Interrogating the feeling of playing Pokémon TCG Pocket

The app does not feel like Pokémon, does it? Something is wrong with the fonts, perhaps. No: something is wrong with the colors. It feels more like a hospital than a game. It has the gray of a place where they do surgeries. This is a sterile environment in which to simulate the feeling of opening a pack of trading cards.

You are playing Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. Playing might not be the correct verb. You are interacting with Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. You are opening the app titled Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. You are using that app on a daily basis. You are returning, again and again, to the setting of Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, unsure why precisely it is you are compelled to do so.

Well, fine, there’s the obvious: everyone knows, by this point, the joys of completing little goals every day. Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket has many little goals, every day. The most basic thing it would like you to do is to open two packs, every day. In order to open two packs, you must wait 24 hours. In order to wait 24 hours, you must live a whole day (itself not so simple!) and remember to return to open your two packs (very simple!), and then you must repeat the process. Which you have been doing: repeating. You have been opening your two packs and living your 24 hours. But to what end?

Well, to collect! To collect the monsters! This time, in card form! “Your pack stamina has recovered!” the game tells you, via notification. “You can open a booster pack!” Why thank you! And, yes, you will, you will!

The art is nice. It is nice to look at art. Art is no less art for being images of plant monsters and fire monsters and monsters whose psychic energies are inflicted upon the world. The art is colorful and pleasant on your colorful and pleasant screen, and it is all, ostensibly, yours to keep. To an extent, the answer to your question—What is the feeling of playing Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket?—is just that: it is nice to look at art. But does that make a game? You’re not so sure.

Perhaps the answer is to battle people online with your art, but you hear that it kind of sucks in the way that all online card battlers, if not properly balanced, kind of suck. Plus, more than that, you just don’t want to do it. Much like when you were a kid, the point of Pokémon cards is less about doing anything with them and more about stuffing them in binders. Binders which are still in your parents basement, you think. Unless, you know. Unless they found their way to the curb. (You wouldn’t blame your parents if that were the case.)

So you just keep opening your pack facsimiles—your packsimiles—each and every day. You’re not sure why, but you’ve continued to do so with a diligence akin to a meditative practice, each day since the game released on October 30th. It has become something that you just do. But do you like it? Do you like how it makes you feel? Do you think it’s something you want to continue doing? You worry the answer to these questions is more no than yes (or perhaps you worry that it’s more yes than no?), and that because the activity exists in the gray continuum between inoffensive and engaging, you might continue to open packsimiles until you yourself are as colorless as the app’s interface.

You decide, then, that there is nothing wrong with Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. Not anything especially wrong, that is. (You can see how people might lose money to it, though you have not paid a dime for your packsimiles and have no intention to.) But the fact is, there isn’t anything especially right with Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, either. And does it make sense to spend your time on something that isn’t especially right? Perhaps not, or perhaps so. Is something inoffensive incapable of offense? Are you being too harsh on the probable hospital where you open packs of digital children’s cards?

Either way, the hours tick away. Your pack stamina has recovered. You can open a booster pack. And you do.