I think the situation is best summed up by the following table:
Call of Duty: age of target audience, 18, age of real audience, 7
Pokemon: age of target audience, 7, age of real audience, 18
In short, Pokemon's demographic breakdown is bloody weird. It includes:
And so being an adult or even a teenage Pokemon fan can be hard. Personally I don't tell other people unless I know they have similar interests, not out of shame, but out of not wanting to bore them. I keep it off my Facebook profile but then I keep as much off that as possible, because I am quite a private person anyway. But I'd like to know, for others out there, do other people know about your fandom? And if so, what do they think?
Call of Duty: age of target audience, 18, age of real audience, 7
Pokemon: age of target audience, 7, age of real audience, 18
In short, Pokemon's demographic breakdown is bloody weird. It includes:
- The five- to seven-year-olds it's aimed at, fairly gender balanced by video game standards. They play it because there isn't a lot of competition in the market for video games that can be easily beaten by people in that age range.
- The ten- to fourteen-year olds who have played it for a few years and continue to do so because their responsible parents won't get the games they really want them to buy. Maybe a few of them are smart enough to enjoy the deeper competitive experience. There are certainly fourteen-year-olds on Smogon.
- The college students who were kids at the time of the Pokemon craze of 1998 or thereabouts and who still love the games. These will probably be gamers anyway and will just be looking for the occasional nostalgia trip between more serious titles.
- The college students who played the games as kids but are more drawn in by the deeper experience that competitive battling brings. They are quite often members of this site, and conversely most Smogonites are in this category. Mostly male.
- The occasional housewife who's spent hundreds of hours playing Brain Age and Animal Crossing and whose favourite part of X & Y is Pokemon Amie.
And so being an adult or even a teenage Pokemon fan can be hard. Personally I don't tell other people unless I know they have similar interests, not out of shame, but out of not wanting to bore them. I keep it off my Facebook profile but then I keep as much off that as possible, because I am quite a private person anyway. But I'd like to know, for others out there, do other people know about your fandom? And if so, what do they think?
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