One of the rules of the Internet is that there are no rules. This fact was most recently demonstrated by something called Twitch Plays Pokemon. [1] For those not familiar, Twitch.tv is a popular streaming platform that gamers use to broadcast their gameplay. One user decided to start streaming Pokemon Red, but with a twist: gameplay is determined by commands that other users type in the chat console. The result was 80,000 people trying to play Pokemon Red at the same time. And yes, most of them are trolls. The game became pure anarchy, to the point where it would take hours to perform a simple task. Then there is Twitch Plays Pokemon Plays Tetris, which takes the commands from Pokemon and uses them for Tetris instead, which obviously is even worse since the commands for Pokemon do not make sense in Tetris.
Twitch Plays Pokemon is simple. An emulator is running Pokemon Red on a computer. Meanwhile, a bot is monitoring the chat stream and applying the commands to the game. It all started about a week ago, and has escalated exponentially. Over time the original author has introduced new features. For example, if 75% of users vote for democracy, the game will enter democracy mode where game commands must be voted on before they are applied to the game. However, the Internet is hardly willing to let something like that happen, so as of the writing of this article the game is still in anarchy mode, where every command is applied immediately. The page has been viewed over 10 million times, with a peak of 81,000 users watching at any given time.
“I didn’t really have any plans for it from the beginning,” the creator of Twitch Plays Pokemon said in an email to gaming site Polygon. “I just wanted to put it up to see how people would respond. I put it together and put it up on a dedicated server all within a few days.” [2] The creator is from Australia, but has chosen to remain anonymous. The creator’s hope is that the game will eventually reach the Elite Four and win. However, the likelihood of that happening is very low. As Max Woolf, a software quality assurance engineer, noted, “the channel had failed to teach any Pokemon Cut for over 4 hours. The stream chat became a bloodbath of blame.” [3] Things only got worse from there. Cutting down a single tree took 4 hours, and in some cases there were multiple trees that needed to be cut. The worst scenario was on Route 9 toward Lavender Town, where there is a ledge that is only one tile wide. In other words, moving in the wrong direction even once forces the user to start over. It took the players 12 hours to maneuver the ledge. And even then success was only because of a strategy where users banded together and pressed buttons in sync with the lag on the channel.
After cutting down numerous trees, accidentally permanently releasing the trainer’s starter Pokemon, and constant fighting between democracy and anarchy, the stream is still running as of the writing of this column. In fact, as a meta-joke on the matter, another user created Twitch Plays Pokemon Plays Tetris. [4] This channel takes the commands from Pokemon and applies them to Tetris. Of course, the users in the Pokemon channel do not care about the Tetris game, so the input makes no sense. Nonetheless it shows how quickly this has spread. The Internet will probably get bored after a while and move on, but it is interesting to see these impromptu “multiplayer games” that cause chaos and anger all around.
[1] http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon
[2] http://www.polygon.com/2014/2/14/5411790/twitch-plays-pokemon-creator-interview-twitchplayspokemon
[3] http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/glory-to-the-helix/
[4] http://www.twitch.tv/xkeeper_
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