Kids Still Playing Pokemon Like It's 1999 93
theodp writes "In 1999, TIME's cover warned readers to Beware of Pokemon ('For many kids it's now an addiction: cards, video games, toys, a new movie. Is it bad for them?'). But Pokemon wasn't as easily felled as Lehman or Bear Stearns. Thirteen years later, 16-year-old Manoj Sunny has his eye on a Pokemon world title, having earned the chance to travel to The Big Island with 35 fellow Americans for the 2012 Pokemon Video Game World Championships, which will be held Aug. 10-12. Sunny, who also captains his school's chess team, credits his success to a good memory, intuition, daily practice, the use of an online simulator, and a competitive attitude ('I hate losing. Once I lost, I needed to get better.')"
Aside from the games' rules themselves... (Score:5, Interesting)
The only important difference between competitive Pokemon and competitive chess is that chess is old and respected.
Rob
Re:Not surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
... its collectible, and collecting is fun.
Collecting was never fun for me. I never saw the point. When I was a kid, my dad tried to get me interested in coin collecting. He saw it as good "father and son time", but I hated it. We could have gone hiking or fishing, he could have taught me something useful. He was an electrical engineer, but he never taught me anything about electronics (I learned it all on my own). But instead of any of that, we spend our time going through bags of pennies looking for a rare 1939D. Bleh.
Now that I have kids of my own, we do active outdoor stuff, we build things, we do science experiments. My daughter has a great collection of Barbie shoes, but I was not involved in that (other than as a source of funding).