Book Reviews

game spaces but notes that globalization(where “race” has different meanings
in different cultures) might complicate
efforts. The book represents a point ofcritical consideration, a “save point” if you
will, from which future work—both academic and within the game industry—canposition itself.
—Steven Dashiell, American University,
Washington, D.C.

Monster Kids: How Pokémon
Taught a Generation to CatchThem All
Daniel Dockery
New York: Running Press, 2022. Introduction, epilogue, and acknowledgments. 208 pp. $17.99, paper. ISBN:9780762479504
Monster Kids: How Pokémon Taught a
Generation to Catch Them All is a media
history of the Pokémon franchise in twelvechapters. The author, Daniel Dockery, isa staff writer for the American anime
streaming site Crunchyroll. Dockery
focuses on the United States but seamlessly
incorporates information about Japanese
media and its cultural and economic background. Along with the myriad manifestations of the Pokémon franchise, Dockery
also discusses thematically and commercially connected media such as Digimon,
Yu-Gi-Oh!, Tamagotchi, and Cardcaptors.
Appropriately enough, Dockery
opens Monster Kids with the childhoodof Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of Pokémon.
As a teenager, Tajiri published an amateur
arcade game fanzine called Game Freak,which would later become the name of thePokémon video game development studio.
After partnering with Nintendo, Tajiri andGame Freak brought on additional creative
talent to fill out a roster of trainable monsters for the first pair of Pokémon games
in 1996. This pair of games, Pokémon Redand Pokémon Green, became a sleeper success that was soon adapted into a manga,an anime, and another set of games. Thisevolution is concisely recounted in thebook’s first chapter, which would serve as
excellent stand-alone reading for someone
interested in the early history of the Pokémon franchise in Japan.
Meanwhile, in the United States, theKids’ WB and Fox Kids network television programming blocks were looking fortheir next big hit. This is where the true
story of Monster Kids emerges as a studyof the broader media ecology of the late
1990s and early 2000s. While the Kids’ WB
won the rights to the Pokémon anime, Fox
Kids acquired Digimon, another importfrom Japan. Monster Kids uses the Pokémon and Digimon franchises as twinnedcase studies to explain the business ofchildren’s television programming andthe various attempts of media companies
to expand Japanese cartoons into localized
franchises of toys, card games, movies,
music videos, fast food tie-ins, and othermarketing ventures of varying success.
The final chapter, “Catch and Release,”provides an excellent summary of thetransformation of the Pokémon franchiseafter its initial boom. This summary,which touches on the changes in media
fandom as Internet access became morewidespread, is capped by a clear-sighted
description of the legacy of imported Japanese cartoons in the brief but impactful365

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P L AYepilogue. Dockery concludes that theAmerican cultural embrace of anime is not
simply a fad, and that “none of these franchises show any sign of stopping” (p. 203).
Along with his personal experience
as someone who grew up with Pokémon,Dockery draws information from various journalistic sources, primarily interviews printed in American newspapers,
magazines, and websites. These sources
are occasionally referenced by name in
the text, but Monster Kids contains nofootnotes, endnotes, or list of works cited,leaving it up to the reader to follow up
on interesting leads. I did so on several
occasions, and I was easily able to findDockery’s sources through simple online
searches.
Monster Kids is primarily concernedwith media history at a corporate level
and, for the most part, it eschews descriptions of media fandom at a more local andindividual level. This is not a criticism,
because the book’s tight focus ensures
the successful delivery of its narrative.
The gaps passed over by the broad reachof Monster Kids serve as an invitation for
future research into other aspects of thePokémon franchise, as well as a contextualizing source for more ethnographic andcommunity-specific accounts of its reception and impact.
Based on the accessibility of the writing, the occasionally humorous turns ofphrase, and the charmingly off-brandillustrations by José Elgueta, the target
readership of Monster Kids presumably
falls into a young adult demographic ofteenagers, and I imagine that this bookwould be a welcome addition to any schoollibrary. In addition, the now-grown millennial generation of adults around thesame age as the author may form a significant secondary audience, and Monster
Kids could easily be read for pleasure,especially by fans curious about the reasoning behind the decisions that went into
localizing various Japanese source materials for an American market. Monster
Kids is an excellent resource regarding a
key decade of transition in global media
ecosystems, and its accessibility as a reference work ensures that Dockery’s careful
yet compelling study will entertain andenlighten readers of all ages.
—Kathryn Hemmann, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PAExperimental Games: Critique,Play, and Design in the Age ofGamification
Patrick Jagoda
Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2020. List of figures, prologue,acknowledgments, notes, ludography,
and index. 320 pp. $27.50 paper.
ISBN: 9780226629971
In Experimental Games: Critique, Play,and Design in the Age of Gamification,
Patrick Jagoda argues that experimental
games “have the potential to create new
ways of being, acting, and experimenting
within (and perhaps beyond) our digitaland networked present” (p. 39)..Jagoda
begins this work with an introduction thatprovides an economic history and political framework for understanding video
games as experiments. At the nexus of his
overview of games lies neoliberalism, theagent he proposes has shifted games out