in their 20s. Many fans are adults who originally played the games as children and had later returned to the series. Numerous fan sites exist for the Pokémon franchise, including , a site hosting the wiki-based encyclopedia Bulbapedia, and Serebii, a news and reference website. Large fan communities exist on other platforms, such as the subreddit r/pokemon, which has over 4 million subscribers. A significant community around the Pokémon video games' metagame has existed for a long time, analyzing the best ways to use each Pokémon to their full potential in competitive battles. The most prolific competitive community is Smogon University, which has created a widely accepted tier-based battle system. Smogon is affiliated with an online Pokémon game called Pokémon Showdown, in which players create a team and battle against other players around the world using the competitive tiers created by Smogon. In early 2014, an anonymous video streamer on Twitch launched Twitch Plays Pokémon, a small experiment trying to crowdsource playing subsequent Pokémon games, that started with the game Pokémon Red and has since included subsequent games in the series. A study at Stanford Neurosciences published in Nature performed magnetic resonance imaging scans of 11 Pokémon experts and 11 controls, finding that seeing Pokémon stimulated activity in the visual cortex, in a different place than is triggered by recognizing faces, places, or words, demonstrating the brain's ability to create such specialized areas. Notes References Further reading Tobin, Joseph, ed. (February 2004). Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon. Duke University Press. . External links 1990s fads and trends 1990s toys 2000s toys 2010s toys Japanese brands Mass media franchises Mass media franchises introduced in 1996 Nintendo franchises