Pokemon Unite is a Mesmerising Mess (Patreon)

So there’s a Pokemon MOBA now.

MOBAs or Multiplayer Online Battle Arena games such as League of Legends, Heroes of the Storm, Dota 2 and now Pokemon Unite are games where two teams of players fight online in short, repetitive matches. We need to define it a little better, because while lots of games would technically fit these criteria, most people wouldn’t say that Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Stike: Global Offensive are MOBAs. This is probably because the most popular MOBAs are practically identical, playing in an isometric-view elliptical arena with 5 players on each team, with players levelling up throughout the match and becoming more powerful and unlocking their attacks, and each playable character possessing a unique moveset including a basic attack, some special moves and an “ultimate” or “ult” attack which recharges very slowly but provides a large tactical advantage when deployed correctly.
What am I trying to say here? Am I trying to say Pokemon Unite is a reskin of League of Legends using one of the most popular intellectual properties on the planet to sell meaningless junk to children? No, no. Hang on. That’s not what I’m saying. It’s worse than that. It’s trying to give children gambling addictions.

First: My credentials. I was very deep into League of Legends I got to a pretty high rank playing a champion people don’t often play competitively (Karthus, press R to win scrubs stay tilted). I have hundreds of hours of play time in League and although Pokemon Unite came out a few days ago I have over a dozen hours playing that too, and I’m currently Expert Class 3 ranking, which is about halfway up the rankings the game provides. I’m saying this to say in short: I’m pretty good at MOBAs, I’m not the best, I’m not the worst, everything else I say here does not come from me being tilted or salty, and anyone who disagrees is welcome to 1v1 me at fountain.

I haven’t played League of Legends for several years now. It was a vice in a very literal sense when I was going through some stuff and I had to kick it because I was spending too much time playing it. Even though I was doing well at it, I was never going to be a serious competitive player and it was just sucking up hours and hours of my life, and so I had to firmly stop playing and uninstall.

Playing a lot of a game, it also should be said, is not inherently negative. I have played a lot of a lot games, and don’t consider Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Control or for that matter the main series Pokemon games to be in any way sinister. What I’m talking about is an inability to stop playing when you have other things you should be doing.

So let’s talk a bit more about how MOBAs work. In a match, players start as their selected character and level up by defeating wild pokemon and enemy players, gaining starter moves at level 1 and 3, more powerful moves at level 5 and 7, and their ult attack at 9. The pokemon also evolve, but as fans of the children’s game series Pokemon will recall, pokemon evolve different numbers of times and so a breakdown of all that would be complicated and not add much more than saying: players get stronger throughout the match, provided they keep defeating other pokemon. Wild pokemon give players points which they can score by holding X at one of the opposing team’s goals, triggering a fun little dunking animation, 4 of the 5 goals can be destroyed by scoring enough, winning territory for your team, and a team wins by scoring more points than the other team.

In Pokemon Unite, matches are 10 minutes long, which in terms of player psychology is short enough that it doesn’t feel like much of a time commitment but long enough that it always feels like things could just maybe turn around if they’re going badly. If you said that match was going to be your last one but you lost, you’re going to think “No I want to win one before I quit” and if you win you’re going to feel like you want to play again and win more.

This is the same player psychology as a slot machine. This is just a slot machine with extra steps.

Exacerbating this, in the last 2 minutes of the game all goals count for twice as many points, and Zapdos only appears in those last two minutes. Zapdos gives the team who kills it a whole bunch of points and temporarily makes it so that you can simply press X to score instead. In other words, if a match is going badly, the last 2 minutes can change it around, requiring players to stay invested right to the end.

Speaking of player engagement, most MOBAs have built in penalties for players who give up on matches, and Pokemon Unite is no exception. In Pokemon Unite you can receive up to 8 points of penalties for standing still for too long in one match. After 20 points you can’t play in ranked matches, and after 40 you can’t even play unranked. This forces players to give the game their total attention the whole way through, which makes the deep psychological investment in the game even worse.

