As a kid I would hide under the covers as a child playing Pokemon Red on my Gameboy. Gaming was occasionally social but mostly solitary. Almost two decades later, I’m returning to Pokemon with 84,000 other people.
Twitch Plays Pokemon is a collaborative gaming “social experiment” on Twitch.tv, a streaming video platform. Viewers gives commands to control a single character in order to capture Pokemon and acquire badges. Created on Feburary 13th, 2014, the peaked at over 100,000 concurrent viewers and has ten million total views.
The Twitch Plays Pokemon Feed. Note that the right-hand chat moves at an incomprehensible velocity, though some players have developed a way to filter commands to see strategic comments. (http://www.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon/comments/1y2if6/remove_commands_from_chat_even_more_improved/).
The anonymous Australian creator shared in an interview the technical details behind the experiment. Pokemon Red (151 ROMhack version) is mounted on the VisualBoyAdvance emulator. An IRC bot lists to button commands on the stream’s chat, which are then input into the emulator and shown on the stream’s overlay.
This mixture of javascript and python code allows us to address the question: how does collaboration scale? The flurry of commands on the right translates into game input depending on the voting mode, which itself is determined by votes. In anarchy mode, all commands are input at a rate of about one per second. In democracy mode, the most popular command is input every few seconds.
I’ve given it a shot, but what started as a minute of nostalgia gave way to an hour of frustratingly walking around the same plaza. In sixty minutes, we moved about ten steps and transitioned from anarchy to democracy to anarchy. Time-lapse clips document other stretches of time making no progress.
So why are tens of thousands of people playing? The friend introducing me to Twitch Plays Pokemon stated his motivations: “I thought this was an simple but powerful concept. Definitely a good way to spend a couple of minutes.” When asked about his expectations for the outcome of the experiment, he replied “It will be painful, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they beat the game.”
Miraculously, the community has progressed through the game. A Google Document recording current progress shows that the community has achieved four of eight badges and trained a decent set of Pokemon. An article on gaming blog Kotaku illustrates some strategies that players have developed to progress and counteract trolls, players that are intentionally counter-productive.
These efforts are documented and cultivated largely by an large community on Reddit that acts both Greek chorus and Roman senate. An active Twitter feed also comments on the current state of the game. Commentary on amusing frustrations and achievements have turned even into memes.
What started as a small dedicated gathering turned into a large community sharing strategies, frustrations, and experiences. The experiment may not answer questions outright, but forces users to consider the merit of consensus-based rule and the role of trolls. And whether the experiment will triumph or fizzle out, we’ll test mathematician Émile Borel’s remark: “With an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters, one will type Shakespeare’s plays.”
