Game Theory - Your Shiny Pokemon is DOOMED to Die!

Episode Date: June 4, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he discusses SHINY Pokemon and their unfortunate fate! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick and Justin Kuiper Editors: Tyler Mascola, Pedro Freitas, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Well, Matt Bet's getting ready for his big flex. I trained Pokemon in years past. Now look in Oz, I show you my Pocodex. Read it and weep. My Pokemon are shiny. A red pika and a yellow pilo swine. It's divine. You know, they're all shiny. I've got rare colors coming out my wazoo. It's very true. Don't you know?

I went and caught them all with my different types of pokeballs. Watch em shiver, my Pokemon are shiny Oh internet, welcome to game theory! Today we're gonna talk about how all your shiny Pokemon are doomed to die. If you're not already familiar, shiny Pokemon are the rare variants of your favorite cuddly pocket monsters that have a different color palette than the other members of their species. Black Charzards, blue ponitas, golden magic arps,

because let's be honest, anything to make this useless fish even remotely cool is a welcome change. But catching these guys comes with, well, a catch. Shinies has truly amped up the difficulty of catching them all, considering their appearance rates have been reported to anywhere between 1 in 500 to 1 in 8,192. When I say that these guys are rare, I mean they are rare. Now it's tempting to just write this off as yet another way to make Pokemon sticky for the player, give them more things to chase, more rare things that'll deliver a satisfying shot

of dopamine into the brain, yet another badge of honor that you can lord over all your Poca pals and most importantly of all, more things to love and cuddle and buy as merch at your local Spencer's gifts. But here's the thing, friends, shiny Pokemon are real. Or to put it more correctly, this is actually a place where Pokemon mirrors real world biology. Throughout the animal kingdom, there are real world shinies. Rare cases of animal appearing in unusual colors. And understand why your favorite shiny is doomed to die a tragic death, well, we have to look into the science of what's really going on. When it comes to real world shiny animals, you're probably familiar with some of the more common examples like the Black Sheets. Oh, Diane!

We're two misunderstood souls. Everyone else is a phony! But while you probably already knew that your dark-colored shiny Wulu was based in reality, some others are so rare that not even the Pokemon fandom pages have made the connection. For instance, did you know that Clancher is probably most directly inspired by the Blue Lobster? An animal so rare that it has about a 1 in 4 million chance of appearing. Makes the game's 1 in 8,000 chance for a shiny encounter. sounder seemed pretty good. A little less dramatic than the blue lobster are mammals like the black-backed jackal, which normally looks like this. Note the black colored fur, but there are shiny variants that look like this with a reddish-colored fur. Same thing with giant pandas. Where you'd normally expect them to look black and white, there is one panda in known existence that was born with reddish or brownish fur. And similarly, you got badgers, for most commonly black, but very rarely you'll see one with reddish-brown fur. Of course, it's not just seafood and mammals that'll show up with unusual pigmentation,

Take for instance, the ball python, which normally looks brown and black, but occasionally appears with white skin covering most of its body. A rare variant that, like a shiny Pokemon, is highly sought after by collectors. Which brings us back to our original question. What is it that makes these animals appear in unusual colors, and why are they so rare? Well, it all comes down to genetic mutation. Whether it's a mutation that causes extra proteins, like in the lobster, a mutation that causes a deficiency in enzymes like the Jacqueline Badger, or mutation Mutations that affect melanin production, like with the snake and other animals like sea turtles, whales, elk, and zebras,

real-life shinies, and by proxy Pokemon shinies, are all caused by genetic mutations that don't normally occur in nature. But that's only half the story. The other factor at play here, and the other thing that makes them so rare is the fact that most of them don't survive to adulthood. Oftentimes, the same genetic mutations that cause them to be colored differently also impact crucial skills like the ability to see. For instance, Piboldism, which is the official name for the coloring pattern that we saw on that snake, is genetically similar to albinism, a condition that affects both humans and animals. In albinism, the body is unable to produce enough melanin. In most places, this doesn't make a significant difference. However, it also includes a lack of melanin in the eyes,

where lower amounts of that pigment can actually affect your ability to see. As a result, a large number of people with albinism are legally blind due to how highly photosensitive their eyes are. Lower melanin levels also means paler skin, which in turn greatly increases the risk of sun damage. But unlike humans, in the animal kingdom, albino and piebald animals don't have the option of hopping over to the local testco to pick up some sunglasses and a tube of SPF 50. It's not just humans that have to worry about things like skin cancer and radiation burns from too much sun exposure. These things happen to animals too. And unfortunately, a melanin deficiency makes these animals less likely to survive. And that's without even mentioning how being bright white makes you much more likely to stand out to predators

