Since moving to Boulder, I've picked up a childhood hobby. The Pokémon TCG exploded in popularity when I was in elementary school, and I stayed a fan of the franchise while growing up.

I attended a couple of special events ran by the original publisher, Wizards of the Coast, but found it hard to find other kiddos to regularly trade and talk shop with.

Jumping forward to a few months ago: I moved to a new state, was looking for a fun way to meet folks, and I saw that a local store was hosting regular play sessions. Several months later, I have more social connectivity, fun, well-being (and well, of course, cards) than I expected!

For the unfamiliar: the Pokémon trading card game has a few facets. The game itself is a two-player format where each player brings their own deck and competes for victory. The trading side of it is similar to baseball cards — there are 1000+ unique pocket monsters, and players try to gain cards both for decks and for their personal collection. Local Game Stores, often of the Friendly variety, host casual play, trading nights, and officially sanctioned tournaments. Top players vie for a chance at the world championship. Folks can play it seriously, but many play casually in the way you might play on a rec sport team.

Some parts of the hobby are admittedly not so pleasant: It's unapologetically commercial, there's widespread scalping, limited product, inflated prices, artificial scarcity, risking a gambling addiction, and an infinite number of ways to lob money into the game. On the flip side of it all are numerous benefits: The regular creation of novel experiences, making fast friends, helping others toward shared goals, learning good sportsmanship, resource management, restraint, strategic thinking, and cross-generational connections. To boot, the community of players and organizers around the card game are some of the friendliest around in the hobby game space.

I'll save gushing about the art, nostalgia, and game mechanics for another day. More urgently worth exploring is everything around the game, and why doing it communally has been surprisingly transformative.

On my list to read is Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Though it doesn't take a thorough read to be aware of the current state of affairs in today's society — being "more connected than ever, yet more isolated than ever."

While in college, I was trained on the value of fostering a Third Place through my gig as a coffee shop barista. Now, as a largely remote working adult, I recognize the essentiality of the communal living room. A physical space that Ray Oldenburg describes as one "in which the presence of a 'regular' is always welcome, although never required. Membership is a simple, fluid process of frequent social contact, renewed each time by choice of the people involved." Online means seem to work best when they augment the physical, but cannot quite replace them. Game stores — like coffee shops, libraries, and bars — have a great value proposition through cultivating that third space.

From Billy Baker's We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends — "Men need somewhere to go, something to do, and someone to talk to.” For men in particular, that species of humanity that is encouraged to embody the spirit of the lone wolf, a regular space and activity are vital. Baker continues:

“I simply needed somewhere to go, something to do, and someone to talk to. I didn’t lack for friends; I lacked for a way to be friends with my friends on the regular.”

Not just any activity will do, though. With many of daily life's banalities, there's a great hunger for novel and elevated experiences. Here are a few ways Jane McGonigal explains how games do just that in Reality Is Broken via paraphrasing:

• Clear goals and feedback — Players know what to do and can see progress.
• Voluntary participation — Engagement is by choice, not obligation.
• Sense of achievement — Games provide challenges that match skill levels, creating “flow.”
• Strong social bonds — Multiplayer games build trust, cooperation, and community.
• Meaningful reward systems — Even small achievements feel significant.

All present and accounted for, and the loop heightens engagement.

Part of what makes the social glue extra sticky is ample opportunity to take advantage of the Benjamin Franklin Effect, where helping someone in a domain you care about leads to stronger ties. Trading cards, in particular, is an exchange where the effect works in both directions. A physical, tangible reciprocal to what you might do at a tech conference when swapping insider knowledge.

Playing the game itself has been surprisingly humbling for me. I've personally not played zero-sum competitive sports before where there are winners and losers. I admit it — I had some ego bruising as I was learning to play! Never underestimate an 8-year-old!

The fact that there was an external game gave a great backdrop to develop The Inner Game made famous by Timothy Gallwey, which is "the difference between being concerned about winning and being concerned about making the effort to win."

Perhaps the problems of connection, learning, and joy are better solved by more productive missions: Fundraising, volunteering, professional organizations, rec sports, alumni groups. Yet, while all those are fine and well, a frivolous cause is also a terrific vessel for passion. From sports writer Roger Angell on baseball:

What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved.

There's something to be said about a local organization with fun as a primary pillar.

I've since fallen out of love with the aims for outward success from younger adulthood. Even if in the guise of service and alignment with beauty, I can see in hindsight that underneath the cloak is, in fact, ambition as the driver. Some things are gained, and others are lost with that compass.

I've been preferring the smaller, seemingly trivial aims: Making a picture, writing words, playing tunes, doing a good day's work. And so this new hobby is another "small carrot" that would suit the title of Tamara Shopsin's "Arbitrary Stupid Goal":

My father knew a family named Wolfawitz who wanted to go on vacation but didn't know where.

It hit them. Take a two-week road trip driving to as many towns, parks, and counties as they could that contained their last name: Wolfpoint, Wolfville, Wolf Lake, etc.

They read up and found things to do on the way to these Wolf spots: a hotel in a railroad car, an Alpine slide, a pretzel factory, etc.

The Wolfawitzes ended up seeing more than they planned. Lots of unexpected things popped up along the route.

When they came back from the vacation, they felt really good. It was easily the best vacation of their lives, and they wondered why.

My father says it was because the Wolfawitzes stopped trying to accomplish anything. They just put a carrot in front of them and decided the carrot wasn't that important, but chasing it was.

This is all to say that a silly card game has been rich with growth, community, and good ol' fun. The carrot doesn't really seem to matter. As is said many times on this site, things transfer — from music to software, from trading cards to Jiu-Jitsu. But I hope you find a carrot just as suitable for filling your days with novelty, connection, and joy.

Anyway, I'm off to catch all the carrots!