Hacker News Reader

Comment by redcap | Hacker News Reader

There's a fair bit of information compressed into Pokemon cards and other card games so it's no surprise that if you're that into it you get good at it despite being so young. Same with sports - there's a hell of a lot of information in statistics for a sport like baseball or cricket.

My impression of 'dumb' means stupid - to me the complexity involved in these cards raises them above dolls and the like.

It may have something to do with the American use of the word 'dumb'?

View on HN

Perhaps "dumb" in the sense of "that looks like a dumb way to spend all your free time and money".

I guess that the appeal of Pokemon and similar dumb phenomena (somebody correct me if I'm wrong, I'm too old to have played any of these games myself and too young to have children who have) is twofold -- there's the "game" part and then there's the "collection" part. The "game" part is pretty "smart" as a game, and one could easily imagine a card game with a similar sort of game mechanic that could be bought for a few dollars. But it's the "collection" part of the game that makes it so addictive, expensive, insidious, and the source of much needless (and dumb) social anxiety among children.

Tell me about it - there's a summer activity here in Tokyo which involves kids going to various stations here and getting a Pokemon stamp - have to collect them all. The only thing they might learn is where all the stations are.

The two end up being intertwined though.

When I was younger I played Magic. At first, I did okay. I had some decent cards and, with some luck, would win often enough. However, as the game evolved, better and better cards came out and if I wanted to have any success I needed to keep buying cards. So no matter how much strategy I came up with, I just didn't have the cards I needed (its possible that I was too young to really come up with good strategy, but given that most of the other people were about the same age, buying cards was probably my best chance at winning).

If this weren't the case, then the card manufacturers would not have a way to keep making money. I got into some other card games as well, and I remember one was particularly well balanced such that new cards weren't "better" than old ones. As I remember, the game didn't last long and was soon discontinued. Anecdotal, yes, but the key is that "game" and "collection" intertwine.

Talking about the "collection" part of the game and how addictive it is, Mattel has some augmented reality cards up it's sleeves:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/10/02/avatar-augmented-realit...

I personally would love to see more than just a simple animation. Think strategic missions, a decision engine etc.

On the other hand, this might also take away a lot of imagination and storytelling aspect of these toys. All you needed for D&D was a good Dungeon Master and a couple of dices. :)

I think that 'Dumb' in this case is more likely to represent the fact that the cards themselves don't do anything. They're 'Dumb' in the sense that they're much more inert by themselves than say a video game is.

I think games like this encourage imagination as basically a prerequisite to play, whereas video games are almost the opposite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com