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Now with the advent of Pokémon Amie, a feature that lets you interact with your Pokémon via touch screen and camera, the belief that you can talk into the microphone and affect your Pokémon in some way has lived on. If your Pokémon can see you via the camera, what’s to say they can’t also hear you? And if the game uses the microphone, what’s to say there isn’t some sort of hidden mechanic that will give you a small boost whenever you try to capture a Pokémon? It’s easy to see how the inclusion of the microphone snowballed into what it is now, despite how outlandish the accompanying superstition is. The idea that you can affect your game via a secret mechanic is just too seductive—nobody wants to let go of it, even if they know it doesn’t work.

What makes the latest variation of the Pokémon superstition so incredible is that it popped up during the age of the internet, when nothing is a mystery. Nowadays, it’s way harder to start a myth like “you can revive Aeris,” because everything is a simple Google search away. And yet this Pokémon superstition continues to live on, each time morphing to the specific capabilities of the handheld system people play the games on. I have no doubts that players will develop new superstitions that are tied to the specific features of whatever systems Pokémon appears on next. In the mean time, Pokémon veterans like myself will happily continue to press Down B, regardless of how effective it is. Some things just never change.

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To contact the author of this post, write to patricia@kotaku.com or find her on Twitter@xpatriciah.