Video recordings of a variety of wild Pokemon encounters were collected and timestamped. The recordings are made in ten-minute chunks, with and without applying Razz Berries (it made no difference).

We were interested in the lengths of breaks taken by Pokemon between attack or jump animations (pause length), and whether this pause length distribution varied from Pokemon to Pokemon. By studying the video recordings taken, we were also able to confirm that all Pokemon have 2-second attack animation. Jump animation length varies but matches the "jump_time_s" variable found in game master data sheet, with several exceptions:

jump_time_s are undefined for Caterpie, Kakuna, Diglett, and Dugtrio. Their jump animations are 1 second long.

jump_time_s is 3 for Jigglypuff, but measured at 2 seconds long.

This graph shows what pause lengths were observed across all samples:

After collecting a large enough sample, it's immediately apparent from the above graph that pause length is a variable that follows the geometric distribution.

The red line charted with our samples is an ideal geometric distribution of p =0.2 at 0.77 second intervals. We checked that distribution against our sample with a chi-square test. The chi-squared value is 7.92 with a p value of 0.63665, which is good evidence that we're on the right track.

A geometric distribution is the type of outcome from counting heads in a coin flip until you hit tails. For an unbiased coin, you'll count 1 head 50% of the time, 2 heads 25 % of the time, and so forth. Instead of heads or tails, our sample outcomes are idle or not idle, weighted 80% towards idle. As such, we see a distribution of 20% not idling after 0.77 second, 16% after 1.54 seconds, and so forth.