Compounding this is the rewards system, which gives players items, new pokemon to play as, and various different flavours of spendable currencies as a reward for playing more of the game. We’ll come back to the currencies, of course, but to understand the items better you need to understand “builds”. In video games, a “build” is a way of arranging the customizable aspects of your character to suit a certain style of play. In a MOBA, there are enough options to require some learning and understanding, but few enough that certain characters will only be good with certain obvious builds if you want to progress.

For example: Charizard is a character with only aggressive moves, no healing or status effects, so equipping it with Leftovers and Muscle Band gives it more HP and more attack power, leaning into it’s natural advantage. Additionally giving Charizard the Aeos cookie which gives you more HP every time you score a goal, and the Goal-Getter item which lets you score twice as fast makes an aggressive goal-focused build.

If you’ll let me mix my metaphors here, having a build is a bit like having a “system” at the casino. It’s a dependable way of playing that results in success at least as often as failure, and it lets you think that your skill is what is responsible for further progression.

But here’s the thing about your actual player skill - in ranked matches, the game is constantly trying to sort you into games with other players of exactly your skill level. So while it may feel like skill is the biggest part of the game, actually a lot of it comes down to luck. This is the case in all MOBAs but especially bad in Pokemon Unite, which hasn’t been out very long so contains a lot of characters that players consider “broken” - in other words it doesn’t contribute to the balance of the game and sit nicely within the ecosystem, but just stomps every game flat. Right now Zeraora is a great example of such a character, where if one team has Zeraora and the other doesn’t, the game is essentially a forgone conclusion. With the build I mentioned earlier, Charizard can be just as much of a broken character, as long as you get in goals early, quickly snowballing into a dragon with 4 aggressive moves and near limitless health that gets stronger every time it beats you. In games where I get early goals like this, the opposing team votes to surrender early more often than not.

Like most MOBA games, Pokemon Unite uses individual player rankings not on a leaderboard of players in the world but strata based on your player stats: goals scored, enemies killed, and of course (with the biggest weighting) number of matches where your team won. Also, although you can play as a team with friends, which will vastly improve your chances of winning, the majority of matches are between players who have been randomly matched together. Playing with a set of random other players deepens the perception that the game is about your personal progression and is categorically not about teamwork.

Now is as good a point as any to talk about tonal dissonance. There’s a certain degree of tonal dissonance in the combination of “Charmander Char Char” and sitting there yelling at the screen “What the fuck are you thinking? Slowbro can’t play jungler, get in bot lane and play defense you fucking scrub”, but more than that, once you start to notice how much the game relies on gambling psychology, the whole thing feels off.

Pokemon as a franchise, while all-consuming and hugely capitalistic, has always appealed to certain values of friendship, environmentalism, respect for animals and for nature, and certain recurring themes pop up throughout the series. For example, organised crime and juvenile delinquency are qualities that the antagonists of the series engage in, and in several of the games gambling is portrayed as a social problem where people who already have money trick poor people out of their money. It actually was probably how a lot of kids were introduced to the concept of gambling, and the message that the Celadon City Casino sends is that playing the slot machines will never ever get you rich. If you want lots of Casino funbucks you need to come in with a lot of money and buy them, and just for a cherry on top, the casino is secretly owned by Team Rocket, the animal-abusing child-fighting hostage-taking bad guys of the original games.

On top of that there’s something very subtly grim about the idea of “licensing” pokemon in Pokemon Unite. That’s what the game calls buying a pokemon - you buy a “license”.

Okay, so the franchise has always been opposed to the idea that pokemon trainers own these animals, but the slight shift to this language of renting the pokemon implies that at some later point, your “license” might end and you might not have the pokemon that you paid a bunch of Aeos Coins to license and you’ve been relying on as your main champion and you don’t have the coins right now but you could get the champion back quickly if you paid in Aeos Gems instead… Of course Aeos Gems can only be purchased with real life dank sweet sticky icky cashish.

Of course this is my perhaps cynical speculation, and the game tells you that you own the license… but it is still a license. You’re licensing the pokemon. You’re renting it.

We’re starting to get into the places where players spend money now, but I just want to emphasise again how much the basic design of a MOBA is meant to make the player addicted to playing using the exact same mechanics and psychology as gambling. Gambling of course is all about luck, but what defines gambling, especially from the perspective of a gambling addict, is convincing yourself that your skill is more important to your success than luck.

