Unfinished and Completely Preliminary Draft for Feature Story 1
12 09 2014If there’s one thing that the previous generation will never be able to understand about us, it’s video games. Actually, let me make that more specific. Maybe they can see the appeal in dressing up like a Rambo-esque soldier and taking out a bunch of Nazis. Maybe they can understand edging toward that next level in Candy Crush or farming out that final square of corn to pay for your new barn in Farmville. Maybe they even can get why you would pretend to be Eli Manning taking on his older brother Peyton and the Denver Broncos in Madden.
And I get it. On the surface, Pokemon is pretty much about screaming at your giant mutant fire-breathing lizard to make to attack and kill a 10-year-old’s one-foot tall electric mouse.
Looks like a fair fight to me. (Image credit: http://www.theanimegallery.com/data/thumbs/790px/0158/tAG_158093.jpg)
And, on a deeper level, it’s… Actually, it’s still about forcing your gargantuan mutant dragon to fry a kid’s sparky rodent to the core. But isn’t that a dream come true?
Let’s try it this way. You wake up one morning and go downstairs. It appears that you have grown a couple of feet shorter and have lost the effects of puberty. Congrats! You’re ten. Darn it. Your mom is making breakfast. She tells you that you’re running late for a meeting with a local biologist. You run to the lab, conveniently located right next door, and the man inside introduces himself as Professor [insert tree name here] the region’s foremost Pokemon researcher. He then offers you a choice of three adorable monsters: a fire lizard, a water turtle, or a grass dinosaur. How adorable. Or maybe a grass gecko, a flaming chicken, or a water salamander? How about water otter, a fire pig, and a grass snake? Or maybe a fire fox, an Internet Explorer, and a Google Chrome? (Just kidding, browser joke.)
Nope, I think I’m going to turn you down, Professor, and play Old Maid with my grandma instead. Image: http://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/thumb/b/b7/Kalos_starters_XY_anime.png/250px-Kalos_starters_XY_anime.png
Anyway, you pick your adorable little demon and go back home. Your mom is very impressed and proud of you. In fact, she decides that you are responsible enough to leave the house, take your little Buttlicker (you have the ability to customize your Pokemon names), and go on a backpacking expedition across the entire country. By yourself. With no supervision. Actually, I think your mom might call you like four times.
On this journey, you will amass an army of lovable monsters, train them until they evolve into more badass versions of themselves, develop a strategy that will make you completely unstoppable, uncover the mystery of legendary Pokemon with the ability to bend space and time, take down a terrorist organization, and defeat the gym leader in each town to eventually become the Pokemon Champion. You’ll most likely find yourself inside a volcano at some point too. And, maybe, just maybe, you’ll fall in love. Just kidding again, I mean really, you’re only ten-years-old!
And did I mention that there are 718 of them for you to catch? Image: http://cdn3.whatculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/493pokemons.jpg
Okay, so I may not yet have inspired anyone to go buy a $200 Nintendo 3DS console and a copy of Pokemon Y (although, if you’re interested, I would recommend the $100 2DS console and Pokemon X), but Pokemon games are very popular among college students. And Nintendo knows their market. The most recent Pokemon games, the aforementioned X and Y, cater to older players in a host of different ways. The games offer an ever-increasingly complex battling system that dives deep beneath the surface rock-paper-scissors interface (water beats fire, fire beats grass, grass beats water). 718 pokemon of 18 different types can learn 617 moves and hold 60 different items, resulting in an almost-infinite number of battle strategies. The newest games even allow for internet connectivity, so you can trade, battle, and chat with friends and players all over the world. There are even professional competitive Pokemon players who compete in international tournaments.
Here at Morningside, the Pokemon tradition is alive and flourishing. A Facebook group dubbed the “Morningside Pokemon Fan Club” has 74 members and is still growing. Last year, a campus Pokemon group met up a few times to talk about the newly-release X and Y and organize pokemon battles. Members still post on the Facebook page from time to time to discuss the upcoming Pokemon AlphaSapphire and OmegaRuby (release date: November 21, 2014) or to talk about ways to obtain rare pokemon.
Michael Andrlik and Josh Karel are two Morningside seniors who started playing Pokemon games as young kids and haven’t yet stopped.
“I put in about 240 hours in the first three weeks [after the newest game came out],” said Andrlik.
INSERT MORE STORY HERE.
I love that you add humor to the story and describe how the game is played. Its very entertaining and funny to read. The images help describe the game. I’m assuming you’re going to add more about the Morningside people that are playing but I’d really like to hear what their favorite part of the game is and why they to this day keep playing. Also, what their favorite Pokemon is.
The humor and sarcasm definitely adds to the story. Makes it easy to read and would make me more curious if I didn’t know about Pokemon. The only issue would be the lack of interviews, but I know you’re going to add more, so I won’t count that.
My advice in class was to move the nut graf (3rd from the end) higher into the story. Maybe after the “And, on a deeper level…” paragraph. You need to get to the club sooner and with more depth.
You might try weaving “How the game is played” in and out of the club story. Think of it as an exercise in telling two stories at once.
Keep the humor as much as you can.