In the latest Pokemon games, Nintendo have instituted a feature called GTS Negotiations, a development from their existing GTS (Global Trade Station) system. Wi-fi Pokemon trading is a blindingly obvious thing for Nintendo to be encouraging and facilitating, but actually implementing it is highly problematic. One big issue they needed to solve is as follows:
1. People want to trade Pokemon online, and we’ve built our games to make trading a core mechanic.
2. Our players range from 5 year olds to 95 year olds (well potentially, but at the very least there’s a bunch of young adults, parents etc playing as well as kids).
3. If we build an environment encouraging kids to chat and swap stuff online with strangers we are opening themselves up to a world of problems.
4. So any interaction needs to be either very highly regulated or very well screened - personal information, recontactability, etc. has to be kept to a minimum.
The original GTS solved this problem by including no real-time interaction at all between traders. You dropped your unwanted Pokemon into the GTS, said what you wanted to swap it for, and if someone accepted the deal was done - with no contact and no returns. Unfortunately the system rapidly became cluttered with players wanting impossible (or just highly unreasonable) trades, and people with fake or hacked monsters. The GTS was safe, but broken. (Though it’s a rather good way to teach my 4 year old about valuing stuff, treating people fairly, and suchlike.)
GTS Negotiations is a clever attempt to get around this - now you CAN trade in real time, but the amount of interaction you can do is very limited indeed. All you get is a trainer name, the country they came from, the ability to show and withdraw possible trades, and a series of buttons on the bottom (a happy face, a sad face, a love heart and an exclamation mark). And that’s it.
Now - why on earth is this on my ‘research’ blog, not my normal one? Because what’s so interesting is that - inevitably - these limitations are a spur to collective, social creativity. Social behaviours are emerging on GTS negotiations, and with them an etiquette. I noticed the other day, for instance, that when I showed a particular Pokemon, often my anonymous trading partner would show that Pokemon themselves, a more polite way of saying “I don’t need that” than simply using the sad face icon. According to one of the main Pokemon forums, showing a particular creature (whose icon appears to be waving) is becoming a way for experienced traders to say “Thanks, goodbye”.
There’s already a well-worked out set of emergent behaviours around Pokemon - the “competitive metagame” where players who like to battle each other have evolved enormously complex strategies, rules and forms of etiquette. What’s interesting to me about GTS Negotiations is that this is a new system, used by players of all ages, and that complex social rules evolve communally out of the most limited set of tools. It’s very interesting to watch.
