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.