Game Theory - Why Pikachu is SHOCKINGLY Terrible! (Pokemon Sword and Shield)

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

Join Game Theory Host MatPat he EXPOSES Pikachu as a terrible Pokemon! Credits: Writers: Stephanie Patrick and Justin Kuiper Editors: Tyler Mascola, Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick, Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Koen Verhagen and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

This episode might be the most controversial thing to happen in the history of Pokemon. More controversial than Sword and Shield not have the national decks. More shocking than the stories about people getting hit by cars while playing Pokemon Go. Even more unbelievable than the fact that Ash Ketchum just became a Pokemon League champion in the anime. Seriously! The claim I'm about to make will change the course of Pokemon history. I'm about to prove to you that all electric lightning-type Pokemon, including everyone's favorite Sparky, barky little hamster Pikachu are absolutely useless. And come at me all you want, but might I recommend not doing it with an electric-type Pokemon?

Because seriously, I'm gonna show you why that would be super ineffective. Go internet, welcome to game theory. For once, the cold open actually cut right to the chase. I am in fact here to make everyone in the Pokemon community angry for probably like the 27th time since this show began. Okay, let's start our discussion today by talking about Rai Chu. Rychu, Pikachu's cooler, oranger evolution that failed to capture everyone's heart like Pikachu, relies on his signature lightning bolt move set when he charges up his cheeks, then kind of blows out a big lightning bolt that, to his credit, seems to deliver a pretty decent wallup.

According to Rychu's Pokadex entry in Fire Red and Pokemon Sun, as well as episode 14 of the anime, Rychu, quote, "... unleashes electric shocks that can reach 100,000 volts." And that seems like a huge number, right? Like, a hundred thousand of anything must pack a big punch because there's just a lot of zeros in that number. And then there's volts, volts, those are like the magical electricity pieces, right? And we don't really know anything about electricity other than it's pretty zappy. So a lot of volts must mean ryechu is basically keep frying any Pokemon who stands in his way, right?

Well, slow down there, my little Excelgore, because it turns out science is not on Rai Choo's side. Like, really not on his side. And to understand just how shocking Me-Kingly mediocre, Rai Chu's shocking power set actually is, I need to school you and apparently everyone a game freak about how exactly lightning works First thing to know is that shooting lightning at someone is not like shooting anything else at them Water Pokemon shoot water fire Pokemon shoot fire grass Pokemon are stirring up leaves in a menacing way, I guess All of that makes at least some level of basic sense because those are all objects that you can actually shoot at someone but can you actually zap someone with electric

from a distance? Not really. Not even with electric weapons that we currently have today. I mean think about how a stun gun works. It works by shooting wires at people and it only works if there's a physical connection between the target and the stun gun. Similarly, a taser only works when you hold it directly against someone's skin. So in light of that, it seems only fair to question this idea that you can shoot lightning bolts at people, or in our case other anthropomorphized key chains. How do electric Pokemon movesets work? Exactly. And more importantly, what does science actually tell us about how strong these electric attacks should be? At first glance, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with electric-type Pokemon. They shoot electricity out of themselves just like lightning. And lightning is a real thing in the real world. We know it can strike from a long distance, so a lightning bolt between Pikachu and the nearest bulbosaur should work in largely the same way, right? Well, not when you look at what lightning really is. To put it in scientific terms, lightning is an electrostatic discharge that occurs between

two points that have themselves an electric potential difference. Nerd! For the non-textbook definition, let's look in an example, shall we? You know how batteries have one end that's marked positive and the other end that's marked negative? And how if you put the batteries together, you need to put them all facing so the negative end of one battery touches the positive end of the next battery? That's because in order for electricity to flow, there needs to be what's called an electric potential difference, which, in the case of batteries, is a difference in the charge, negative or positive. At the negative end of the battery, there's a buildup of negative charge.

Which is why it's called the negative end. Pretty obvious. I've always found it confusing that the negative end of the battery is where all the charge is because negative always makes you think of not having enough of something. But remember in electricity, it's the opposite. Since electricity is talking about the flow of electrons and electrons have negative charge where those electrons are built up is where the things are gonna start. Makes sense, right? Electric charge always starts from the biggest pile of electrons, the negative end, and flows to the positive from where there's a lot of charge to where there's less charge until all the extra negative charge has spilled over into the positive areas and everything winds up neutral. That's when your battery is run out. All the negative charge has flowed toward the positive end of the battery and there's no more difference between them anymore and the battery gets thrown out, or more accurately, recycled safely. The difference between the negative end of one battery and the positive end of the next battery

is called that electric potential difference. The shorter, easier way to say electric potential difference, by the way, is to say voltage. That is what volts are. So when you hear me talk about how many volts something has, something has, bolts aren't a thing that you can hold in your hand or toss around. It's just the difference between the electric potential of two things. The greater the voltage difference between two objects, the more easily that electricity is going to be able to flow between them.

