Discussion Main / PopularityPolynomial

Makes sense to me. If you check this link, you can see that their sales certainly do fluctuate. That's not necessarily the be-all end-all, but it's a place to start.

Of course, I've never been a Pokemon guy and have only the vaguest idea what a "Gen" is in this context so there might be something I'm missing. (-:

For reference, the dude who deleted it brought it up first in Ask the Tropers. Didn't seem like he really got much support for its deletion.

The link you posted does not work. I had to replace the weird characters with a plain e to get it to work

Weird. Sorry about that.

It seems to be a common problem with URLs that include what would be non-standard characters (e.g. é or ä)

Aaaaaaannnnnd Pokemon has been removed again...

What gives?

I've restored it and included a commented-out note asking anyone who wishes to argue for its deletion to join the conversation here rather than do so unilaterally.

Thank you very much.

I deleted it because I don't think there was ever a period where Pokemon wasn't popular. If anything after Pokemania ended it became more popular as it's Periphery Demographic started to grow.

Pretty much all the Post-Gold and Silver games have sold around 15 million or so. Pretty stable. And while they sold more back then, it was back then only a fad among kids.

While I would argue that Pokemon never did become Deader Than Disco, there was a time when it was merely: "Oh yeah, that franchise" and not "Holy crap, how are you not playing Pokemon? Are you insane or something?" And you cannot deny that Pokemon Go is the first time in ages that a Pokemon product has even come close to the heights of Red/Blue/Yellow and Gold/Silver

But that doesn't fall under this trope. There was never a time when Pokemon wasn't popular. This trope is when something popular stops and then becomes popular again, not when something has minor variations in popularity.

Anyone else?

I would not call the trial and tribulations of Pokemon "minor variations in popularity"

Quite frankly it almost disappeared from mainstream's radar for a long time, before Pokemon Go brought it back.

It may never have ceased being a "popular video game" by the way such things are usually measured. But it sure as hell ceased being "all encompassing cultural phenomenon that you cannot even hope to escape from". And it (at the very least briefly) went back to that when even Hillary Clinton pandering on it (badly)

There was NEVER a time when it wasn't popular. There were never any "trials and tribulations". It was still very much mainstream, even at it's lowest still 10 million games sold.

Well let's just say it like this: Plot the number of units sold over the various generations over time on a graph.

That graph would start out high, then go lower and then go high again. The only difference Pokemon has with other entries on this list is that "low" is still pretty high, but the up down up is still there.

The generations have sold pretty much the same, around 10-15 million per game since the first two.

That is precisely my point The first two generations were an all-encompassing social phenomenon. The generations after that were successful video games. Nothing more, nothing less. Pokemon Go is/was an all-encompassing social phenomenon.

Trying to plot this would look a bit like this:

I_______/ even though the "_____" is rather high compared to others, the high is even higher.

This trope's not about "Something that was insanely popular becomes less popular but still highly popular and then becomes insanely popular again".

How so?

The way I understand it is "Something at least once enjoyed high popularity and went down in popularity at least once and subsequently went up again at least once". Which fits Pokemon to a T.

Yes, the baseline is different, but that's neither here nor there, is it?

The laconic description is "something that once was a fad becomes popular again" and most of the examples are of things that stopped being popular and then became popular again.

Anyone want to chip in? No reply for three weeks.

I agree, popularity polynomial would leave the popularity skyrocketing towards infinity, or plummeting to oblivion after a certain number of turning points. It is more like a popularity sine wave.

I think it sounds better as Periodic Popularity, though that may not stand out well enough as an individual phrase. Periodicity is just too long rhythmically to make the alliteration stick as well, to my ear.

I do agree that polynomial isn't the most appropriate term for the effect. I also think the apparent need to explain what a polynomial is takes away from its descriptive power.

Another alliterative alternative to argue, Cool Cycle.

Calling it a polynomial can make some sense if you decide to make -inf your 0-popularity baseline, and scaling that somehow. Given a sufficient amount of time, everything disappears.

Well, you could technically get a graph with waves, if you plotted in y=Sin x, but I don't know if that's a polynomial. I support Cool Cycle, although the distinction between Cool Cycle and Cool Bike has to be made, and would be hard to remember.

http://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic1-032910.php

This is the link where the webcomic is taken from; the image is much larger there.

After playing around with the image on Microsoft Photo Editor a bit, I've concluded that the current page image is pretty much as big as we can make it. I'm no fancy computer expert, but whatever the file is made out of it seems to take a lot of bytes.

It's a pity, since it does a great job illustrating the trope, but we might want to look into other options with the text that impractically tiny.

Have the image also be a link to the original comic, or have a link in the caption box?

I went ahead and made the bubbles and text bigger. It looks like crap, but I think that's okay.

Is it possible to put the comic panels as seperate images? You know, taking the comic and trimming the panels then placing them on the page one by one?