Pokemon - Deploy!

Number One Pokemon Trainer

Pokemon, evidently, still has a substantial fan base.  I never jumped on this particular fad because I was sixteen when they first appeared and was still too obsessed with the Ninja Turtles to be bothered with anything new.  According to Wikipedia, Pokemon, or "Pocket Monsters", is the Japanese version of "Trouser Snakes", a common Western game with which all sixteen year-olds are well acquainted.  It has now been fourteen years since the Pocket Monsters were unleashed on the world, and the sedentary six year-olds who spent all their allowances on playing cards have lived well past the expected middle age of that demographic. Interestingly, the crises of midlife have manifested themselves in home-brewed computer versions of this once wildly popular card game.

Let's play Pokemon, mon!

This recently came down the Facebook pipeline courtesy of one of those original Pokemon gangstas.  Given his enthusiasm for the project promoted on the site and my new-found interest in bridging physical gaming and video gaming, I thought I'd check it out.  What I found is a surprisingly professional looking site with two valuable Don't-do-want-Donny-Don't-does-type lessons in video game deployment.
 
Lesson #1: make your game easy to access
It's not that this so-called Pokemon Online Battle Sim is necessarily difficult to get a hold of, but it is 16.5 MB and hosted on a server somewhere in the European Union.  From where I'm sitting, that's a download that can take anywhere from three minutes to three hours, depending on traffic.

Lesson #2: I don't know you and I don't trust you
I immediately grew apprehensive when I discovered that the Pokemon game is only available as a downloadable, installable executable.  That's right, you actually have to download and install it.  If you don't understand my apprehension, I invite you to install the software yourself.  Be sure to let me know how it works out.  If you're a Mac user, better still... there's a version for you!  Macs can't get viruses, right?

My first foray into video board game design and distribution, though modest, taught me some interesting lessons about software deployment (world multi-player coming soon, FYI).  But, even being the amateur that I am, I would have thought the lessons listed above would be no-brainers.  The real shame is that I actually want to play the Pokemon game, but the reasons listed in Lesson #2 are more than enough incentive for me to run screaming in the opposite direction.