Prison or penthouse? The cruelty/kindness of Poké Balls

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont.../PokeBalls.jpgThe old concern is that Pokémon, the cutesy kids game that has become nothing short of a global phenomenon, has a dark heart. Yes, its bevy of monsters have doe eyes and quivering smiles, but strip away the cartoon aesthetic and the fact remains that your character is charged with wounding animals until they are sufficiently weakened to be captured in a tiny ball. Then, having trapped the critter, you send them out to fight other pocket monsters in what must be the world’s most socially acceptable contemporary take on cockfighting (Pokémon X/Y sold four million units in just two days). In this way, Game Freak is teaching postmodern generations how to hunt, trap and battle in a world where the children affluent enough to own a handheld device have little apparent need for such skills.It’s a selective take on Pokémon’s seemingly inexhaustible appeal and yet there’s something to it. Sure, apologists will argue that captured Pokémon fight for you willingly, and that a complicated bond of trust and cooperation is formed through the trainer/monster relationship. But you could read this another way: as a digital introduction to Stockholm Syndrome. After all, no matter how big or small they are – and even the original Pokémon range in height from a mere 30cm (Pidgey) to 8.8m (Onix) and in weight from less than a pound (Ghastly) to nearly a ton (Snorlax) – each monster is kept in a one-size-fits-all cage: a tiny Poké Ball.Pikachu may be Pokémon’s headline monster, but it’s the Poké Ball, a red-and-white sphere about the size of a baseball, which unclasps in the middle and sucks Pokémon into its TARDIS-like interior, that is the visual shorthand for the series. The in-game origins of the Poké Ball are linked to the Johto region, where Apricorns grow. The fruit was hollowed out and then used to catch Pokémon. These antiquated designs (still used in the game by some trainers) were modernised by the still-mysterious Silph Corporation, a company based in the Kanto region, which manufactures and markets essential tools for Pokémon trainers. But outside of the fiction, the Poké Ball has its origin in the simpler tools of childhood bug-catching.As a child, Pokémon’s inventor Satoshi Tajiri (who lends his first name to the lead character we know as Ash in the Japanese versions of the game) was infatuated with collecting insects. In the summer holidays, he would head out from his family home on the outskirts of Tokyo to search the surrounding undergrowth in search of beetles and other insects, carefully studying each one he caught before cataloguing it in a notepad bought for him by his parents. Clearly, Tajiri wouldn’t go so far as to name, train and battle his captured beasts – even if a few did eat each other – but in whatever Perspex prison was used to house the creatures, the Poké Ball was born.
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