the difficult-to-decipher yet crucial critical information summaries hide a trove of secrets. Pokémon primed my brain for a world of weird acronyms, obscure methodology, and a disconnected cohesion.
Pokémon also, weirdly, taught me a lot of skills tangentially related to my job. I started learning HTML in the third grade so I could make a Pokémon fan site on Geocities. I taught myself Photoshop so I could make fake Pokémon cards for creatures of my own. And trading Pokémon cards taught me about B2B sales.
It’s easy to be worried or even panicked about what the children are up to, but my experiences suggest you shouldn’t stress too much. They’re just working on their CVs.
Pokémon turns 30 today, and to celebrate, we have some telco-adjacent takes from the ageing millenials in WhistleOut's editorial team. Keep reading by clicking the links below!
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Alex Choros
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