For the last few days I’ve been replaying Pokémon XD: gale of darkness. It’s the best game I ever played, which is something I’d tell you now as a 25-year-old and then as a 7-year-old, playing it for the first time. It was part of my childhood, and now i stand before you as an adult.

When I was 7, I hadn’t read Fanon yet, and I didn’t know about colonization. I just knew I liked Pokémon a lot, and I liked the soundtrack to the game, and I liked the dark, mysterious vibe that the game had, and I liked the act of snatching shadow Pokémon from other trainers and spending a bunch of time with them so I could open their hearts after they’d been artificially shut by bad people. It was a charming game, and I loved it, and it was my favorite.

reading It’s one of the games that I would always go back to as a kid, and then as a teenager. I’d always find myself in the living room wondering what to do next and coming up with Pokémon XD: as good an option as any. I didn’t have internet in those days, and it’s just now striking me how much that changed the day to day life of being a teenager. I turned to Pokémon XD, with its incredible soundtrack and strange characters and undeniably genius storytelling, and I played and played and played. There was just that much joy to be found in it, even though i knew the story like the back of my hand. It’s like listening to the same album over and over. You know what the experience is gonna hold, but no you don’t, because you’re not the same now as you were the last time you listened, even if the last time you listened was the other day. “Go back and do it again,” you tell yourself.

And now i’m 25, and i started playing it again. I felt the urge to play it a few weeks ago, and then i realized that the best way to do it would be to get a steam deck, an incredible new invention of the 21st century that relies quite heavily on the internet, but once acquired, can transport one to a bygone era of internetless time. I felt the pull of it and sent a text to my mom saying i want one for Christmas. The perks of being a spoiled brat. 25 years old and still asking Santa for gifts, and getting them. I’m sure this is also beyond the point, but it’s part of the story, so i had to mention it.

And now it’s been four days of playing the game. I think i’ve already put about 30 hours into it, but i don’t know for sure. The game tells you how many hours you’ve put in, but i don’t remember what it said the last time i checked. It could be 30, but it could also be 20. That doesn’t matter.

I’m only about halfway through the game. There’s so much more that i need to do in order to beat it. A lot of evil guys that i need to battle and turn away from doing the evil that they have planned. A lot of them. A lot of Pokémon whose hearts have been artificially closed that i need to steal from their trainers and spend time with and open their hearts back up.

colosseum While i play the game, i’ve been listening to the wretched of the earth. It’s a book that i first encountered in college. I think I was 18 at the time. Maybe i was 19. And it was good. I enjoyed it. It made me realize for the first time that violence might be the answer. We had been reading MLK and Gandhi, and then the syllabus threw Fanon at us: “Those other guys said we’re not supposed to use violence, but i’m Fanon, and I think violence is absolutely necessary if we’re ever going to see a world without colonization.”

I knew that i had to be a part of whatever was going on there. Decolonization. It’s a process whose history is constantly writing itself. There is no history of it, because it’s happening right now, or it’s happening in the future. It’s not happening in the past.

This year i watched the documentary Concerning Violence, narrated by Lauryn Hill and made by some guy in Sweden, and came back to Fanon's ideas.

Now i listen to the wretched of the earth while i play Pokémon XD, raising my Pokémon and whittling down their shadow meters, shuttling them back to the town with the big tree and the rock that lets their hearts open back up once their shadows have been shaken off by battle and companionship. I listen to the wretched of the earth and hear stories about little kids who are traumatized by “the war” and start doing behaviors that we haven’t really seen as a species yet, as far as we know. The resonances resonate without my needing to do any work at all. Just play the game and listen to the book. It’s something that would resonate even if i weren’t here. Trees falling in the woods, hitting the ground, the ground hearing the tree, the tree hearing the ground, with no need for any observers because the two things that are resonating with each other would do so either way. It’s not about us. It’s about the things. I’m just the messenger. I’m just the one who gets to tell you about how a tree fell in the woods. Pokémon XD was playing at the same time as the wretched of the earth, and it did make a sound.

The other thing is that i’m the main character in the game. That’s the difference, i guess. I’m inside the tree or something. I’m part of it. The game is happening in the way it’s happening because of me. I’m making decisions that are my own, and mine only. I choose not to go to the casino in the game, because the evil team is out there artificially closing Pokémon’s hearts in a factory, and the longer i distract myself with gambling, the more traumatized the world is going to be, ultimately. So that’s something that i bring to the game. Another player would spend a few hours in the casino. My play time could be at 33 hours, but it’s at 30 (20?) because i’m not the type of player who wastes time at the casino. I see the urgency, and i act on it. The time i spend playing that game should be spent doing the mission, which happens to be something like decolonization.

labor The evil team is not only trying to traumatize Pokémon en masse and turn them into weapons with closed-off hearts who hit everything harder than they would if their hearts were open; they’re also trying to establish a new world order that seems to involve destroying the planet (their main factory for shutting Pokémon hearts emits smoke at an extremely fast rate. It’s pouring out of the damn place.) and some other funny business. I imagine it’s an allegory for colonization, because it has to be. They’re even targeting the news outlets, just like fascists do.

