Object Lessons From the Pokemon Trading Pits

It’s that time of year again: the Christmas shopping season. And with it, as sure as clockwork, comes this season’s Toy of the Year, that colossus of kiddie consumption that dwarfs every other toy on the market.

Indeed, ever since the Cabbage Patch craze of 1983, each Christmas shopping season seems to produce its own delirious favorite. There were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles months, the Tickle Me Elmo era and the virtual pet parade. Last year it was Furbies.

You don’t need three guesses to identify the current toy of the year. It’s there on the Yahoo home page, at Burger King, on every school playground in the country and at a theater near you. Yes, this is the year of Pokemon fever, and while in one sense the current toy stampede is no different than the stampedes of the past, I do think it bears a new cultural message worth contemplating.

If you’re an American parent, you already know all about Pokemon fever, about the little “stock exchanges” where your children become day traders in Pokemon equities, and about the “portfolios” in which they horde their trades. I use these stock trading metaphors deliberately, because here is where I believe the cultural significance of this season’s toy of the year differs from those that have come before.

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In the past, whether it was Cabbage Patch Kids in the 1980s or Tickle Me Elmos in the 1990s, what children wanted was a toy that they could play with, or in technical terms, consume. Of course, due to their scarcity at the peak of their popularity, such toys, especially in the case of the Cabbage Patch dolls, also became status symbols: To own one put you ahead of your neighbors who didn’t, which is why parents were often more frantic to acquire the things than their children were.

All of these toy crazes were object lessons in the logic of America’s consumer culture, in which our social identity is determined in large part by our ability to acquire consumer goods. To lose face in the consumption sweepstakes (say, to drive a Hyundai rather than an SUV), is to lose social face. No wonder that parents, who use their possessions to signal to others how economically powerful they are, are so eager to get the latest goods for their kids.

For many kids, having a complete set of Pokemon cards is something of a status symbol too, of course. But there is still something different going on here. For it appears that children don’t simply play with their Pokemon cards; they horde them, often in the hope that they will become more valuable later on.

That’s what makes Pokemon fever look so much like the stock exchange. Stocks, too, are hoarded rather than consumed, held in the hope that their value will increase. We think of them as monetary assets, but they aren’t really. Unlike money, they are not legal tender. Their value is entirely speculative, lying in the price that you can get someone else to pay for them. The idea is to buy cheap and sell dear, which means that somebody, eventually, is going to get a raw deal.

This is what children are doing with Pokemon cards: aggressively trading them in the hope of getting a better deal than their schoolmates. Which means that somebody is going to lose out.

Pokemon fever was anticipated in this regard by the Beanie Baby craze, where cheap dolls could become the stuff of expensive collections. I think that this is enough to indicate a trend that mirrors a much larger trend in our society. That is, our consumer society appears to be changing into a hoarding-and-speculating society. With so many Americans feverishly building up stock portfolios and speculating on every initial public offering that comes down the pike, we can see that our children are, in effect, imitating us, as is so often the case with children’s play.

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I’m not certain what effect this move toward becoming a hoarding-and-speculating society will have, but I think it is fair to say that it bears the potential of turning the country into a giant Ponzi scheme, where one’s personal wealth, in the end, is dependent on someone else having to pay a price. A Ponzi society is different from a savings society, because saving money does not depend on timing and doesn’t eventually require that someone else loses so that you can win. And that’s what bothers me about the Pokemon craze: As kids cut their deals on their school playgrounds, there have to be losers as well as winners. One child’s happiness must come at the expense of another’s.

So when I read newspaper stories about unhappy children who got snookered in the Pokemon trading pits, I think about a society where prosperity is predatory, where my getting my piece of the American dream means that you must lose yours. And that’s not just fun and games.