The Gliscor In A Coal Mine
Gunna talk about Smogon here. Oh, you don’t know Smogon?
Weeeeell, deep breath.
Smogon is a Pokemon fangame played with the basic components of the videogame series Pokemon, which is itself, made by Game Freak and distributed by Nintendo, which you’ll probably recognise as one of the largest privately held companies in the world. Smogon, by contrast, are a forum and some emulators and a surprisingly dense little bubble of Youtube content.
‘Smogon’ in this context refers to a bunch of related games, that form a single fandom game, a folk game. They have, in the terminology I’m fond of using, made a game out of another game, which is a super cool practice I actively encourage. It’s how we get great things like, for example, the entire Legacy subgenre of games, from its dizzying heights of Pandemic Legacy Season 1 to the shocking lows of Pandemic Legacy Any Other Seasons. I like Smogon as a thing to observe through some sort of astrolabe or other technical device. I have no particular interest in engaging with the game itself, as they play it.
I don’t want to get into a play space with these people.
Not because they’re bad or anything, though they are overwhelmingly split between the still-thinks-he’s-on-4chan shithead vs autistic trans girl social binary of internet niches and you’re never sure what side that coin is landing on when you flip it. I don’t want to partake of Smogon because the game they’re playing looks unpleasant to me to play, and because part of Being Into Smogon means looking around at the game Smogon has made and thinking: Yeah, this works. This is a good system.
The current news out of Smogon, such as it is, is that in their OU format (short for ‘overused’), just banned the Pokemon Gliscor. Gliscor is redacted information that doesn’t matter, because you don’t need to know what Gliscor is to come to understand the problem that Gliscor highlights, and the lesson you can learn about making games and control over those games.
Smogon’s banning policy reflects a truth I espouse as a game designer: Players are great at identifying problems and terrible at solving them.
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