Pokopia: The end of history?

23 Mar, 2026

The point of the 2026 video game Pokopia, based on the playthroughs I watched, is that you are the ideal neoliberal subject in a world that humanity and its ideologies have long evacuated.

That might seem like a stretch. Pokopia describes itself as a "relaxing life simulation game devoted to crafting, creating, and building". Thematically, it's a climate-apocalypse restoration fantasy, one where Pokemon fix the Earth that humans turned into a climate-fueled disaster and subsequently abandoned. Aesthetically, it's a bright chirpy sandbox, somewhere between Animal Crossing, Minecraft, and Terra Nil. Its goal is to be a pleasant place to play-work, customize, and ultimately inhabit.¹

But it's also an unabashed downer that leaves you moored inside your own head forever. It rules.

The ideal worker

The player character is the Pokemon Ditto, an amorphous blob able to assume the shape of any other Pokemon. The game interprets this fact as the ability to learn any skill impossibly quickly. This was done for gameplay reasons, of course— it's delightful that Squirtle teaches you to turn post-apocalypse barren dirt into fertile ground, for example.

But this fact also makes Ditto a representative of an ideology. Specifically, let's consider the player character in any sort of work-simulation video game as a sort of ideal worker. In the past, the "ideal worker" was alienated, compliant, well-conditioned, and skilled at rote memorization. Gramsci called this ideology Fordism, after the man whose name is metonymous with assembly lines and people-as-fungible. But Fordism has been replaced because of the rise of a new global, computer-filled, neoliberal economy.² Critical educational psychologist Steven Vasallo describes the ideal subject for this "neoliberal turn" as follows:³

This neoliberal self is individualized, disciplined, self-interested, and responsibilized. This self is fit for 21st century economic and educational environments, which can be construed as rapidly shifting, competitive, and replete with choices. In these environments, good workers/students are good thinkers and learners. They are self-regulated, adaptable, innovative, creative, flexible, and good problem solvers. (p. 1)

Ditto is the personification of this focus on adaptability and problem-solving. It's fair to say that Ditto's literal shapeshifting is why they are the player character, and therefore the de facto leader of the other Pokemon. After all, you alone are able to make the world green and habitable by combining skills. The game's lore implies that you were the first Pokemon to "wake up" after the apocalypse precisely because you can live anywhere.⁴ And you alone have an aesthetic capacity beyond tallying the point values associated with various decorations, and thus you alone have the power to decorate the world. As a result, the other Pokemon teach you new skills, perform mass labor like making concrete, and otherwise allow you to "hack your time".⁵ They are your underlings because they're worse at inhabiting this neoliberal ideal.

Humanity

Of course, what's conspicuously absent is the neoliberal economy itself. When the humans made Earth unlivable, they skedaddled to space, taking their institutions with them. There is no global trade; there are no middle-manger Pokemon; there is no private sector to privatize, deregulate, or let fall prey to competition; in fact, there is no competition to invoke the fear of death; in fact, there is no threat of death, and therefore no reason to accelerate the production of life-nourishing resources, much less make a science of it. In fact, since the allocation of resources is entirely up to one individual, and none of them are scarce in the long-term, it's hard to say this world even has economics.

So in a world where anthropogenic climate change, ingrouping, and war are literally things of the past, what problem is neoliberalism trying to solve? In this game, the Pokemon's goal is to fulfill the telos of humanity. This has two prongs. First, the abandoned Pokemon hope that humans will return to them. Almost every Pokemon describes the restoration of the barren wastes as part of a project to bring back the humans. After you complete some megaproject such as lighting up a city or throwing a party, a legendary Pokemon appears, and each says the same thing. Perhaps the humans will see this great and characteristically human work, they say, and come back.

But hand in hand with this desire to rendezvous with humans is the desire to become human. Ditto, as the greatest among neoliberal subjects, has the privilege of closely resembling a human, albeit as a beady-eyed simulacrum. Through your guidance, the Pokemon start off in "habitats" composed of tall grass and eventually come to live in houses designed by the player, with amenities like public transport. Dark cities become lit up by electricity. As the world becomes less barren, it inevitably becomes populated with shops, neighborhoods, and decorations.

