People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
I also don't have a convenient, and actually useful AI device that knows everything about every animal that I keep on me at all times. Something close to it, but it's wrong 70% of the time.
There's also only 1025 pokemon. There are so, so, so many more animals IRL to memorize.
If this was in 2002, there were also only 251 or 386 Pokemon depending on when in the year it was done (Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire released in November 2002)
Not to mention a huge chunk of those Pokemon at that time were just evolution phases, sharing very similar names as their base (e.g. Charmander, Charmeleon, and then Charizard). Additionally, each evolution phase looks pretty similar to the prior. That in comparison to, say, many different varieties of ants, wasps, birds, etc. that don't look that different at a distance, especially to an 8-year-old.
Don't forget the mimic species that evolution selected for because they look like something else. Even the most complex video game is nothing compared to nature's complexity. I'd love to learn about geology, but look at how many variations there are in just one group of minerals. Biochemistry is the real misleading one - "I'm just a few types of atoms" Yeah, in a shitload of combinations.
And all pokemon of a species usually look the same! Very few gendered traits, age differences (unless you count evolution, and that still counts for more species in pokemon than irl), season differences, plain old individual differences, etc.
Speaking of AI, the app whoBIRD (kind of a FOSS BirdNET alternative) allows the recognition of bird species by sound. Obviously, it's not perfect and not all birds sing, but it's the closest IRL to Pokémon calling their names and a Pokédex.
Common wildlife species also weren't designed by art and marketing people to be visually distinct and easy to recognise.
Oh look, its the small brown hoppy bird. And there's another one of an entirely different species yet basically indistinguishable.
Field ID on most sparrows boils down to "yep that's a sparrow".
common wildlife species
Look, a crow! Or is it a raven? Wait, it looks like a koel!
(it's a magpie)
You can't go wrong with pokemon because most doesn't share similar silhouette, like even if 4 legged feline, there's very distinct shape between Persian, Umbreon, and Nermal. That's very important for pattern recognition.
Unidan has entered the chat
JACKDAW!
Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
Yeah, what an idiotic comparison. The one thing is a game franchise, specifically designed to get you hooked on it and "collect them all" which obviously means you need to know what you are collecting. Plus the name yelling thing.
The other thing is... life. How many average 8-year olds are travelling the world to see all animals? They certainly don't have unrestricted access to the internet (hopefully) to lookup animals. There's no reward for knowing that.
Just a shitty comparialson.
Also, early 00's was, what, generation 2? 251 pokemon. Depending on what would be considered "common" for wildlife, that number could much greater.
And I'm sure the goal would be to attack videogames, not to better educate children.
They're probably counting the common zoo species as the comparison, not every animal. And kids do go to zoos a lot at that age. I do not think they needed to be world travelers to have seen most of these
There were like 20 different kinds of small birds where I grew up. Adult me can't tell you the species of any of them.
That was in 2002. That percentage must be much lower now, since the number of Pokemon has increased due to a phenomenon called Pokémon inflation.
My siblings dont know what a magnamite is.
There isn't a song that names all the wildlife creatures either...
Unless of course, one were to live a part of the world where the Tokay gecko can commonly be found.
I choose you, fuck-you lizard!
We do have the Cuckoo
As for the 50% common wildlife species, most of those kids would probably also resorted to their Pokemon knowledge to figure those out: "That one looks like Pidgey, hmm that must be a Pigeon then?"
Whip-poor-wills yell their name at you.
I love it when wild animals yell at me.
Whether it's that guy at the bus stop who blocks the traffic or the one with the bible and the speaker that renders his words into nonsense noise...
They're all a part of our ecosystem!
I was just watching a dude not know what a horseshoe crab was, but describe a similar Pokémon’s evolution step by step, as this scrolled onto my screen. .
Was it Kabuto -> Kabutops?
Is there other evolution that turn them into Kabubottoms?
Killdeer