I never gamble, as a rule. It’s not an ethical thing, or even self-preservation in the face of ADHD-driven overconsumption, I’m just pessimistic about my luck. I don’t bet on sports or horse races; I don’t play slots; I don’t even buy lottery tickets. But thanks to Pokémon TCG Pocket’s magical spinning wheel of card packs, my thumb has been hovering over the ‘buy Pokégold’ button distressingly often. I’m not surprised the game’s made $180m already – and I think that silly old wheel has a lot to do with its success.
If you haven’t yet tried Pokémon TCG Pocket, it’s the third and newest major digital iteration of the Pokémon Trading Card Game – a fiendishly well-designed mobile app that’s made Pokémon cards more accessible and addictive than they’ve been since I was trading fake Voltorbs in the playground aged eight (don’t cancel me, I didn’t know they were fake Pokémon cards at the time).
Pokémon Pocket takes gameplay-optimizing lessons from Marvel Snap, condensing matches into delightful, 10-15 minute affairs by cutting the deck size by two-thirds and automating how energy works – which is impressive on its own. But the real magic is in how it digitizes the compulsive art of Pokémon card collecting.
Every 12 hours, you get a free booster pack of five digital Pokémon cards for your collection and, just like MTG Arena and Hearthstone, the game renders each pack as a 3D, interactive object for you to actively crack open, giving you a little dopamine hit as the cards soar out. Unlike those games, Pocket takes the opening experience several steps further by showing you a spinning carousel of around 20 identical packs – each of which can be flipped over, tipped, and examined – and then invites you to choose between them.
Let’s get the conspiracy theorizing out of the way first: we don’t know for sure if spinning the wheel changes the actual cards you get, or whether it’s the same random set of five whichever pack you tap. IGN’s Ryan Dinsdale asked the developer Creatures Inc., but it declined to confirm one way or the other – and Dinsdale points to reports from Youtuber PokeNinaa and other players suggesting the cards are generated before you’ve chosen from the carousel. Maybe we’ll hear specifics on this from Creatures Inc. one day, maybe we won’t.
Honestly, I really don’t think it matters. I always assumed the carousel did nothing. I thought everyone did. I mean, why on earth would developers spend vital time and money creating a system that invisibly generates 20 unique sets of cards every time, when 19 of them are going straight to the Shadow Realm right afterward? It’s preposterous.
But here’s the thing: I still spin the wheel every damn time. Sometimes, when I’m feeling extra spicy, I flip the pack over and open it backward. Sure, it’s mostly because messing around with physics objects on a phone still has a strange hindbrain satisfaction to it. It’s fun to spin the wheel, just for the sake of seeing it spin. But I think there’s something more, too.
I know (to the extent possible) that spinning the wheel won’t change my chances of getting a full-art Mew ex instead of more Pidgeys and Magikarps. Every time I do it, it consumes another two of my precious seconds on earth, for zero gain. And yet I still drag that wheel around over and over, like a dog chasing a car, or a monkey enthralled with a child’s toy.
Because, subconsciously, it feels good to pretend you’re exercising some measure of control over something you know, deep down, is terrifyingly random. It gives the experience more meaning, salves any guilt you feel over taking a risk, and ultimately makes it more fun. It’s the same reason physical trading card collectors like to size up several identical, sealed packs in real life, before buying the one they have the best feeling about. It’s the same reason people who play fixed-odds slot machines swear by their own personal ‘system’ for winning the jackpot.
The creators of Pokémon TCG Pocket must understand this because they didn’t put all that effort into coding an (allegedly) functionless fidget toy into their game just for the hell of it. The developer told Ryan Dinsdale straight up that the opening experience had been carefully designed to mimic how fans open real-life packs. And expensive, non-essential features don’t get added to free-to-play mobile games unless they enhance the game’s potential to make money.
I’ve tried to work out, on a probabilistic level, what the difference is between choosing one physical card pack out of 20 identical ones in a store and pressing “open pack” to generate five random digital cards on a phone. It gave me a headache. The answer is probably something to do with quantum. Willing mathematicians may contact me at [email protected].
What seems inescapably true, though, is that someone at Creatures Inc. believed making a spinning wheel of packs, rather than just giving you the cards, would result in more people paying hard cash to open more packs (enough cash to justify the dev time, anyway) even if a moment’s logical thought would tell you it probably made no difference. And they’re now sitting on 180 million reasons to suspect that person was bang on the money.
For over a decade now, ‘gamification’ has been a beloved buzzword, almost a holy grail, for user experience designers in every digital industry. People whose job it is to convince you to buy stuff online are obsessed with working out how to make the act of clicking ‘buy’, in itself, fun and addictive – and one of their favorite ways to do it is by trying to reproduce the feeling of opening a container and taking out an exciting thing you want.
When I worked at a PC games ecommerce store, I sat in on meetings where bosses pondered, capitalistically, how to make buying a Steam key feel like opening a trading card pack. To my knowledge, no-one’s managed the feat yet – but I feel like they could certainly pick up a few hot tips from Creatures Inc.
I haven’t spent real money on Pokémon TCG Pocket yet, but it’s only a matter of time. A few more spins of the wheel, and maybe I’ll get that full-art Mew ex. Or a banana.
In the meantime, we can always ogle the shinies in our list of the most expensive Pokémon cards, or scope out the strongest Pokémon cards for the physical decks I’m now in grave danger of making. And if you, like me, are finally interested in later-gen ‘mons thanks to playing Pocket, we have a handy guide answering the big question: how many Pokémon are there these days, anyway?