Pokemon Birth, Evolution and Documentation (Case Study: Nidoran)

By: Nam Ngo
Copyright January 2010
(NOTE: This article is food for thought and for entertainment only.)

I recently sat down with my friend Shannon at our local coffee shop- it's become a routine every Saturday- and had our usual random tangent chats. The paths we usually take are related to nerdy/geeky things (of course not limited to that, but that's where they usual go). She and I are fans of Pokemon- not ridiculous crazy fans (well, I'm not- she's played so many more of them that I have!), but fans enough to know what they are, play the card game and familiar with at least the first 150 (or 151!) Pokemon.

Pokemon and Their Birth
Have you noticed that since the first batch of 150 Pokemon there have been a ton more Pokemon? For those of you who have been out of the Pokemon scene for a while, according to the Official Online Pokedex, there are 493 different Pokemon. Yeah. Believe it. There's almost 19 times more Pokemon than letters in the alphabet. And I bet you that there are some little kids out there that must know their Pokemon and probably don't know the entire alphabet yet.

Back in the day, it was simple. "This [Pokemon] evolves into that [Pokemon]" and so forth. Since then, there has been the introduction of baby Pokemon. Pokemon that are found in the wild are considered basic/regular/normal Pokemon. Higher level evolutions are Stage 1 or Stage 2 evolutions of Pokemon (depending on how many evolutions away from the basic one it is). Then there are baby Pokemon. These have been obtained only because of Pokemon breeding.

So my first question is: how do many Pokemon come into existence in the first place if there's a baby evolution form? How do normal Pikachus come into existence? Are female Pikachus pregnant and have a little of other Pikachus? Why are they not born as the baby evolution Pichu?

What about "wild" legendary Pokemon? Many of the legendary birds in the first 150 Pokemon are born from eggs. What put the eggs there in the first place? It's not a mystery to figure out where Mewtwo came from because we all concede that he was a Pokemon created in a laboratory (the motivations for why was to create a living, enhanced replica of Mew- but that's not the topic of this article). Back to the legendary birds, how do the eggs come into existence? It's like the chicken and the egg problem here- except that we suspect our "chicken" eggs started out as an egg of something else and mutated/evolved into the current chicken eggs we know and love today! How did the legendary eggs come into existence in the first place? If there was a previous Pokemon of he same legendary kind, is it still considered legendary? So sure we have theories of evolution in our world- but Pokemon evolution works differently.

Pokemon and Their Evolution
In our world, evolutionary theory basically describes the changes as gradual changes through generations of offspring. Typically it was necessary to mutate/adapt to be able to best survive/use the environment. Why do Pokemon evolve? Some "level up" and become better than they were- in terms of strength, skills and abilities. So that's understandable. Is it because of necessity to survive in the wild or necessity because the people in the Pokemon-world force them to battle each other?

One question on my mind- how did the people in Pokemon know how to evolve certain Pokemon (the ones that required some sort of item, like a stone of some sort to evolve)? What possessed some Pokemon-world person to place a stone next to a Pokemon? I guess as great scientific discoveries occur, I'm sure the initial discovery was probably an accident, but how come all the resulting effects of evolution are inherently considered positive? Why are there not stones that randomly de-evolve types of Pokemon, or make them forget attacks or yield some negative effect? One would usually assume if there's a type of item that grants positive results that something similar could grant negative results as well? It seems to be lacking in the balance between Yin and Yang.

Pokemon and Their Documentation
I recently found out that in the newer Pokemon games that all the Pokemon you capture have a gender. So if you capture a Pikachu- it can be male or female. Okay- awesome. But what of Nidoran? For those even remotely familiar with the original 150 Pokemon, there was Nidoran (male) and Nidoran (female). They each counted separately in the original count of Pokemon (numbers 32 and 29 respectively). However, I feel that the male and female versions of Pokemon shouldn't count as separate Pokemon. No other Pokemon's genders are classified differently as separate Pokemon, so why should Nidoran?

From a game development stand point, I understand that it was probably easier to have different evolutionary paths separated for coding purposes/etc. But in the Pokemon-world, some could argue that there are different physical characteristics- okay. I understand that. But we have lions. Male and female lions have different physical characteristics- and yet they're both lions still. We don't separate the species of male and female lions. Some could also argue that the Nidorans have different evolutionary paths. While this is true, Eevee also has many different evolutionary paths (at least 8 I think!). You don't count male and female Eevees differently. Okay, you're probably wondering about the consistency in which the male evolves to Nidorino and female to Nidorina. I don't have an answer for this- but let me pose this question to you: perhaps it's the male/female version of the same Pokemon that some professor badly classified? Who knows. But I am essentially arguing that the first 150 Pokemon are actually the first 149 Pokemon, and that the total current number of Pokemon is 492 instead of 493.

The things that bother me about this is that the classification system is arbitrary. In the Pokemon-world, you might not be able to answer those questions about Pokemon birth and evolution that I have posed. However, as new Pokemon "discoveries" come along, they should change the classification system. Right now, the almighty Pokedex has the entire library of known Pokemon. How does it sort them? It can sort them by Pokemon name (which has a lot of usability), and by Pokemon number. If sorting by name, it makes sense, but if you want to see the Pokemon evolutions, the name might not be best thing to sort by. Number is almost useless except in the situation of when you want to see the evolution of the Pokemon- except in the case of baby Pokemon. Pikachu evolves into Raichu and have Pokemon numbers 25 and 26. Pichu, the baby evolution of Pikachu, is number 172. With the Pokedex, you can easily see the evolutionary chain- but why is the number so important? It is all but useless (perhaps except to determine when it was "discovered" in relation to other Pokemon). And you can't even scroll through any organization to see all the associated evolutions conveniently- you have to know which Pokemon you want to inspect! This is more of a criticism of the Pokedex user interface design, but you can only look at one Pokemon's details at a time.

I was telling my roommate Rob about this article, and he thinks that there should be a taxonomy of Pokemon organization to more easily organize/view them. I tend to agree. At the end of the day, if you like Pokemon, you're still going to play- but they can really do a lot to improve the organization of Pokemon.