The Game Is Played With Great Feeling
July 18, 2025 at 03:00AMThis isn’t just my favorite piece about gaming this year; it’s my favorite piece about gaming in memory. (No, you don’t need to be familiar with the Pokémon series. Anything this Gen-Xer knows about it comes from rap lyrics.) Joseph Earl Thomas happens to be a competitive Pokémon player and an astute cultural critic, which makes his remit far wider than a mere subculture story: In interrogating why Pokémon’s competitive scene has always looked blessedly different from other games’, he brings all of himself to the project, in the best way possible.
It’s also nice that New Orleans is, much like Outkast’s Aquemini, another Black experience. I bumped into this dude at Louis Armstrong Park who looked like Wayne in his Carter III era; we were both quacking back at the ducks, and he offered me weed as we watched them play (“Nah, I’m good,” I said reflexively.) We compared the qualities of cuteness between turtles and geese—which, in miniature, we agreed, are their own kind of Pokémon. Then we talked about Jordans for twenty-four minutes, as we both had on crisp thirteens in opposing color schemes. On the street, this woman with a friend who looks like my daughter’s mom stared me dead in the face as we passed each other, took off her headphones playing what sounded like GloRilla, looked me up and down and said, “Mm-hmmm,” and my new friend with the wrong color thirteens on watched her walk away and said the same thing. That’s how it felt to be in New Orleans, mixed-up, of course, with memories of Kanye’s post-Katrina George Bush beef, and Sarah Broom’s hundred-year inscription against dilapidation in The Yellow House, and even my last visit, during the New Orleans Poetry Festival, where I predictably fell in love with a poet and roamed the streets bedecked in Mardi Gras beads behind (or in front of?) a handful of friends from VONA and had forgotten that other forms of joy even existed. All of which is to say that sure, I’m working this Pokémon tournament, but it’s also easy to recall the comment that Arthur Jafa once made about how twerking is its own form of Black virtuosity, be it at Magic City or elsewhere; we all make sacrifices for our art, for the greater good and all that.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/17/the-game-is-played-with-great-feeling/
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