Growing up in a time when skyscrapers devoured villages, forests, and wild animals, Satoshi Tajiri, the “Dr.Bug,” decided to create a game capable of reviving the experience of going outside and collecting bugs with friends for Japan’s new generation. Fans of Pokémon are familiar with the story of how the great game was first conceived due to a thirst for nature and socialization. In the boom of the Pokémon universe, environmental protection has always been the core theme of the Pokémon series of games, animations, movies, etc.; Meanwhile, the highly participatory fan culture plays a significant role in the increasingly active Pokémon community. Multiple environmental-themed educational programs based on Pokémon's environmental philosophy and its fan culture have emerged. However, they have not been sustained or developed as the Pokémon universe expanded. Based on the valuable insights gained from previous Pokémon-derivative environmental projects and an innovative digital humanities perspective, I envision and demo a crowdsourcing project that will serve as a medium through which global Pokémon fans can upload and exchange data related to environmental issues inspired by the Pokémon world, which will then be aggregated, achieved, and published in the form of a webpage, thus providing pluralistic discourse for the socio-environmental propositions. This project aims to experimentally utilize games as a vehicle to transform a grand topic into more gamified, emotional, and fragmented narratives and make the participation of game fans in the grand proposition a valuable piece of data to be recorded, preserved, and perpetuated.

Authors:
Yansha He, The University of Chicago, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Yansha graduated with a master's degree in digital humanities at UChicago and will start her PhD studies at the University of Hong Kong this September. She's interested in studying East Asian popular cultures in a digital humanities way.

Connect on Linkedin
http://www.linkedin.com/in/yansha-he

See this presentation on the full schedule – Friday Schedule

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