two versions of pokemon is the optimal format for the releases
1. i like trading. i think it adds to the social experience and i enjoy that. i dont get anyone who says "i gotta buy two games?!?!?!" what? talk to people lmao
2. it makes for a fun convo on social media. i love seeing the reasons people choose for picking one version over the other, and seeing what my friends choose.
overall pokemon while also a game series is also supposed to be a social event. two versions promotes this a lot
This take stretches across a lot of relevant take areas in the era of the internet:
1) I see lacking nuance (shock!) in convos where any profit-generating measure has to be totally outrageously immoral. Something can be a profit-generating measure and also either actively beneficial, not beneficial but relatively harmless, or negative but in an unremarkable / expected way.
2) Even if someone doesn't trade for whatever reason, "i gotta buy two games" is pretty silly i think. A game doesn't have to give you all of its content, so long as the content it does give you is good. Ideas of 'total completionism' are often pretty arbitrary, and not something that has to be forced on every game anyway. Like, if you can't get all the Pokemon because of verison differences or whatever, you can frame your completionist impulse in terms of 'get all Pokemon that are accessible to me'. Lots of options for you to conceptualize your experience in a way that is satisfying to you.
3) Sometimes arbitrary categories are good because they provide material, fuel for you to bounce off of by choosing one or the other. I'll elaborate. neither Pokemon Sun nor Pokemon Moon is objectively better, so you can easily say things like 'i will pick the moon one because i think the moon is a cool metaphor/symbol in various contexts', or 'the moon one creates an interesting alternate paradigm of much common activity taking place in darkness'. These conceptualizations make your choice more meaningful, and these areas of novelty across multiple versions help you make meaningful conceptualizations. In other words, these categories are opportunities to sort yourself along some dimension(s) of interest. You can learn or affirm something about yourself.
This final commentary about arbitrary categories leads into my independent hot take of the post. I'll first elaborate my POV on arbitrary categories though.
Preamble 0) Many categorizations have different purposes for scientists and non-scientists. In most discussions, which are conducted between non-scientists, the non-scientist purposes are the expected usage and the point of reference. Generally, 'experts use this word in a different way' is not helpful to me - experts don't monopolize how words are used, and i'm not currently talking to them. One can make connections to linguistic prescriptivism / grammar nit-picking in casual conversation, which I also dislike.
There are exceptions to this principle. Sometimes people use non-expert definitions
but act like they are expert definitions, with the corresponding significance / authority. This is common with psychological terms like "narcissist". However, note that the problem is that
not 'the definition they use is different' but
rather 'the definition is given the wrong
context". Much of the issue is in
miscommunication. (There's also other issues possible here, but this post is long enough as is.)
For an example, think about the idea that 'birds are / aren't dinosaurs'. There are two different meanings of 'dinosaur', an implicit taxonomical one (built by scientific principles of classifying organisms based on e.g. common ancestry) and the socially understood one (the social construct people mean when they say 'dinosaur'). A claim like 'birds are dinosaurs because t.rex is taxonomically closer to a sparrow than a stegosaurus' is a pretty bad argument i think (
rare xkcd L?), because its taxonomical framing is one that most people (validly) don't care about. Taxonomy doesn't get at what most people mean when they say
dinosaur, so using taxonomy to challenge them provides an "answer" to a question that few people asked in the first place. It's misaligned. An argument like 'birds are dinosaurs because some dinosaurs looked and behaved similarly to birds' (see
artist's awfully bird-like conception of
troodon) is a lot better, i think. This argument thinks about dinosaur traits that are more important in the social construct definition of 'dinosaur' people use and care about. I look at that linked picture and think, sure, a pheasant or peafowl or what have you is reasonably similar to the picture
in ways that I care about.
Take 1) People who say x personality test is unscientific (and therefore bad) are mostly missing the point of personality tests. It's a similar question-answer misalignment issue as using taxonomy to say sparrows are dinosaurs. Personality tests, like pokemon versions, provide categories you (or an algorithm) can sort you(rself) into. That is a useful role, regardless of whether these categories align with the current personality constructs of psychology, because these categories are material you can bounce off of to better understand yourself. Even if a test wrongly sorts you into the 'extrovert' category versus the 'introvert' category, by providing the category in the first place, the test gives you a question to think about when it comes to your personality and behavior: 'Do i generally enjoy / gain energy from / etc. spending time around other people, or from spending time alone?' This is a useful dimension to understand yourself. Obviously, it's not the only dimension, and it's only a generalization. Very few people will enjoy spending
all or
zero of their time alone. But it's a piece in a puzzle.