Generative design is a recent school of thought in design and architecture that employs artificial intelligence, machine learning, and mathematical rules to create design elements. Sometimes this takes the form of a playful approach to mathematics and algorithms to see how methods usually considered to be purely functional can be employed to make something aesthetically and stylistically interesting. Other times this means using machine learning to speed up the process by which designers iterate on previous versions to maximise all the functional elements of a design.

MOBAs aren’t generatively designed, of course, but I bring this up to highlight how much they feel like they could be. All the design decisions in Pokemon Unite are chosen so obviously cynically and single-mindedly that it feels like it may as well have been designed by committee, or by artificial intelligence. Every single detail of the interface, game mechanics, and user experience feels motivated by one end-goal: to get you to spend money. The tactic for getting you to spend money is to get you addicted to playing the game, in the not hope but rather confident knowledge that on a long enough timeline you will be invested enough to spend money.

This doesn’t just simulate gambling, this is the exact game design psychology of gambling. What they’re relying on to make you spend money here is the sunk cost fallacy. Albeit, they dress it up a little with the idea of a battle so that you think your own skill is responsible for success and not random chance. They sort everyone to be fighting players of roughly equivalent skill, so you get both the dopamine rush of climbing a leaderboard and you can convince yourself that you aren’t just doing a very very over-complicated version of pulling down the lever on a slot machine.

Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the lootboxes yet. There are lootboxes, of course, because of course there are.

To put it in context, if you’re ranked, say - just pulling a random tier out of the air here - Platinum I in League of Legends, you know that you beat a lot of other players to get there. Sure, Platinum is actually only technically half way up the total possible ranks, but that doesn’t mean you’re an average player, after all you’re platinum - and nobody else even plays Karthus so you have a basic advantage on that because they aren’t familiar with the moveset.

Maybe I should play League of Legends again.

Let’s talk about money.

A guide to Pokemon Unite’s microtransactions states “at first glance, Pokemon Unite isn’t exactly free to play”. What the guide means by that is that although there isn’t any paywall, the grind to get the things that you could buy with gems (which you buy with real money) is pretty fucking steep. Besides cosmetics, you can use gems to get new pokemon to play or upgrade the items in your build to make the tiny statistical improvements slightly bigger. You can upgrade items with item upgraders, which you can get with “tickets”, which are sometimes a reward for battles, but if you want to upgrade one of your three items in your build all the way to max level using only gems, it’ll work out to about £33.

If the currencies seem complicated, firstly I haven’t even really gotten into it yet - there are Aeos Coins, Aeos Tickets, Fashion tickets, Holowear Tickets, Energy and Aeos Gems - and secondly, that’s the point. It’s meant to be confusing. You’re never meant to think too hard about all the different currencies, but it’s important that only one currency can be turned into every other currency - only one currency can be used for everything, and it’s the currency that you pay real money for.

You have to go to no less than 5 different menus to collect different kinds of rewards in the game outside of the main matches. This itself gamifies the rest of the user interface - it turns it into a kind of idle-clicker game. You get points to help you buy stuff that helps you get more points. Except that in idle clickers, the escalation is extremely fast and scales exponentially, that’s the game. It’s fun to make number go up. By contrast, Pokemon Unite doesn’t want the number to go up quickly, it wants the number to go up glacially, but just enough that you know that eventually you will inevitably get there.

That’s how they sell the Battle Pass and Battle Pass Plus which also comes with 10 levels worth of battle rewards - you’ll get this stuff eventually, but it’ll take a long time. It’s basically yours already, you’re just paying to speed up the process of getting it. You expect that you’d be weighing up how much the item is worth to you against the cost in money, but counterintuitively it’s a lot easier to get people to buy things if they expect they’re going to get them after a long wait anyway, because then instead of weighing up their money against how much the item is worth, they’re weighing up their money against how much their time is worth to them.

The apologetic response to microtransactions in games is to say that the items that are sold in game are “only cosmetic” or that “you don’t have to buy anything” and so the game doesn’t require you to spend money in order to play, but as we’ve already discussed, while they may not require you to spend money, they expect that you will.

