Thank God for the Pokemon World Championship

I grew up watching Pokemon – before school. That gives you a pretty good idea of our household’s rules around TV time. I was a lonely kid, and Pokemon was one of the few ways I could connect with the other students. 

I’d tried taking my Christmas present from my pretty absent father (a John Elway football) to school, but the kids wanted to play with it. Ugh! And I quickly realized sports weren’t my “in.” But the adorable little critters on the cards from the toy store were my ticket in. We traded (with me not really understanding the rules of the actual game or being able to afford all that many cards) and talked about our favorites. We rapped the rap, pretended to be trainers, and laughed at our parents trying to pronounce the different names of the creatures. We bonded.

My experience as a millennial isn’t unique. Pokemon’s been around for 30 years now, and generations after mine have connected in the same way, even as the games and context continued to advance well beyond my understanding. 

These days there’s a whole industry built around Pokemon. And it was here in San Francisco this past weekend for the Pokemon World Championships. But here too were the same familiar faces who helped me as a lonely child. Pikachu, grinning from a cable car. Charmander and his evolved forms, playing on the Golden Gate Bridge. The nostalgia has me reckoning with my relationship with The City, precisely because the branding for this event has really embraced our unique aesthetic and our icons.

Lately I’ve been in a funk. I’m not a patron of certain coffee shops anymore, because waiting for my latte and hearing about an upcoming IPO is too depressing. So many tech companies are globbing up air time that there aren’t any fun news stories anymore. And the way AI has fucked up the rental market for my friends, like these two lovebirds who wanted to shack up but instead had to do the very UNROMANTIC task of waiting on endless lists and getting hearts broken by greedy landlords… Don’t even get me started.

I started feeling bitter about the out-of-towners coming here. Yeah, yeah, I know they bring money to our economy. I know even B2B SAASholes have a place in keeping this place, The City That Knows How, working. But it’s hard to not feel like a curmudgeonly pessimist when you’re downtown a lot, surrounded by said assholes (most of whom don’t look up from their phone, litter, create long lines at my favorite lunch counters, and then turn around and trashtalk The City on Reddit).

That’s why Pokemon has been so refreshing. Sure, they also… don’t look up from their phones. But it’s different! They’re playing a game. They’re catching a little Pikachu in an astronaut suit. I can forgive that. Plus they wear silly hats and goofy costumes, and that’s just plain old fun.

Our City needs more of this. It can’t all be AI bullshit and the impending stampede of Dreamforce. If we have more fun, more nostalgia, more games and tournaments, it makes me feel a little more connected to the people who come here. Less possessive, less annoyed. Sure, we need tourism in ways that most people don’t even understand, but it feels a lot better when they’re here to celebrate San Francisco instead of shit on it.