The Nuzlocke Challenge and Emotional Attachments in Video Games

In a Pokemon “Nuzlocke Challenge”, you’re tasked with difficult obstacles like the mortality of your Pokemon (if they faint, they are gone forever) and limited access to which Pokemon you can “own” or use in your quest to become a champion. Outside of the Pokemon community these self-imposed rules, which are not in-game mechanics, are seen as primary reason to partake in a Nuzlocke Challenge. Inside of the community, however, there is a deeper function: these hurdles pave way to stronger bonds between the player and the game’s Pokemon (Bulbapedia).

In Semiotic Social Spaces and Affinity Spaces (2005), James Gee explores the idea of external grammar used in video game communities. This external grammar consists of “patterns in thoughts, deeds and interactions” (Gee, 221) that are generated by a game’s community, rather than a game’s baked in mechanics or genrefication, which he calls internal grammar (Gee, 219). An example of external grammar would be like Fortnite or League of Legends players developing a “meta-game” or optimal strategy for victory. In essence, a game that exists outside of the game – one that exists well within the heart of the game’s community. Such is the case for the Nuzlocke Challenge, which has developed so much within the franchise’s community that there are hundreds of different subsets of the challenge.

In video games, players are often given the task of assigning meaning to in-game characters. This isn’t always the case, where something like The Walking Dead or Bioshock use more traditional narrative structure to form emotional attachments between the player and its characters. As we’ve talked about before on this website, games (and the stories within) exist on a wide spectrum, so the examples that will follow in this article do not apply to all video games. In a game like Pokemon: Crystal – the game I used for my first Nuzlocke Challenge – your protagonist is wordless, the NPCs (non-player characters) typically only provide instruction or vague musings and your path to game completion relies almost entirely upon prior knowledge of the “Hero’s Journey” — a popular trope in video games that has also been used in titles like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Pugh, 2018). Because of this, players must decide who and what is important, as the game most certainly isn’t going to tell you.

Via Nintendo

One of the most important components to a Nuzlocke run is naming your Pokemon. For instance, you might name your Pikachu “Gary” or your Zapdos “Jonesy”. The idea here is that by giving your Pokemon nicknames, you’ll grow more attached to them and (quite literally) want them to die less. By humanizing the Pokemon and giving them names, the Nuzlocke run has successfully set up an interesting scenario using external grammar: keep your Pokemon alive at all costs, or you’re going to feel bad.

It is this immediate attachment that makes the dichotomy between challenge and emotional investment so interesting. There are high stakes being set up here, stakes that usually don’t exist in video games. For instance, in the brutally difficult Dark Souls, your character will die repeatedly but not be lost for good. Dark Souls, of course, uses a different brand of stakes that are more mechanically ingrained where as the Nuzlocke Challenge sets up emotional stakes in any way that it can. Not only are you tasked with naming the Pokemon, but they’re given a mortality – an expiration date – that doesn’t often exist in games. The moments you have with these Pokemon are sparse and can end almost as soon as they begin.

There is a clear desire for video game players to have emotional stakes tied to their games. One of the reasons the Nuzlocke Challenge is so popular, however, is because it uses those stakes as a consequence for its difficulty. Few games have achieved a balance of both, and even though these mechanics have been tuned by a set of external grammar, the Nuzlocke Challenge has remained such a phenomenon across a handful of Pokemon games for a reason: players want to be emotionally invested in the stakes that exist within the game and its mechanics.

References

Gee, J. P. (2005). Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces: From The Age of Mythology to today’s schools. Beyond Communities             of Practice, 214-232.

Pugh, T. (2018). The Queer Narrativity of the Hero’s Journey in Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda Video Games. Journal of                           Narrative Theory, 48(2), 225-251.

Information received via: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Nuzlocke_Challenge