Lessons from Pokémon
By Pastor Daniel Marvin
Welcome to the world of Pokémon! Those words of professor Oak have a special meaning for me. I have grown up with the Pokémon franchise since I was the age of 3. My first introductions were the anime and the games. My love for Pokémon increased when, at the age of 7, I was given Pokémon Crystal. That is when the lessons began. Here are three lessons that I have learned from playing and enjoying Pokémon: 1. Love of creation, 2. Exploring the world around us, 3. Relearning what we already know.
Pokémon in its story and games has the player intimately connect with the created world. Pokémon are considered partners with Humankind in their world. Humans are not meant to dominate nature but learn to coexist with it. This is most commonly seen in the games Pokémon, Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald. The villain teams try to manipulate nature to their own advantage. They don’t understand that nature is not something to be controlled. Nature is beautiful in its own right. In Pokémon Crystal, there is a point in the story where the player is asked, “Do you value all your Pokémon, even the weak ones?” This question had a profound impact on me. I found myself loving the sprites on the screen because I had journeyed with them, because the creatures were my companions. So I answered yes. Now I realize why I answered yes: humans are designed to have a relationship with God’s creatures. At that moment, I expressed a desire to have a relationship with the creatures, although fictional. Pokémon encourages us to love all of creation and appreciate God’s handiwork.
Pokémon encourages exploration of the world around the player by visiting forests, caves, mountains, seas, small towns, and large cities. Pokémon said to the player, “the world is out there.” The game enhanced my love of learning about the world and exploring it in all of its splendor. Pokémon generally has a positive take on the goodness of the world. While there are villains, they seem to try and disrupt society and or nature. The villains are chaos in the world. As a follower of God I believe the world to be inherently good, not evil. I recognize that God’s creation is in need of repair and transformation, but I also recognize that it is good and that it has the potential to show us revelation about God.
Similar to exploring the world around us, Pokémon taught me the importance of going back to a place we thought we knew now that we are equipped to explore even further. In the games, there are areas in cities or routes where you enter and find that you cannot explore the whole area until you have an upgraded Pokémon, moves, or progression in the story. Once you have discovered something new, you go back and find that a whole new section has opened up for you. In our Christian walk, there are areas of life and knowledge of God that we thought we were experts on. Yet as we learn and grow, we find that the simple truths become deeper, wider and greater than we can even imagine.
The theologian Augstiane wrote on how the world around us can teach us about who God is, “Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?” This is in line with Psalm 19:1-4: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they have no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world”. Creation is out there proclaiming the glory of God. These lessons from Pokémon show us that God can use anything to teach us about Godself. The question is not whether God speaks to us in a multitude of ways but whether we are listening to the world God has created.