To these Pokemon, humans are familiar, but they are also mysterious. We never see them, not even in pictures, and although we can hear about them secondhand we cannot truly reach through time and space to talk to them. They are strangers, foreigners, Others. And the inhabitants of Pokopia want one of two things desperately: to become them, or to meet them. The difference is trivial. Most information about the human exodus is found in "human records"— collectible artifacts such as old magazines or diary entries. Each is associated with knowledge about the human past (with implications for how to contact the humans), but many also unlock outfits, hairstyles, or emotes. Learning about humanity literally enables human expression. Attracting humans and becoming human are inseparable. And doing so is a sublime goal, more important than any objects in the barren world.

The rocket

Team Rocket, the antagonists of mainline Pokemon games, remains in the form of an uninhabited building which robotically asks you for various resources. This is the final task the game has for you. Diegetically, this building is a scam set up by Team Rocket, hoping to lure gullible humans into giving them food, furniture, entertainment, and so forth in exchange for pointless tchotchkes. When the building decides it has enough resources, it would reveal that it's actually a rocket. It would blast off, and with it the last stragglers of Team Rocket that couldn't make it in the main evacuation.

Of course, Team Rocket is already long gone. When you feed the requisite items to the building (valuable ores, a fridge, a photograph), it takes off, but nobody is inside. As the Pokemon wonder aloud whether the humans will see their makeshift Voyager Disk, a cutscene in a different art style shows a human astronaut encountering the rocket.⁶ Thus ends the main plot of the game.

The game, with its cozycore affect, would like us to interpret this hopefully. It's implied that the Team Rocket ship held excess fuel that could allow humanity to return— but despite the syrupy music and the hopeful dialogue, I don't feel hopeful. One shallow reason for this is that, despite the dialogue I've seen, the actual image before my eyes is not of humans returning; even the image of humans seeing our ship is in a different, dreamlike art style that I'm inclined to interpret as fantasy. Another shallow reason is that in real life, rockets suffer from a "tyranny of fuel"— that is, fuel is heavy compared to the force it allows the rocket to exert on that mass. While the world of Pokemon has stranger technologies than mega-dense rocket fuel, this fact nevertheless makes the whole victory feel Pyrrhic.

But perhaps the most sensible reason I know that humans won't come back is that it would defy the structure of the video game. Pokopia provides the fantasy of "Animal Crossing but with Pokemon". Per genre expectations, we expect the "postgame" to be a continuation of the process we've been doing: we accumulate resources, customize a world, and spend time in it as we please. And that's what happens! This game remains a sandbox forever. Ditto will be waiting for Godot forever. There is no place in the fantasy for humans.

I'm tempted to say that this lack of humanity could be a good thing, that homo sapiens is secondary as a concept to person and whatnot. Haven't we had enough of a bildungsroman⁷ to say that the Pokemon went from pre-people to people, that they self-civilized or self-actualized or whatever? But the player's loneliness haunts the game. In real life, of course, you can play the game alongside other minds: you can play multiplayer with your friends, or show your house to your mom. But within the fiction of the game, you are the sole agent, literally the only entity capable of altering the landscape or its inhabitants. Every atom of this world is your demesne. There are others, but they are all completely instrumental; they might as well be alien appendages that inhale clay and excrete bricks. Everything and everyone is an extension of your body. This is hell. As Bakhtin scholars Emerson and Morson write:⁸

"What would I have to gain," Bakhtin asks, "if another were to fuse with me? He would see and know only what I already see and know, he would only repeat in himself the inescapable closed circle of my own life; let him rather remain outside me."

And so the Pokemon not only fail to revive humanity, they fail to locate a second mind. The launch should have felt like a first contact with the Other. Instead it's a rocket transporting nobody to nowhere. The gesture of evacuation is so typical, so mandated by history, that it continues in pantomime even with nobody left to evacuate. Why shouldn't it? There is nothing left to happen. Ditto is the avatar of a belief system, and it has conquered the Earth so completely that there is no source of conflict outside ourselves, not even nature or time.

This is the end of history, a turning point marked by a change in ideology but by an eternal reaping of its rewards. We won. We did the song and dance of acceleration and accumulation, to the point that we've literally opened up a world defined by surplus and unilateral control. But if we were trapped here, unable to disinhabit the game and interface with other minds, we would go mad. It is paradise. It is pleasurable. And it is unbearable.

#academia #hof-art #pokemon #politics #theory