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I am AkiConterR and my companion is a “Pidgeotto” who I call “Pid”. I belong to Team Mystic; I am on level 7 and I have 53 Pokémons (72, actually, but some of them I transferred). Together we roam through Aguascalientes to fulfil my aim of becoming a Pokémon master.
Pokémon the anime series arrived on Mexican television 20 years ago, on what was then “Canal 5” (Channel 5), and I grew up with Dragon Ball, the Knights of the Zodiac, and Sailor Moon, but this new proposal about capturing Pokémon “characters” (which had originally been part of a videogame, as I had learned much later) struck me as remarkably interesting. I remember too that at school they did not like us to mention the subject because Pokémon was “satanic”!
Now, 20 years later, we are surprised to find as adults we have strong memories of the Pokémon mugs, cards and stickers we collected during our childhood. But can this virtual reality game be played by women? When it arrived in Latin America, after starting up in other countries, Pokémon Go had a large number of users, and I thought that all the women of my generation played it.
In actual fact, even with the passage of the years and the closing of some gender gaps, the images of women in videogames remain sexualised. In others, there is not even a single female image, other players harass you and everything is centred on the male characters. So why do we play them?
Read the full article in GenderIT.org .
