The Spirit of Giving

You know, right now is a special time for a very large group of people. It's a time for contemplation and doing good things, and one of the latter would be giving back. I participated in such an activity today, and what was special is that I also got to do it with my own style, and my style is Pokémon, if anything on this blog is an indication. This of course leads to the consideration of how far and where I can take this spirit with this style.

I play Pokémon Go and I'm involved with a local raid group, as many of the posts in this blog indicate. I'm not quite a "general", but I can do many of the things that the "generals" do: I can tell people where a raid will happen and start to inventorize participants, then when the raid comes, I can offer suggestions on when to start. Elsewhere in Go, I can provide little tips and tricks to improve gameplay of other players even by a little bit, whether at a glance through conversing or more descriptively by this blog. That seems to very much constitute giving.

In the primary realm of VGC battling, there's not much that I can do - in fact, I'm more likely to be given rather than to give in this area - but there are still things that I can do. I'm not able to heavily contribute within gameplay, but at least I can support things that go on around the gameplay, like filling in for participants as in the previous online tournaments, or provide backing for whatever happens next. It just so happens that I did exactly that last year out of a consideration I discussed in last year's post (see below), and I'm still proud that I did so. This year is a different story, though, and I'm not sure how I can possibly contribute - yet I will assuredly do so once I find out. I'm still giving in any case.

And then there's today. It's hard not to give back knowing it's a special time, and it's even harder not to do so without including my particular fondness for Pokémon when it's permissible and workable to do so. I'm sure I did a great thing today, as much as I did great things in other Pokémon-involving opportunities. The spirit of giving is likely to manifest itself in different forms as well as results, even beyond this special time of year.

One year ago: A Faraway Tournament and a Charitable Spirit