Game Theory - I SOLVED The Oldest Pokemon Debate!

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he finally solves one of Pokemon's OLDEST debates! *Credits:* Writers: Matthew Patrick, Mike Keenan (The Pokémon Biologist) and Tom Robinson Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Tyler Mascola , Brandon_n_motion, Dom Sealion, Pedro Freitas and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

Pokemon sizes make absolutely zero sense. The fearsome Charzard? Yeah, it stands at a measly 5'7 inches. That has a couple inches shorter than me. The formidable Lucario? He's just 3'11. It's not even tall enough to get on most Disney rides. And for it, you know, the Pokemon that's based on a ferret is supposedly 6 feet long. Not sure I want that thing running up and down my pant leg.

Anyway, I think you get the point. The sizes listed in the Pocodex are all over the place. But there's one Pokemon that takes the insanity and turns it up to 11. the float whale Pokemon Waylord. For two decades, this guy has sparked fan rage, so much so that it's even spilled into the realm of a full-on academic paper. And all of it stems from one simple question, is Waylord lighter than air?

Seems like a weird thing to be asking about your 47 foot long whale, right? Wrong! Once you look at the rest of the numbers, you see how this has become one of the most controversial topics in all the Pokeaverse. So today we're gonna be coming up with a definitive answer. Has the internet hit rock bottom? Or is everyone else? including this Pokemon full of hot air.

Hello internet! Welcome to Game Theory, where today we're going back to our roots. Applying real-world research to fictional worlds. Break out the Pixel Ruler's class, because today we're over-analyzing the disturbing science of Pokemon. And no, I am not talking about how a tiny skitty and a giant Waylord are meant to breed. Not touching that one with a 10-foot Alolan Executor. At least, not yet. Nope, today I'm talking about the fact that Waylord is light. Like stupidly light. As I mentioned in the cold open, Waylord's Poked Sentries confused fans since it was first introduced in Gen 3. You see, Waylord's weight is listed at 877.4 pounds, or about 398 kilograms.

That's no doubt heavy, one of the heaviest Pokemon in the entire series, but it is comically light when you compare it to your typical whale. Blue whales, the thing that Weylord is based on, usually weighs somewhere between 290 and 330,000 pounds, or between 130 and 150,000 kilos. practically 350 times the weight of your standard Waylord. So these guys are heavy, but not too too heavy, you know? However, where things get controversial is when you factor in Waylord's other measurements. Waylord's quote unquote height is listed at 47 feet, or 14 and a half meters.

He's massively big for not a lot of weight, prompting many fans online to speculate that Waylord may in fact be the lightest Pokemon in all the games relative to his size. Some of even gone so far as to say that Weylord is so light, he's literally light than air. The argument's been so heated in fact that it eventually spawned a real research paper from a real university in the UK. And their conclusion? Yep, whalord is in fact lighter than air. Strap a string on that guy, you got yourself a big old whale balloon. Reddit though, they weren't buying it. Because of course they weren't, it's Reddit. This prompted a massive post arguing the

exact opposite that no, Waylord is not later than air. So today loyal theorists, we're gonna be putting an end to this seismic debate. We're crunching the numbers ourselves to see who was right, who was wrong, and who was super nerdy. It was all of us, all of us were super nerdy. Will Waylord be sailing the Seven Seas or floating amongst the clouds like a Thanksgiving Day parade balloon? Ladies and gentlemen, it's Morty time. Leave your theories in the comments below, I'll pick my favorites in the next episode of Morty.

So how does one go about proven whether a fictitious whale is able to float through the air? Well, it all comes down to a little scientific principle called density. Density is the measure of how much mass something has per unit of volume. If we have ourselves two cubes of equal volume, one made of lead and the other made of wood, the cube of lead would weigh more and thus be more dense. If I then drop that cube of lead into a fluid that's less dense than it, say water, the cube of wood into the water, meanwhile, it would float since wood is less dense than water. It's all pretty self-explanatory stuff. It's also pretty darn easy to calculate.

All you need to do is divide the mass by the volume, and bam, you've got yourself the density. Classic equation. D equals M over V, DMV. One place for dreams go to die. So let's just take ourselves an easy example here to get warmed up. Voltorb. Voltorb is a nice round sphere, so figuring out its volume should be quick. According to the Pokedex, Voltorb has a height of 0.5 meters, or 1 foot 8 inches.

Its radius is half that, so 0.25 meters. And the formula for the volume of a sphere is V equals 4 thirds pi r cubed. So plug it in our values, you get a volume of 0.065 cubic meters. Now all you need to do to figure out Voltorb's density is take that listed mass. of 10.4 kilograms and divided by the volume that we just got to get a density of 160 kilograms per cubic meter. Comparing that to the density of air, which is 1.293 kilograms per cubic meter, we can see that Voltorb is definitely not floating away on the breeze. But the density of water, it's actually much higher. 1,000 kilograms

per cubic meter. So Voltorb would actually float on the water, despite him being a giant metal ball. Which means in real life, you'd probably be able to teach your Voltorb how to use surf. That being said, this is all pretty easy math, right? Here's the problem with Waylord though. Unlike Voltorb, who's a perfectly shaped sphere, Waylord is a blimp-shaped whale, and finding his volume is not as easy of a plug-and-chug solution. So let's just take a look at how both sides of this poca puzzle tried to solve the problem. First, there's this paper written by William Farmer, a student at the University of Lester who wrote an undergraduate research paper in the school's

Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics. I gotta say, love the fact that this debate's been going on for so long that the kids who used to argue about it on the playground are now old enough to write their own published research papers about it. Truly, William Farmer, you are a man after my own heart. You're looking for a job. Feel free to apply for theorist's script writer. Anyway, he calculated Waylord's size using pixel measurements in a classic theorist move, and he used a cylinder to estimate Weylord's base shape,

claiming that the overestimates here, these empty parts where the cylinder is bigger than the body, those would help account for the parts that stick out, like his tail and his fins. The volume of a cylinder amounts to pi R squared H, so pi times the radius of the cylinder, multiplied by the cylinder's height. So with a Waylord cylinder height of 14.5 meters and a radius at 2.855 meters he figured out that Waylord's volume would be around 370 cubic meters making the density 1.08 kilograms per cubic meter, which is lighter than air at 1.293. So case closed, right?

