Editing Ontology:Q10301 (section)

== Usage notes ==

Why Missingno. would be a Z Item may not be intuitive at first. <i>Aren't Z Items supposed to be tangible things? Is this calling Missingno. a book, or group of people? Is Missingno. real? Should I be concerned?</i>

In this case, Missingno. is a Z Item because it exists outside the context of <cite>Pokémon</cite>'s fictional narrative. Missingno., in the context of being a usable generation 1 Pokémon, was not created intentionally by the authors; it is more like what would happen if an intentionally designed memory address suddenly collided with the environment outside the gameboy and was filled with garbage data such as atmospheric noise. Any ordinary Pokémon or RPG character can easily be conceptualized as a signifier: the word "Pidgeot" is assigned to a particular image of a bird, a particular pair of types, a particular stat block, and perhaps a particular narrative of life events as some particular individual appears within the <cite>Pokémon</cite> TV show. Missingno. is not like this. Inside some particular box we define as a Pokémon game there are hundreds of deliberately designed signifiers containing names, designs, and statistics, but Missingno exists mostly outside that box of signifiers as part of the raw substrate that runs and constructs the game. A computer chip is a Z Item. "Pidgey" is an S Item. A specific assembly algorithm is a Z Item. "Poké Ball" is an S Item. Missingno. is a Z Item. A deliberately-designed game event like Pokémon evolution (advancement) or a Pokémon evolution animation could be an S Item.