On Norman's commute to work and the implications this has for the scale of the Pokémon world in the games

[Red Knight]

I was looking up Norman on Bulbapedia when I found this line from his PokéNav bio in Emerald:

I walk the 30 minutes from home to here every day.

Only 30 minutes for that distance?

I get that Routes 101 and 102 are pretty short, but only 30 minutes to walk from Littleroot to Oldale to Petalburg?

Just for fun, I decided to count how many map tiles you would need to walk through (using the Emerald maps uploaded on Bulbapedia) to optimally go from the door of the player's house in Littleroot to the door of Petalburg Gym, and I got a grand total of 151 tiles: 14 in Littleroot, 35 on Route 101, 17 in Oldale, 63 on Route 102, and 22 in Petalburg. If you were to interpret that as literally as possible, that would make the time it takes to cross 1 overworld map tile by foot in Hoenn roughly 12 seconds. The average human walking speed is 3-4 mph, so assuming Norman is a relatively fast walker and walks closer to 4 mph (~6.4 km/h), that would make the total distance walked around 2 miles/3.2 kilometers, and each tile about 70.4 feet, 844.8 inches, or 21.458 meters. (I am, of course, assuming that he is taking the routes and not cutting a diagonal through the forest and brush directly between Petalburg and Littleroot, and square tiles suck for trying to determine diagonal distance - a potential complication of the way I counted the tiles as well, as you could argue that some of the diagonals along the route should make the tile count functionally lower.)

To give another sense of the scale of that, Slateport City is 66 tiles long from north to south in ΩRαS (I decided to boot that up and count steps there instead of trying to count the length of the Emerald map by hand). By the scale determined above, it's about 4646.4 feet/0.88 miles/1.416 kilometers from the north end of town to the south end, and it would take a little over 13 minutes to walk that distance. That's, like, nothing. That's not much longer than my old university campus, and it's a pretty small campus in the middle of a city. And this is one of the larger cities in Hoenn.

This really doesn't impact the gameplay experience that much - suspension of disbelief and all that - but good grief, is this kind of thing a nightmare for figuring out timeframes for writing fics and such...

 

[Bolt Strike]

It's a video game. There's limits on how big they can make the region based on system limitations and development resources. And Pokemon's spent most of its history on handhelds that had pretty severe system limitations to the point where they simply couldn't handle a realistically sized region like you want. So you really can't put too much stock into the size of the areas, especially for older regions.

 

[Red Knight]

Of course they couldn't make it a realistic scale. I don't expect a life-sized map of Kyushu to fit on a GBA cartridge. But that one detail of Norman taking 30 minutes to walk - not bike, not ride a Pokémon, but walk - through two routes, one whole town, and parts of two others invites so many questions about the scale of the Pokémon world, or at least the Hoenn region. Like, 30 minutes would be a reasonable amount of time to walk between two points in a single mid-sized city. For another scale comparison, it takes around an hour to walk the length of Central Park in New York City. Does it make sense for all of Routes 101 and 102 plus however much of Littleroot, Oldale, and Petalburg he needs to walk through to be half the length of Central Park? It seems to me a more reasonable time frame would be around an hour just to walk up Route 101, or to have his 30 minute commute be a bike ride rather than a walk, but that's just me spitballing.

I guess the (now former) title of the thread is a bit of a misnomer, then, because my issue isn't so much with the fact that the games are scaled down, but with that one detail that calls the degree to which they're scaled down into question.

(For reference, the thread used to be titled "Distances and scale in the Pokémon games make no sense" or something to that effect)

The best solution to this conundrum, I suppose, is to say, "sure, Norman, whatever you say," and proceed to disregard that detail.

 

[Greninjaman]

Of course they couldn't make it a realistic scale. I don't expect a life-sized map of Kyushu to fit on a GBA cartridge. But that one detail of Norman taking 30 minutes to walk - not bike, not ride a Pokémon, but walk - through two routes, one whole town, and parts of two others invites so many questions about the scale of the Pokémon world, or at least the Hoenn region. Like, 30 minutes would be a reasonable amount of time to walk between two points in a single mid-sized city. For another scale comparison, it takes around an hour to walk the length of Central Park in New York City. Does it make sense for all of Routes 101 and 102 plus however much of Littleroot, Oldale, and Petalburg he needs to walk through to be half the length of Central Park? It seems to me a more reasonable time frame would be around an hour just to walk up Route 101, or to have his 30 minute commute be a bike ride rather than a walk, but that's just me spitballing.

I guess the (now former) title of the thread is a bit of a misnomer, then, because my issue isn't so much with the fact that the games are scaled down, but with that one detail that calls the degree to which they're scaled down into question.

The best solution to this conundrum, I suppose, is to say, "sure, Norman, whatever you say," and proceed to disregard that detail.

I see it as it's a 30-minute walk uninterrupted and no distractions. What I mean is, you start in Little Root, go through Oldale and Route 102 to Petalburg without stopping. Obviously, if you were to stop and do other things like go north to 103 or shop or chat with locals, it would take longer.

 

[RichestAirPirate]

So Norman walks a little under a mile to get to work? Assuming he doesn't take any shortcuts or anything?

Huh.

 

[bugfacts]

I’m so glad there’s a thread about this I was looking at that exact quote the other day and was wondering what the ramifications were for distance scale LOL

Thanks for doing the work shdhdhdh

I feel like, for my own sanity as somebody who is making a fan region version of Hoenn, I need the distances to operate under anime rules, i.e. “anything goes if it serves the vibes or narrative purpose” because otherwise I’ll lose it.

