Author Archives: Cayenne Guo

Competitive Pokémon Hax Chants

RF has been playing competitive Pokemon for years, starting with the folkier Smogon (singles 1v1) formats before transitioning to the official Video Game Competition (VGC) format in recent years.

The Text

Pokemon differs from most other turn-based games in that turns aren’t taken independently one after another but rather decisions for a particular turn are made from both players blind (like in game theory) and resolved simultaneously once all decisions are made. Because of this wait time, players are held in suspense after making a decision or even while making a decision, running through probabilities and the different possibilities the turn might resolve. As the game also employs an incredible amount random number generation (RNG), luck becomes a huge element in how a particular game turns out. Much of the game revolves around accounting for best and worst case scenario and, at time, betting on small odds in desperation. This lends itself to chants and prayers for good luck between turns while waiting for a turn to resolve.

The most common chants to shout are “Freeze” (referring to usually a 10% chance to render the opponent to be unable to act until they hit another 10% chance), “Flinch” (referring to the higher chance of rendering an opponent unable to act for the turn), “Dodge” (referring to the chance for an opponent’s attack to miss), and sometimes, as the informant explains that most competitive players are also “degenerate weebs,” “Chance Ball” (referring to the anime Haikyuu!! in referrence to an opportunity to score, or in the context of Pokemon, turn the momentum of the game in their favor).

“Deserved” is also sometimes said when RNG befalls an opponent “post-ironically” as the players know they’re “victim-blaming” the opponent, but also they sincerely mean it, or at least tongue-in-cheek do. Another variation is to say that the opponent was asking for it by putting themselves in a position to be haxed (the term for bad RNG happening to you, derived from “hax” which is a noun referring to the occurence of RNG-based effects.

This leads to the informant’s report of the rising sentiment in the community that luck is partially a skill to the degree that maximizing your odds of getting lucky or minimizing your odds of being haxed is a core skill of playing the game. When a player purposefully makes a play relying on hax in an attempt to turn around an otherwise unwinnable game, that can be somewhat respectable as “playing to your outs” while players who get hax on their side unintentionally are “lucky and bad” for “getting bailed.”

Spectators will join in a lot, rooting for their teammate or friend, but actual players don’t usually do so, only when desperate and no other obvious plays can be made. Naturally, this is because doing so in chat would be announcing your next move, though it’s not uncommon for players to chant it into a voice call or the text chatroot once the animation resolving the turn begins, even though by that point, the random numbers have already been generated. For the same reason, an opponent’s attack missing sometimes isn’t bad luck on their end but rather your own “skillful dodge.”

I then asked the informant whether they think this chant is an invocation or prayer, to which the informant responded that “it depends on the player.” While some players may desperately plea for luck, some other demand it with imperative authority in an attempt to manifest it into reality. The informant himself reports that he always utters it in an invocational form, the odds of willing it into existence proportional to the confidence they call it happening with, such as “watch this dodge right here” rather than desperately wishing with “please.”

I then asked if the informant has noticed differences between the folkier Smogon singles format and the VGC doubles (2v2) format, and while the informant suggests that there is a difference, it is apparently not due to the officialization of the format. The informant explains that smogon singles tend to be “harsher” due to the lower variance over a longer game (because less happen each turn with only two Pokemon on the field as opposed to four with odds that RNG evens out to the expected rates over a longer game), with more toxicity as the format has lower odds of RNG factors (because RNG effects don’t have two targets per instance of use) along with much more room for error (because each individual turn matters less in a longer singles game). Due to the option for players to play around RNG in singles that doubles formats don’t have, singles communities tend to be less forgiving when it happens while doubles communities have accepted that it’s almost inevitable within a game.

Analysis

Given the luck required of this game, the use of an incantation, sometimes even in imperative form as if manifesting it into reality reflects a form of contageous magic in verbally invoking an incident, as described by Frazer’s sympathetic magic. The difference between prayer and invocation is particularly interesting as prayer is more associated with blessings and curses, and prayers don’t dominate this chant over this invocations for the same reasons why English doesn’t have much curses and blessings, as the language and its societies have become less religious over the various historical events in the past such as the English reformation derparting from the Roman Catholic church and the Enlightenment era founding ideals of the United States. Coincidentally, invocations and “curses” in the imperative form seem to have overtaken in modern culture as people place more power into their own hands rather than an agnostic higher entity, similar to how people “manifest” something for themselves instead of praying for it or how people command others to “kill yourself” or “get cancer” in the imperative form instead of wishing them eternal suffering in hell in the subjunctive form. In the same vein, many players in the community opt to command hax to manifest for them in an imperative utterance of the chant rather than wishing for it in the subjunctive form.

Gacha Gaming Luck Rituals

The Informant

CM is a long-time gacha player who players multiple different gacha games and stays up to date in the community news of gacha games he doesn’t even play. The informant admits to doing one of the following rituals in the past, having played the game genre since he was 13.