And let’s talk about cosmetics a little bit.

Another place where there’s a weird tonal dissonance is in the shop to buy skins for your pokemon. There are three seller-characters in the shop menu, there’s a fashion lady for your trainer fashion, an inexplicable weed-joke character called Erbie who sells you Pokemon licenses, and then there’s the Zirco shop where you buy Holoware, the outfits for Pokemon, staffed by this incredibly sinister looking man.

I don’t have much of a point here I guess I’m just baffled? He’s so sketchy looking, I don’t understand the thinking behind putting him on the one shop that exclusively takes real-world money. Are the game’s artists trying to tell us they think the microtransactions are predatory too? Just bizarre.

Anway:

There is a small bit of player psychology among MOBA players that goes like this - only hardcore players who play an enormous amount of the game would be invested enough in one champion to want to buy cosmetics for them. Ergo, if you see someone with the Pentakill Karthus skin you know that they play a lot of Karthus and you should stay out of their jungle unless you want a free trip back to fountain. Ergo if you buy that skin then other people will avoid you or lose confidence and maybe actually give you an advantage.
So hey why not buy the skin? It’s only 750 RP and okay that’s just a bit more RP than the £5 gift card but if you got the £10 one then you’d have more points left after the purchase to get something else… next time.

So if you main Mr. Mime and you want to engage in this kind of fronting then you can get the “holowear” which is a character skin for pokemon in Pokemon Unite. And hey, if you want Mr. Mime to wear a fancy yellow magician’s suit, that’s 1200 gems, so you can only get it by spending £20. £20 for Mr. Mime to be yellow. It should be noted I have ruthlessly steamrolled every Mr. Mime I have ever seen in this game so if it gives you an advantage, I haven’t seen it.

Pokemon Unite, of course, doesn’t have to rely on this MOBA myth of high-skilled character skins, because, well, they’re pokemon. You know pokemon, those cute animal friends you know and love from childhood. You don’t have to believe it will give you any tactical advantage to buy a big floaty ring for Snorlax to waddle around in - it just looks cute.

And now it’s really worth taking a moment to think about all of the mechanics I’ve been talking about and how they are intended to work on the player the same way as gambling, think about how expensive the premium currencies in this are compared to other free-to-play games, and remember that this game is explicitly marketed to children.

I don’t think that arguments about gambling, predatory game design and microtransactions should always center around children, because exploiting people suffering from gambling addiction - a serious disease that destroys whole families - is already despicable. However, this game in particular is only on the Nintendo Switch, a family console. This franchise is marketed to children primarily, and the game is rated E for Everyone by the ESRB. If there was any doubt about this, a friend of mine who was contacted by the developer on release day so they could be given Aeos Gems for free was told:

“Children may watch your content whether or not they are the intended audience. Please avoid obscene language, offensive stereotypes and topics that might be unsuitable for young children (including encouraging unsafe or inappropriate behavior).”

You have to laugh, otherwise you’ll cry.

I think it’s worth talking about children here because this game is explicitly marketed towards children and only available on the Switch, where if parental controls haven’t been turned on, and a payment method has been added so that games can be bought from the Nintendo Store, a player can go directly from the menu where they don’t have enough Aeos tickets to buy Snorlax a cute floaty ring to the purchase screen, and then straight back into the game to play more matches.

MOBAs in general are perfectly designed to make players addicted to the game, and this game in particular uses an incredibly popular kids franchise to bring in lots of people who’ve never played a MOBA before. The surrounding game is meticulously built to funnel people, and people almost definitely means children, into spending money sooner or later. That’s kind of troubling. I could talk about the connection issues, but it doesn’t have worse issues than any other Switch game I’ve played. I could talk for hours on end about how broken some of the playable pokemon are, but they’ll inevitably balance it all out. The disconnect between the nostalgia of the Pokemon franchise and the design of a game trying to give you a gambling addiction and then take all your money is certainly alarming, but although I call this game a mess, you should understand I’m not saying that it’s buggy or badly designed.

The mesmerising mess of Pokemon Unite is that there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s working exactly how it was meant to.