Between the ages of 5 and 10, I spent many solitary weekends at my grandparents’ house reading middle grade books and playing Pokémon on my Game Boy. The fact that I read one and played the other was unimportant; I was captivated by both in the same way — by how detailed they were, by how even the most trivial bits of information could prove meaningful in the context of their respective narratives. I spent an unjustifiable amount of time not only playing games like Pokémon, but also scouring them for secrets that may or may not have existed. The kinds of rumors that surrounded such games are instantly recognized by most millennials: “You can catch a Mew” — a particularly coveted and elusive Pokémon — “if you can get to the truck next to the S.S. Anne”; “There’s a secret stash of Pokémon behind Bill’s house.”

Most of these rumors were at their apex when dial-up was the norm and YouTube didn’t yet exist — there were no 34-year-old man-children making hundreds of thousands of dollars off video game walk-throughs. I was 5 when Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue came out, too young to know the difference between bogus and legitimate sources of information, and too young to use the internet. Even when I was old enough to wait 15 minutes for AOL to boot up, I was more likely to stumble on a forum of adolescents swearing by the existence of some hidden magical portal in the game than to find reliable intelligence.

In later versions of Pokémon, developers started indulging the rumors by planting items that corresponded to the rampant speculation online. These hidden items were referred to as Easter eggs. Some Easter eggs helped players advance in the game; some provided insight into the story line or clarified loose plot points; some seemed to have no purpose other than enabling players to boast about having found them.

Because even the most nondescript Easter egg could end up enhancing the gaming experience in some way, players were obliged to take them seriously. That random vase in the middle of your character’s path, or the old man incoherently babbling about a cave outside town: These are what Italo Calvino called, in a literary context, “magic” objects. “The moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships,” Calvino wrote in “Quickness,” one of a series of lectures on literature he was working on at the time of his death. “The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit, but it is always there. We might even say that in a narrative, any object is always magic.”