The Text

“Gacha” games are a from of video games that involve a “gacha” element, deriving from the Japanese toy-capsule vending machines of gachapon, in which rewards are drawn through lottery as a monetization system. As a very luck-based system, it lends itself to superstitions and magical rituals, particularly when players are investing their in-game resources into “pulling” for gacha. Most gacha games tend to sell particularly desireable limited characters or equipment, and the lottery mechanic incentivizes players to quite literally perform summoning rituals to “pull” the right character or equipment.

According to the informant, there are two big ways to perform a luck ritual in gacha community. In the past, one method was to change your social media profile picture (Discord, X, etc.) to the target character before you pulled for them. Other people draw summoning circles, placing the phone in the middle of the diagram with merch on the periphery. Some people would assemble entire shrines in dedication of the target character before they roll. The informant recalls an episode where a particular player put their phone into a circle of salt to keep away bad luck before rolling.

In Grand Blue Fantasy, a particular gacha game, the most incentivized way to pull would be to pull 300 pulls at once for an incentivized reward, and you must play a song, like related to the target character, on loop as the game rolls through the 300 pulls. If the player ever repeats a song used for a previous character, the rolls would be atrocious, from an anecdote. The informant also recounts a method where the player would go to a specific location important to the target character or have related characters active in the party while pulling for the character.

Analysis

What I find most interesting about this ritual is the homeopathic nature of summoning for a fictional character, as described by Frazer’s sympathetic magic, despite the target of the homeopathic connection being completely fictional. This operates off the belief that the target character will be bound to other characters, locations, and merchandise that have a connection to them. Setting one’s public profile picture also morphs the player’s cyborg identity to be closer to that of the character, again evoking a homeopathic bond. Because the user’s are invested in the characters and want them to “come home” to their account, they will perform rituals to improve their odds, especially as losing to the lottery odds can be quite costly to an account, forcing the player to either pay for more rolls or miss out on the character. As many gacha games sell their characters through story, the narratives the players experienced with the target character also incentivizes their investment on pulling for the target character, going as far as to perform rituals to better their luck when rolling.

Induction Pranks of Passage TTRPGs

The Informant

GL is a long time tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) player with years of experience as a Game Master (a special role in TTRPGs). When I first asked about Induction Pranks in TTRPGs, GL had some time to discuss with some other members of the community before our interview.

The Text

The informant reports a few different induction pranks and common shared experiences that qualifies someone as a member of the TTRPG community, distinctly differentiating two sets between GMs and players. For Game Masters, the common experience is dealing with the first problem player, a whole subset of narrative genres emerging from this experience can be found on the subreddit r/RPGHorrorStories. The informant cites chaotic and evil player characters, which is a distinct tradition of D&D alignment stemming from Original Dungeons and Dragons. When he exchanges stories with other GMs, while telling success stories can be fun, tales of how terrible a particular player was to work with is an effective way of relating to each other. For players, while the informant reports that the community is generally averse to gatekeeping in recent years due to the nerdy and niche reputation and history the game has, he recounts how older players in the OSR community will put new players through the “death funnel,” a meat grinder dungeon that will kill several player characters to get the player accustommed to the brutal game style of older games. We discussed how this reflects a cultural shift in the TTRPG landscape in the modern age where players become more attached to their characters and think of themselves as the hero of the story whereas older D&D is more about the dungeon crawl, with any given character not expected to live through the story.

We then talked about unique signifers of the TTRPG player identity, such as maps and miniatures, which led to our discussion of how conversely, despite being a “tabletop” game, most TTRPGs can be played without a map or grid or any miniatures at all with the “theater of mind,” which we agreed was very unique to TTRPGs as wargames tend to rely on a grid or map and the miniature sets. Extending from that, we discussed how owning a set of dice can identify a TTRPG player, particular the 20-sided dice, which is hardly ever used for any other game and iconic to D&D. If someone owns a cohesive themed set of dice from 4-sided to 6, 8, 10, 12, and 20, then that is a sure certain sign of a TTRPG player. In a way, the moment a player buys their own set of dice instead of borrowing someone else’s indicates a commitment and thus induction to the community. The other example he talked about was creating one’s own first character, which players nowadays are more likely to be attached to as mentioned earlier. Even though the character may never be played in an actual game, a TTRPG player can likely be identified by their excitement to share their character ideas, character sheet build, or even stories involving that character from a game.

Analysis

This was a particularly interview as the informant came prepared, giving a blason populaire about his own ingroup of fellow GMs and particularly problematic players who play chaotic and evil characters, citing a specific experience that identifies a particular community. Older players also have an “induction prank” for newer players when playing older systems to shatter their idea of TTRPGs before welcoming them to the experience, but it’s also interesting to note that this hobby doesn’t try to gatekeep newcomers with anything that could be qualified as hazing. Aside from the “death funnel” and Gary Gygax’s Tomb of Annihilation dungeon designed to kill player characters, we both thought of a particular video as an another example of this “induction prank” in D&D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBmNThMZJ1U

“Off record,” he joked that the real hazing is letting new players play 5th edition (a particularly divisve version of the game he dislikes but is otherwise a popular gateway game), but he notes that many other players in the community would disagree with the sentiment of the joke. Noting the uniqueness of TTRPG dice sets, a rite of passage presents itself in the form of buying the first set of dice, an example of Stuart Hall’s reception with the expression of community membership identity performance via consumerism. We laughed about how cheap it is to actually buy a dice set (you can get like a pack of 10 sets of 5 dollars), but at the same time, nobody else would bother with buying such a set of dice.