Eh, no. You see despite this coming from an academic journal, the paper makes a lot of assumptions about waylord's shape and volume. And this got read it eager for a more precise solution. This post comes from the are Pokemon subreddit by user Petscott Meju, who also used pixel measurements, but this time refined Waylord's estimated shape. Instead of just reducing him down to a simple cylinder, they instead decided to add a hemisphere to each end of the shape. That way, they didn't need to explain away as much empty space. They also recognized that pixel measurements tend to be slightly inconsistent across different games, and so they tried to correct for that as well. This led their estimate for Waylord's radius to be smaller, 2.2 meters as opposed to 2.8. Their cylinder length then was 8 meters, leaving about 2.1 meters on each,

each end for the tail and the head. In total, this refined equation where they added up the volume of the cylinder and two hemispheres gave them a significantly smaller volume. Only 166.24 cubic meters. Less than half what the academic paper had proposed. Divide wheylord's mass of 398 kilos by 166, and you get 2.39 kilograms per cubic meter, which is nearly double the density of air and a vastly different conclusion than the academic paper. With numbers like that, your float whale Pokemon here? He ain't floating anywhere. Which is right? Well, off the bat, the Reddit approach seems to be the more accurate method. While both options are assuming certain parts of Waylord's shape, the Reddit one is taken precautions by doing multiple calculations to account for the nuances of both his shape and the differences in pixel measurements across games. I gotta say it, my friends, I am on Team Reddit for this one, but...

You guys know I'm not gonna just leave it there. These calculations, they're not perfect. Between its little grooves, its crevices, and the giant fins and tail, there is no perfect shape to truly describe what a Waylord is. It's not a cylinder shape, it's not an ellipsoid shape, It's just a waylord shape. This is where our two density debaters get into trouble. But what also complicates things is that the scale of Waylord, it's never been consistent.

Since Waylord is so much larger than just about every other Pokemon in the game, it's always shrunken down, so it can fit within the confines of the system, the battlefield, or the screen. And with Waylord being so large, any amount of estimation error gets exaggerated to become a whale-sized problem. Without factoring in that sort of inconsistency, who knows? It might conclude something insane. As a result, my dearly beloved pixel measurements, they might not be the best tool. tool to give us the most accurate numbers in this instance. So, how do we get the most accurate results and settle this debate once and for all?

On the wise words of Patrick Starr, We have technology! Since the release of both the Reddit post and the research paper, Waylord has made the switch to the Nintendo Switch with Pokemon's Sword and Shield. In the Isle of Armor DLC, we finally get to see Waylord in all his blubbery glory, just as Arceus intended, which means that we finally have access to a full 3D model of this Pokemon. No more pixel measurements based on weirdly angled sprites required. This means that we can take this new 100% accurate 3D model and import it into a 3D modeling program like Blender.

While this program is typically used for creating 3D models, it also allows you to do things like measure the volume of your, or in this case, Game Freaks creations. Therefore, as long as we have the proper scaling figured out, we can use Blender's built-in tools to get the exact volume of a Waylord. No estimates required, including the tails and fins. Now, up to this point, everyone's been using Waylord's Pokedx height to measure his length. It sounds confusing, but this is actually a common quark amongst the Pokedex. Sometimes it means vertical height, but other times, especially when you're talking about long Pokemon like Waylord, it means length. But just to make sure that we didn't get the math wrong, I wanted to be extra careful. So I took a look at every depiction of Waylord that we've

ever been given, like the size comparison tool from Generation 4, or the player character standing next to Weylord and sword and shield. Given that the trainers in the series are usually around 5 foot 4 inches, there's no way that Waylord's 47 foot height in the Pokedx could refer to anything other than his length. So, but that one settled, I was able to make sure that our Blender Whale was scaled correctly. And by creating a mesh for him, we can use Blender's volume calculator to tell us that Whelord has a volume of 182.8557 cubic meters precisely. No estimates, no assumptions.

That is the exact number. From there, all we have to do is divide Weylord's 398 kilograms by his volume to get a definitive density. Drum roll, please. Really? That's the best we got? I'm going to admit, I don't know what we got to do at this point. I am perturbed by the lack of a solid drum roll, Yossi.

Fix it, man. Pull out all the expenses next time. I want a drum roll that will melt mines. Promise? Yose, I put you in the shaving episode, so you better promise me. Thank you. Where was I? Oh, yeah, his true density.

Waylord's true density is 2.18 kilograms per cubic meter. Which means that I can now say without a shadow of a doubt that Waylord is not lighter than air. Even if you don't include Waylord's tail into overall calculation, it still wouldn't be enough to get him airborne. And honestly, all this checks out. Waylord being lighter than air would have broken the other information that the Pocodex tells us about him. Waylord's Pocodex entries going all the way back to Sapphire, tell us that Waylord can knock out prey by the shock of its splash. Which, you know, it's going to be pretty hard to do when you're so light, you can't even hit the water.

So, there you have it, my friends. The debate is finally squashed. Waylord is not lighter than air. Reddit was right. Not completely, obviously, but their conclusion was pretty darn close for an estimate. I guess we'll just have to leave floating off to the sky to Team Rocket. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory.

Thanks for watching.