I guess it’s about fascism and not colonization. But i’m sure they’re one and the same. Not the point i’m trying to make here.

But what is the point? That the game is awesome? That Fanon would love it if he were around?

I wonder if I’m supposed to be playing this or if i should be doing something else. Is the game just a distraction, etc. Well, no, i don’t think so.

I think of all the people who poured themselves into the game in order for it to get made and released in 2005. The composer, the musicians. There’s a lot of freaking heart and soul in the music. The animators. The people who invented all these Pokémon to begin with. The writers, the people who conceived this beautiful and terrifying story about fascism/colonization with a 10-year-old protagonist who becomes a celebrity and elevates himself out of his mom’s lab-basement-bedroom, gathering more responsibilities, more respect, and eventually a sort of expectation from his elders that he will save the world. That’s what it’s about. That’s the story they wrote. They wanted to empower kids, and they did. It makes me happy to know that my kid self was taking in these themes rather more subconsciously than i am now.

I wonder about the future version of me who will inevitably feel called back to the game. They’ll think of the version of me playing it now with the same lucidity with which I imagine the kid version, the one who watched their Eevee evolve in to Espeon for the first time (of many), the one who wandered around Phenac City, moved in ways he couldn’t yet understand by the now-peaceful, now-suddenly-urgent soundtrack.

It’s a really important game, and everyone should play it. Even if you don’t, that’s okay, because the tree fell in the woods, and the tree and the ground met each other, and they made a sound, and even if you don’t hear it, the sound is still there, but i’m telling you that the sound is pretty good and actually feels pretty important. It sounds, actually, quite like a call to arms, a suggestion that everything about all of this is just wrong.

I think other people should play the game and listen to the wretched of the earth, because they’re both telling us the same thing. They’re both telling us different things, actually, but those different things come together to form a full picture. Invitations and blueprints. Stories about what went wrong and what’s going wrong now. And answers. Solutions. There’s a lot of solutions in the game. Play the game, find the solutions, and feel the dopamine rush of finding them. Feel the serotonin rush that is more rare in video games but which comes when the actions of your video game-self are in good alignment with the ones that, deep down, you really want to do. You really want to take down whatever evil team is running things. You want to be the one to step out of the masses and rip it all up so something else can take over. You don’t want to think about the power vacuum that you’ll create when the system topples, because the threat is too urgent. You want to rely on the power of the people instead of the power of those people.

Maybe i’m projecting. I just think you should play the game. I know it’s hard. I know you’d have to get a Gamecube and then find a way to buy a physical copy of the game. Or you could ask Santa for a steam deck. Or you could find a computer and download an emulator and the rom. You could find a computer somewhere around here, surely. Just go to the library and tell the librarian that there’s a sacred text that you can only read by playing this Gamecube game, and install it on the computer. You’d also have to learn how to play the game. If you’re not familiar with Pokémon, you’d have to get familiar. But the game lets you do that. It’s not so hard. You can figure it out, i’m sure. You can just live in it. Let it speak to you. Do what you need to do to get by. Figure out how to play it. Be the protagonist.

Is that sounding good to you? I highly recommend it. Again, i’m only halfway through the game this time. And again, no pressure to actually play it. Not sure if i’ve said that yet. You don’t have to listen to the tree falling in the woods. But i invite you to do so. It makes a pretty nice sound. I know you’re busy. You probably have a job. I’m on vacation. That’s why i’ve had 30 hours (20?) to play it. I plan on continuing. All i’m saying is it could be nice to play this game, and then put on an audiobook of wretched of the earth while you’re grinding on Mt. Battle, which you’ll probably have to do for a few hours here and there, nothing crazy, but it’s perfect because listening to Fanon is part of hearing the tree fall in the woods. You need tree (game) and ground (Fanon) to hear the sound. And remember how i described the sound? How beautiful it is? Every songbird you can ever imagine, plus all the best symphonies ever composed, plus the sound of “i love you,” and other good stuff like that—it’s kind of like that. Maybe i’m overselling it now, but i’m just trying to get you to understand that it’s a good sound.

I think i’ve said my piece on this matter.