Key to the success of Pokémon cards as a site of the semiautonomous play of value is the underlying, more rigid and rulebound order of value that stems from the game for which the cards were originally designed. While not all children play the game (or play it by the given rules), and while most children value cards in social economies that are not based on their value within the game, the ability to reference a card’s game value (or sometimes “objective” monetary value) is a critical touchstone for the negotiation of value (Brougère 2004, 198–199). In other words, the determination of value is not merely an act of social imagination and creativity in groups of children – it is one that is in dialectic tension with an imposed logic of value. The intimate negotiation of value and imagination occurs in the shadow of an ostensibly real, foreign, alien economy.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 376