Secret Answer: Norman doesn’t actually live at our house in Littleroot so the 30 minutes is starting from another location entirely lol

 

[Red Knight]

Secret Answer: Norman doesn’t actually live at our house in Littleroot so the 30 minutes is starting from another location entirely lol

That's the other answer I thought of after writing this lol

 

[Red Knight]

So Norman walks a little under a mile to get to work? Assuming he doesn't take any shortcuts or anything?

Huh.

30 minutes of walking is generally closer to between 1.5 and 2 miles (depending on walking speed), assuming, as Greninjaman said, no distractions, slowdowns, or detours (which I did, even though the optimal route I counted involved walking through multiple patches of tall grass). Still, if, as I assumed and as the games seem to imply, Norman's starting point is the player's house, that makes the distance from Littleroot to Petalburg really, really small, all things considered.

 

[kintsugi]

consider: Norman is Latios masquerading as a human, and he's really bad at guessing normal human travel distances as fellow humans do

also do not mind the implications of catching Latios later

 

[Red Knight]

Also, just for the fun of it, I decided to figure out Slateport's area and see how many times it could fit into Nagasaki, the city it's based on, if the scale I derived is accurate.

If I counted correctly, Slateport's map, including water tiles and out-of-bounds tiles, is 66x74 tiles, which is actually a good bit wider than I was expecting. That makes its area 4,884 tiles.

Each tile is a square with a side length of, presumably, 70.4 feet/21.5 meters. This makes the area of each tile 4,956.16 ft^2/460.44 m^2, or about 0.1138 acres/0.046 hectares.

Multiply 4,884 tiles by 4,956.16 ft^2 per tile, and you get a total area of 24,205,885.44 ft^2, or 0.868 miles^2, or 555.69 acres, or 2.2488 km^2, or 224.88 hectares for Slateport.

According to Wikipedia, Nagasaki's total area, including both land and water, is 156.70 miles^2, or 405.86 km^2. Just its land area is 92.94 miles^2, or 240.71 km^2.

That means that Slateport, at the scale I derived, would fit inside Nagasaki 180.5 times. All of Slateport, including the water, would fit inside just Nagasaki's land area 107 times.

Also, because I've already made comparisons to Central Park, let's also compare Slateport's size to that.

Central Park is 843 acres, or 341 hectares, or 1.317 miles^2, or 3.41 km^2. This means that Slateport is approximately 65.918% (a little under 2/3) the size of Central Park.

 

[VeniaSilente]

It always amuses me when I see threads like this. Thanks for not only bringing up also the corresponding area calculations, but also for using the metric system like a decent person (no idea what are those other units you are using tho).

I'm not one for taking Pokémon "'dex"-style stuff at face value (100k degrees hot Magcargo, for one!) but it does is interesting to see what in these cases when one does, and then extrapolates and the result at least keeps some measure of sense. I don't know how things are in collonialist countries with a lot of stolen space, but here in the third world 1.416 km long is just a bit under 2/3rds the size of the suburb-turning-town I live in, so that sounds like a really senseful size for a "city stand-in" in a world that, let's remember, does not have to experience the kind of human-centered, capitalistic, urban expansionism our modern cities do. Furthermore, the 3.2 kilometers commute-on-foot that Normal is taking feels also senseful to move from a residential area to a commercial or industrial area in this kind of world – but feels comically out-of-place with the fact that in the world I live in, it's twice the distance I need to walk to work, and Norman does it every day.

This thread iss the kind of thing how we know Norman is ripped, people!

 

[bugfacts]

1.416 km long is just a bit under 2/3rds the size of the suburb-turning-town I live in, so that sounds like a really senseful size for a "city stand-in" in a world that, let's remember, does not have to experience the kind of human-centered, capitalistic, urban expansionism our modern cities do.

For me personally, it’s less the presumed scale of the cities that creates difficulties with my suspension of disbelief; I can totally find the argument that the Pokemon world is just less densely packed and expansionist plausible! That’s an interesting read that could be used to extrapolate a lot of fun takes on the setting. That said, I do feel the series routinely calls upon the follies of unchecked greed and desire for power to inform some of its moral dilemmas so there’s an argument to be had that it’s still a world that suffers from this type of capitalist sprawl. Fun to consider either way!

the struggle starts for me when the hypothetical measurements start getting applied to the Routes and nature areas, lol. I start to be like “nnnooooooo” because so much of my personal interpretation of them comes from the anime and movies where characters spend days to weeks at a time backpacking between towns. I just can’t accept the idea that they are as small as they’re represented to be, haha.

 

[staticmoth]

I feel like my brain defaults to thinking about the regions being far more similar to their real life counterparts wrt density without thinking too much of the distance/scale between them lol. Probably the wrong call because I can imagine developers creating these locations and wanting us to imagine them much bigger then they appear on screen, but then you get instances like these.

Also: 30 minutes is about as much time between starting the game and getting to the Petalburg Gym for the first time, so maybe its a wink and a nudge in that direction?

 

[bugfacts]

Also: 30 minutes is about as much time between starting the game and getting to the Petalburg Gym for the first time, so maybe it’s a wink and a nudge in that direction?

That’s really freaking cute if so…. Omg

 

[DekuNut]

Secret Answer: Norman doesn’t actually live at our house in Littleroot so the 30 minutes is starting from another location entirely lol

Legit I think this is the answer. It's not uncommon in Japan for the father to rarely see his family because he doesn't work near where they live. It's likely why we see so few fathers throughout the Pokémon series.