Less materialistic indications of membership are player characters, where a newcomer exploring the hobby might borrow a prebuilt character while TTRPG players committed to the hobby will not only have the knowledge to build their own characters but be actively invested in them as a proxy of themselves that they would like to roleplay as. In a sense, this is akin to a fantastical identity localized within this particular hobby or at a particular table, and modern players who focus more on the epic narrative of a band of heroes on an adventure invested in the safety and prosperity of their characters as an extension of the performed identity of the self. This is comparable to the process of an initiation ritual for community membership.

TTRPG Dice Superstitions and Rituals

The Informant

E.T. is a long-time tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) hobbyist and player who has played in several games at real life tables using real physical dice that must be tossed by hand as opposed to digital random number generators. TTRPGs rely on sets of dice of various face sizes in

Text

Amongst E.T.’s collection of dice sets include favored dice sets such as his “pansexual dice.” He insists on carrying the dice, or else “they’ll misbehave.” He “trains” his dice, ritualistically pulling them out one at a time, grouping and categorizing them by face number. Then, all the die are placed highest number up to condition them to roll that number more in the future. He notes that he does not utilize “dice jail” that often, only when a particular dice is especially egregious for a session. Although he reports that trained dice tend not to perform that poorly, the pansexual dice notably acts up every now and then. He insists that training dice work due to the estimated measurement comparison where his digital dice underperform compared to his trained physical dice.

E.T. has a cat that passed away a couple years back, and he uses her food bowl as the “dice jail” for misbehaving dice. The cat had no quality that would help the dice rehabilitate, but it’s a sentimental use for the bowl he’s held onto since. If he’s hosting a game session with players he is not fond of, he will give them dice that have a history of poor performance. Apparently, it is necessary to keep them in specific bags along with charms for “positive vibes.” The favorite dice gets a more spacious satin satch instead of the usual velvet one. He also reports a friend and fellow TTRPG player who puts dice in a mason jar under the full moon to absorb of the power of the moon. This can be either to cleanse unlucky dice or to bless dice.

Analysis

Dice rituals and magic can be fairly easily categorized as Frazer’s sympathetic magic, particularly contageous magic that associates good luck with particular sets of dice. The process of trying to enchant dice by imbuing it with moonlight is contageous magic that attempts to rub off the cosmic force onto the statistical random number generator by association. The idea that dice can be trained to roll higher numbers simply by “conditioning” them with deliberate face placement as a ritual similarly hopes that the time spent on the face with the biggest number will persist in future uses of the dice. Conversely, dice with historically bad luck becomes stuck with the contageous misfortune until a conversion ritual is performed, such as with the mason jar and moonlight. As a fantasy roleplay game, the medium itself lends itself towards players who are inclined and willing to partake in magical and superstitious practices, if not for genuinely belief, at least for fun and roleplay.

Canadian Nanaimo Bar Recipe

The Informant

The following recipe was shared by CM, a Canadian from Alberta, with verification from his mother.

The Text

A common Canadian dessert/treat composing of three layers, commonly found confectionary stores, supermarkets, and occasionally bakeries, and served at gatherings or laid out as snacks.

Base Layer Ingredients

  1. Cocoa Powder
  2. Graham crackers (CM originally recalled this as quick oats before verifying with his mother)
  3. Shredded coconut (sweetened)
  4. Butter
  5. Sugar

Firm Custard Ingredients

  1. Custard powder
  2. Mix with butter, powdered sugar, and milk
  3. Hold back on liquid

Chocolate Ingredient

  1. Semisweet chocolate (or sometimes dark)

Instructions

  1. Mix crushed graham cracker, sugar, cocoa butter, and shredded coconut into melted butter
  2. Fill and chill in inch deep baking pan to set for base of bar
  3. Spread an inch of firm custard over base
  4. Melt and temper semisweet chocalate and fill into the baking pan and chill to set
Image

Analysis

The simplicity of the dessert’s composition, with no baking required, being any variable base of sweet grains from wafers to crackers to oats sometimes mixed in with nuts, a filling that can vary from custard to flavored icing, and a chocolate finish of various chocolate variety lends itself to various ecotypes as it spreads, all identified with the unifying identity of coconut flavor being somehow included in the base and sometimes the icing. Its post-war emergence and rise in popularity after being presented in a global event like Expo 86 leading to it being dubbed “Canada’s Favorite Confection” in a National Post reader survey may hint to Canada’s search for a stronger national identity after the events of WWII reshaping the dynamic of the world powers as Canada enjoyed reinvigorated economic prosperity, general optimism from post-war victory national pride, and greater global political influence during the formation of the United Nations.