relative to your much more camouflaged brethren. Zebras have stripes because the vertical lines allow them to confuse predators when moving as a group, making it more difficult for a lion to identify a target. But if you look different from the rest of the herd, well, makes it easier for that lion to track you, making it that much more likely that you become the next meal before you can pass on your genes to the next generation. And the more unusual you are, the harder it is to survive to adulthood to pass on those genes. So being an unusual color on the grasslands? Not a great idea. You know where being an unusual color is helpful? in captivity. And here again is where we see video games imitating real life. Unusual colors make an animal a prize for collectors, which is not that different from shiny Pokemon. I mean, let's face it, there's nothing that screams, throw a polka ball at me more like being a rare color. There's a reason why people grind for hours to capture a shiny umbriand. Because it's rare, because it's a trophy, it's an accomplishment. And gosh darn it, it's cute like that brown little panda. So while being a rare color makes you much more likely to die a horrific, grisly death out in the wild, Pokemon,

or otherwise, it also means that an impressionable 10-year-old is going to be much more likely to save you from that horrific death by throwing his balls in your face, especially when you're compared to like, I don't know, the one millionth pidgey he encounters, which brings us to one final and very unexpected comparison between video game shinies and real-world biology. As we just discussed, a lot of the color variants that we see in nature are genetic, meaning that they're hereditary, passed down from parent to child. And so, to some extent, the likelihood of you ending up with a different fur or skin color is to dependent on who your parents are. That's not entirely true in the Pokemon universe. Two shiny Pokemon parents getting together does not increase the likelihood of a shiny baby.

Unless to count Gen 2 where Pokemon shininess was determined by something that was called DVs in a way that hasn't been a part of a Pokemon game since. However, if you're looking to breed a shiny Pokemon, there is one thing that you can do to increase the chances of a special egg. You breed using two parents from different regions. And I'm not talking different regions in the Pokemon world, like breeding in a low-lin ryechu with a Galarian Pikachu to have a higher chance of getting a shiny Pichu, I mean caught in different real world regions, or more accurately, different languages of the game. If you take a Pikachu that was caught in an English language version of the game and breed it with a Pikachu that was caught in a Japanese language version of the game, your resulting Pichu is five times more likely to be shiny than if you just bred two

Pokemon caught in the English language versions. This method of shiny hunting is informally known as the Masuda method, named after Game Freak director Junichi Masuda, who programmed the mechanic into the game starting with Gen 4 and documented it in his blog. It's a lesser-known mechanic that was designed to bind international Pokemon communities together. Encouraging you not only to trade Pokemon with your friends, but to make new friends with people who play the game in different languages and trade with them. Pro tip, by the way, if you got a friend who does have a different language version of the game from you, get them to trade you a ditto specifically for shiny breeding purposes. The Masuda method seems to suggest that Pokemon that are more different from each other are more likely to produce a shiny Pokemon,

that a Spanish Charmander and a Japanese Charmander have a special certain chemistry that makes them five times more likely to produce shiny Charmander offspring. But does that square with reality? As it turns out, no. In fact, it's quite the opposite. A lot of real-life shinies are the result of inbreeding. For example, remember the brown panda that I mentioned earlier? According to scientists who discuss the brown panda in Nature magazine,

one of the most plausible explanations for the brown panda's origin is inbreeding, a lack of genetic diversity. As pandas become increasingly rare, there's less and less variety in the gene pool. And so it's harder and harder to find pandas to breed with that aren't in some way related to you from a few generations back. That whole lack of genetic diversity leading to a weird coloring is actually something that's happened in humans. The fugates are a family that lived in the hills of Kentucky and were commonly known as the blue fugates, or the blue people of Kentucky, because for many members of their family, their skin was literally blue. No, this is not Photoshop.

No, this is not distorted in any way, this is the actual color of their skin. You see, they have a rare genetic trait that leads to the disease, methemoglobinemia, which causes blue skin. The cause for this genetic abnormality? Well, for a period of about 200 years, the Fugate family was largely isolated from the outside world in a remote part of the Appalachian Mountains, leading to predictable lack of genetic diversity. Let's just say that their family tree looks a bit more vertical and less wide than you'd expect. As we've discussed, unusual pigmentation is usually the result of adverse genetic mutation. And as you're probably aware, birth defects become more common when the parents are too closely related.

In short, the fugates are a real-world example of humans that are shiny. It's actually a lack of genetic diversity that causes the sort of mutations that result in unusual colors. If the Masuda method were trying to be biologically accurate, breeding a Japanese squirrel with a French one would probably have a reduced chance of producing shiny offspring. Luckily, this is the one part of the Pokemon game mechanics that isn't true to real life. So if you happen to be a shiny hunter, it might be worth your while to start making some international friends. If not, well, let's just say you're gonna wind up blue. D, D, D, D, D. But hey, that's just a theory.

A game theory! Thanks for watching!