And just like water flows down a steep cliff more easily than it flows down a little slope, electricity finds it easier to flow when there's a high voltage difference. Higher volts means a steeper slope, if you're using that water analogy. You can actually see this play out and practically every lightning storm. During a storm, negative charge builds up on the bottoms of clouds, making it polarly opposite from the positively charged ground below it. Sometimes, like during thunderstorms, that potential difference between the negatively charged cloud and the positively charged ground becomes so big that it's able to overcome the resistance of miles of air.

And that brings up the question of what I mean by resistance. Well, the air all around us has a lot of molecules, and each one of them has to become supercharged. to carry the lightning bolt through the air. And it turns out that air doesn't want to randomly become lightning Which is pretty darn good for us, but it also means that the lightning bolt has to overcome a lot of resistance to get the air to charge up enough to carry that bolt all the way down to the ground In order to overcome that resistance you need a huge voltage difference between the clouds and the ground How big a difference we talking about here? Like a billion unironically not even joking about as high as 1.3 billion volts, if we want to be exact about it. At high enough voltages, the air actually becomes ionized and becomes plasma. That's the fourth state of matter, ladies and gentlemen, after gas, liquid, and solid. The air actually stops being a gas and becomes an entirely different state of matter. So, you can imagine how much energy that's gonna take.

That's what's going on every time you see a bolt of lightning in the sky. The reason that potential has to be millions or even a billion volts is that the result between the points is so big. Tall objects like trees are more likely to be struck by lightning because there's less distance between the cloud and the top of the tree than there is from the cloud to the ground. So the electric potential difference required to close that gap is smaller. And since the electrons are looking for the path of least resistance, well, they're gonna take it if they can. So could an electric Pokemon strike its foes by summoning lightning from the sky like a thunder cloud would? Not even close. Remember lightning strikes can have a voltages as high as 1.3 billion volts. And even small lightning strikes carry voltages in the hundreds of millions range. Consulting the Pocodex were reminded that Rai Choo, the stronger, more evolved form of Pikachu can only reach at most a hundred thousand volts. That is 0.01% of the voltage required to pull off a large lightning strike that could travel from the clouds to the ground. How far will a hundred thousand volts carry you? Well, it

takes around 30,000 volts per centimeter to jump a gap of air that hasn't been ionized. So, if we're using Rai Chua's baseline for what a typical electric Pokemon should be capable of, that 100,000 volts is only gonna be enough to jump a gap of 3.33 centimeters, or just 1.3 inches. That's some close quarters combat for a Pokemon battle. And what's even more concerning is that even if Rai Chu is standing right in front of another Pokemon, The only one who's really at risk of getting electrocuted is himself. Wait, what? How do we go from Rai Choo shooting lightning to Rai Choo electrocuting himself?

Well, the thing about lightning is that we don't actually decide where it goes. It just always will follow the path of least resistance. Targeting your lightning strike like you see in Pokemon battles or heck like you see in Star Wars does indeed look awesome, but it actually defies everything about physics and how electricity travels. The truth is that lightning just strikes the closest things. with the least resistance. And in Rai Chu's case, that's likely just gonna be himself. Looking at the way Pikachu and Rai Choo's power sets work, the charge they build up

canonically comes from these two little cutesy spots on their cheeks. They somehow turn those two spots into the negative end of the battery, super charge gum with lots of negative ions before shooting that negative charge out at their opponent. But the problem with that is when your cheeks are negatively charged and the rest of you isn't, then the closest positively charged thing is just still gonna be you yourself. To understand why that's the case, we need to go back to this idea of resistance. Like I said earlier, sending electricity through the air is really hard. Again, this is lucky for us because it means we're not getting zapped every time a breeze blows, but it also means that electricity would rather travel through pretty much any other object before traveling through the air itself. Metals like copper or aluminum have a very low resistance, for instance, which makes it really easy for electricity to travel through them, and which is why we use metal

wiring for our electronics. If you use a professional resistance meter to measure the resistance of aluminum or copper, it'll read almost zero oms, which is the official unit of resistance. Try something else though, like say a piece of steak, and you're gonna see it register several thousand ohms, slightly more resistant to letting electricity pass through it easily. It's gonna default to the metal, but in a pinch it'll go through the steak. Measure the resistance of the dry area on the outside of your skin and it's even higher still. At least a hundred thousand. So again, electricity is gonna choose a lot of other things before it wants to travel through that dry of your skin.

