While reading Natalia Cecire’s “Introduction: Theory and the Virtues of Digital Humanities,” my attention was piqued when she mentioned hacks. At the very beginning of her introduction, she states that “The debates around the role of ‘theory’ in digital humanities are debates about the relationship between saying and doing.” The theory is the “saying” and for “doing,” she brings up hackers as an example, referring to Stephen Ramsay who says that “…a hacker is a person who looks at systemic knowledge structures and learns about them from making or doing.” He describes hackers as people who see the data and the information and make something new from it.
If you haven’t picked up the hints in some of my previous blog posts, I’m into playing Pokemon games and if you’ve never played any of their main series games, I’ll give you a brief explanation of them. At the beginning of each game, you are introduced to the professor of the particular region that the game takes place in in the Pokemon world and after getting a short explanation of the creatures that inhabit the world and choosing whether you are a boy or girl (not optional in Generation 1) and selecting a name, you dive right in. After selecting your starter Pokemon, you travel throughout the region, catching and training Pokemon, collecting each badge of the eight gyms in the region, defeating the evil team of that region, and challenging the Elite Four and the Champion. There are other things you can do in the games, especially now that there are Wi-Fi battles and downloadable content, but you’re obviously not buying the newest installment to the series expecting there to be anything different from what I described above.
So now that you know the gist of the main series Pokemon games, you’re probably thinking, “Okay, so don’t the fans get bored with the same old-same old?” That’s very reasonable to think but as Griffin McElroy from the Polygon, “Despite the truly gargantuan amount of time demanded by the core series, there are fans who demand more — and fans who create more.” McElroy is talking about the ROM Hacks that can be found all over the internet. These hacks are simply altered versions of the original games. Some are completely new spins on old stories while others aren’t that much different. Some are just more difficult versions of the originals which can consist of altering the levels of your opponent’s Pokemon or even changing their Pokemon to make their teams more well rounded. A link can be found below which has downloadable hacks of games that were made for the Game Boy Advanced if anyone is interested in venturing them. Overall, I feel like despite the original work is not theirs, the ability to create a polished game that you can call your own is an incredible talent. Besides, the PokeTubers that play some of these games on their channels aren’t complaining.
Works Cited
http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/22/6054087/pokemon-fan-games-hacked-roms