Twitch Plays Pokemon

So, the night before I beat the Sinnoh Pokemon League I was informed of an interesting experiment on the streaming gaming website, Twitch. There's a channel called Twitch Plays Pokemon, in which all the people chatting on the channel are in charge of the action in the game, a rom of Pokemon Red. People put in a button press (up, down, left, right, A, B, Start) and a IRC bot logs the commands and inputs them into the rom to play the game.

The link for the stream is here: http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon As of this post, the stream has an average of 80,000 people watching, with around 10% inputting commands.

I find it interesting as a concept, with thousands of people trying to guide this one trainer to success, and hundreds of others trying to guide the trainer to utter failure by trolling. This is a real-world example of the Infinite Monkey Theorem, which states one monkey at a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will end up writing Shakespeare. The idea in this endeavor is that thousands of people putting in commands can eventually beat Pokemon Red.

As of this post, the stream has earned 4 Gym Badges, built up a team of semi-varied Pokemon that are mostly under-leveled except for Pidgeot, accidentally released two Pokemon including the Charmeleon starter, intentionally released a Flareon, and have spent over 7 whole days getting where they are now. There's also a new system in place where people now have one of two ways to control the game by voting for either Anarchy (everyone enters commands) or Democracy (most-input command controls the Trainer) on top of inputting commands. Whichever has 75% of the vote is what runs the rom, and it's normally Anarchy unless there's a tough part in which people prefer Democracy.

There's no way something like this could have been done in any genre other than a JRPG like Pokemon, and even then I almost think Pokemon is almost too complex compared to other games of that genre because of things like HMs required for movement and Type strengths/weaknesses in battle. Having said all that, perhaps Pokemon Red was the perfect choice, being a JRPG with only one Pokemon out to battle at a time, whereas standard JRPGs have 3-on-3 battles.

With so many people doing so many things, several memes have already popped up. One of the biggest memes has been the Helix Fossil (used to revive Omanyte) being regularly consulted for advice on how to continue. Players often (accidentally) go to the Items menu and because the Fossil is right near the top the lag causes them to keep trying to "use" it, and they've decided that it is like a god.

Another meme is that Eevee is a false prophet, because it caused the Twitch community to accidentally release those two Pokemon when they tried to put the Eevee into the PC. The thing about Eevee is that the community became galvanized by it, half wanting to evolve it into Vaporeon to learn Surf later, and the other half wanting to evolve it into Jolteon for a wider Type spread, and of course a small portion that didn't want to deal with it at all.

The one bad thing about the TPP streaming is that it's something that you can only watch for a short while before it just gets frustrating. Granted, they're slowly making progress, but at the end of the day you're watching this poor Trainer just twitching about like he's suffering a constant seizure while everyone tries to get him to the next objective.

It's an interesting experiment, but at the end of the day it's not something I'd want to watch except to take occasional glimpses into the cage of monkeys all banging at the one PC between them.