Now compare all of those to air, which is an insulator, meaning that it's particularly bad conducting electricity. While the resistance of air can vary a lot because the water level in the air can change, you're talking in the realm of billions to tens of billions of omens of resistance. It's not even a contest. If electricity can go through almost anything else, it's gonna do it. So taking this to the logical conclusion, if Pikachu or Rai Chu builds up a big negative charge in their cheeks, creating a big voltage difference between themselves and the ground, well, the path of least resistance between the cheeks and the ground is gonna be just through its own body. I don't see either of them wearing a big old pair of insulating rubber booties

to the path of least resistance for every single lightning attack is just straight through the rodent's own self. Now, sometimes Pikachu decides to leap up off the ground to perform his attack, So now he's closer to his opponent than he is to the ground, which honestly is a smart move and the only way to scientifically Avoid striking himself with that lightning But any part of him that's not negatively charged would still absorb all that lightning power before it ever reaches his opponent He is literally just frying himself with every attack, but hey, least he still looks cute, right? But you know what? Even I'm not heartless enough to want to see him fail, so what if we give him the ultimate benefit of the doubt and said that he could still manage to lightning strike another?

Pokemon, sending electricity through the air and hitting that other Pokemon on the battlefield. How strong would a strike like that be? How much damage would that lightning be doing? Well, it turns out that we can actually calculate that. The strength of an electrical strike is measured in Amperes, or amps, not in volts. Remember, volts aren't a thing that you can hold in your hand. A volt is just the difference between two electric charges. The strength of the shock all depends on the amps, and there it doesn't take much to do a lot of damage. A shock as small as 10 millie amps or 0.01 amps is gonna be a shock that you're gonna feel. And a shock of 200 milliamps is fatal.

So can Pikachu cause that level of real damage? To figure out the strength of the shock, we need to use the equation for amps. Amps are equal volts divided by resistance. So amps is gonna equal volts divided by ohms. When the volts are high and the resistance is low, like say Pikachu we're sending those 100,000 volts down a wire with almost no resistance, well, we're gonna get ourselves a big old wallop of electricity, really high amps, super effective damage. But if he's sending that 100,000 volts across the air, that 30,000 oms of resistance per centimeter, well that shock isn't going to be very strong for very long. In a typical Pokemon battle,

Rychu is standing all the way across an arena from his opponent, so let's say conservatively he's like 10 feet out. To send 100,000 volts that far, it has to get through at least 9.1 million oms of resistance, Which means the shock that hits the other Pokemon is gonna be, at absolute most, 0.01 amps. About the shock of a nasty doorknob spark. Ooh, that's some violent static electricity. But it's not gonna be nearly as bad as if you accidentally stuck your finger in an electrical outlet. So, you see, volts have almost nothing to do with the strength of a shock when it comes to sending electricity through the air. The resistance of the air is the thing that's ultimately hindering the strength of that attack.

Now, as one last and final thought, if Rychu and Pikachu and other electric type Pokemon weren't dependent on lightning strikes, then they'd all of a sudden be in a totally different position. If Rychu were able to deliver the same voltage over a wire connecting him to his opponent, all of a sudden he's not worried about the electrical resistance in the air, ionizing air molecules, that whole thing. Now all of that charge suddenly goes straight from his cheeks, down the wire and into the unsuspecting squirtle across the arena, where the shock would be so strong that he wouldn't just be knocked unconscious, he would die almost instantly. The long and short of what I'm saying here is that the strongest move in an electric Pokemon's tool set isn't so much the lightning strikes. It's the ability to bite their opponent, break the skin, get down to that soft, squishy, interior flesh,

and then deliver that Pokemon the shock of their lives. Too bad Ash didn't pay attention in physics class, or otherwise he would have been completely unstoppable. As it stands though, now you know the reason how Ash is able to survive getting electrocuted week after week after week. Truly shocking. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.