Seeking Confirmation

Lately, some Pokémon players, including me, have been driven to seek confirmation in the games we play. We've been driven to check if the way things happen measures up to what we think will actually happen. This is a big thing for the way we play the games. There are many things we've discovered, and we think they're big indications of confirmation. Yet sometimes reality may appear to speak the other way.

For Go players, the biggest efforts are for the elusive - not to mention exclusive - Ex-Raids. It may seem that based on earlier successful efforts as well as the observations I've mentioned, this is pretty much set. However, these are just deductions based on a mechanism that is not known to players. Coupled with recent information that things may change for who will get Ex-Raids and where they might be located next, it appears that some things may not be completely confirmed after all. I and my raid group are doing our part, though we run into the same obstacles. The pursuit for confirmation continues as more details are proved or disproved.

For players of the main series in the VGC scene, it's always about strategies and usage, which is different in different tournaments and places. There is a tournament right now which I'm neither fit for nor able to attend, but some of my colleagues did attend, and they even had battled in last Sunday's online tournament and had done somewhat well in fact. But this is a much bigger tournament by far, and it can almost be confirmed that there would be a much diverse use of strategies. The result was that they did just well enough to be in the middle, which may mean that some strategies succeeded and others fizzled. Those outside of the tournament also observed certain other successes. Likewise, pursuing confirmation for this becomes a continuous process.

So it seems that confirmation for things in the games is not lasting, but tentative, depending on the particularities that are present and absent. Some things do measure up, but not everything, especially if they're not known or they suddenly change. But we think that some things can still be confirmed, even if they're only apparently stable. It's just when they're clearly not that raises big questions about confirmability; we'll still seek at least some of it no matter what.

One year ago: Time