Ghosts 1: Pokemon Cursed Black

Yesterday I was stumbling about the other day, and I came across the story of a hacked version of the original Pokemon cartridge which added "Ghost" as a possible starting character. In this version, the story goes:

Defending Pokémon were unable to attack Ghost — it would only say they were too scared to move. When the move “Curse” was used in battle, the screen would cut to black. The cry of the defending Pokémon would be heard, but it was distorted, played at a much lower pitch than normal. The battle screen would then reappear, and the defending Pokémon would be gone. If used in a battle against a trainer, when the Pokéballs representing their Pokemon would appear in the corner, they would have one fewer Pokéball.

The implication was that the Pokémon died.

What’s even stranger is that after defeating a trainer and seeing “Red received $200 for winning!”, the battle commands would appear again. If you selected “Run”, the battle would end as it normally does. You could also select Curse. If you did, upon returning to the overworld, the trainer’s sprite would be gone. After leaving and reentering the area, the spot [where] the trainer had been would be replaced with a tombstone like the ones at Lavender Tower.

But the most interesting part is that victory is replaced by merciless penance for the evil done by the player. Of course, this forced moral reflection, driving the player to stare at the endless violence done in the course of an adventure, appears in other games, but it is incredibly rare and often cordoned into the tiny world of Serious Games. Please, read the post yourself to get a surprisingly chilling sense of the way that a Gameboy adventure could create a moment of moral reflection.
Of course, for Pokemon to force a serious engagement with the ethical possibility of player action requires that the mandatory sportsfolkship of the series be circumvented. Here, the insertion of the "curse" attack is an artistic insertion of foul play, bringing murder into a game where violence is always somehow limited to the polite possibilities of Olympic wrestling, and hunting always ends in either escape, capture, or curable injury. Now the question becomes thinkable, "Where was death in the Pokemon universe this whole time? How did all of those lightning and fire attacks end so cleanly?"
This is, in some sense, well tread territory. The obsession with the dead in video games, particularly those which make violence most cartoonish and dismissable, is a familiar theme in fan art. But it is surprising how completely the types of violence possible in video games escape mainstream criticism. When we see gunplay of a kind that makes sense out-here, parent groups frequently complain, but attention to the death of goombas or pokemon is left entirely to the marginal play of fan creativity.
It is appropriate, then, that Pokemon Black is itself a ghost. Know Your Meme thinks it is probably just a story, a fiction about a game, not as a game, but ghosts thrive on quasi-existence. It has been created as a "visual novel" for the DS, and it may soon be released as a complete game, either as a hack of a later version or a gamemaker project.

Ghosts don't need to be real to haunt.