Adults irresponsibly and absurdly occupying a children’s hobby is nothing new. It happens with many cartoon series (you’d be surprised at the 40-something fans of ‘Dog Patrol’), movies and even board games. And it’s not always healthy fanaticism that is behind these fads: usually it’s the vile metal that is behind them. As proof, the absurdly inflated market for Pokémon cards in Japan, which has led one Akihabara store to prohibit adults from buying packs. We have reached these limits.
Get them all (if you are a child)
The Pokémon collectible card game was born in 1996 and has since sold an estimated 43.2 billion cards around the world. That’s almost nothing. And it’s not that adults have suddenly become fans of the game, but rather that it has been discovered that, as with ‘Magic’, the special cards cost a pretty penny. So serious is the matter that on April 18 The Pokémon Company announced that it had no more packs in stock of the new expansion.
To give you an idea of the importance of this game in money matters, Logan Paul, the famous Youtuber (to call him something) spent over 5 million dollars on a Pikachu Illustrator card. He even hung it around his neck to attend Wrestlemania and ended up selling it as NFT. What’s important is not how valuable the card is in the game, but how valuable it is to you: what was once a diamond necklace is now a Pikachu card. The times a’changing.
Akihabara without cards
The thing is, the new packs that were released for sale just a week ago could contain rare cards with artwork of gym leaders Grusha and Iono. Adults went crazy and ravaged everything in Akihabara. The thing has been so much that one of the most famous game stores in the world, Hareruya 2, has announced that from now on children will have absolute preference and in case of doubt they will ask for ID.
That doesn’t mean that young adults (or old adults, for that matter) can’t get their hands on their cards: there will be a place for them with a limited number of packs throughout the day. When they run out, they’re gone. Oh yes: they will only be able to buy a maximum of ten per day. Children, on the other hand, will be able to do their shopping in peace and quiet as long as there is no greedy parent or guardian behind them.
The idea is to prevent adults from reselling the cards and to make them more available to children. As fun as it may seem to us, in the end if we strip a game of its real value and give it only a value in the form of banknotes, doesn’t it lose all meaning? Isn’t it time to stop looking at the world as coins and banknotes and focus on having a little bit of fun?
