As my first game for Gameboy, and the only one I played with such devotion and intensity, Pokemon Red Version evokes a sense of nostalgia for me- and 15 million others, apparently. That’s the number of views Twitch Plays Pokemon has, a quickly growing social experiment of sorts in which the livestream allows anyone who wants to participate to submit commands, with nearly 80,000 active players at times.
Here’s how it works- the actions of Red, the main character, are programmed so that the subscribers can type input controls in a live chat feed, such as “a,” “b,” “up,” “Select,” etc. There is no queue for commands, so as soon as one action is completed, the next command submitted at that moment is then implemented, skipping over all the commands that were typed while the previous action was taking place.
This reduces the outrageous lag that would inevitably accrue if the commands people typed for one moment were not implemented until many actions later. Fighting 80,000 other people for control over the character is frustrating enough, and would be infinitely worse if Red was stuck walking into a wall for hours because hundreds of people typed “down” at once. However, this does not eliminate some unfortunate byproducts of chaotic commands like the naming of the Pokemon, where Red’s poor Bellsprout is named ‘x(araggbaj’:
…Or the unintentional but devastating release of valuable Pokemon like Hitmonlee only moments after obtaining it:
(Earlier in the game, players released a Ratata named ‘JLVWNNOOOO’ that they affectionately nicknamed Jay Leno as well as a Charmeleon named ‘ABBBBBBK (,’ otherwise known as Abby, within seconds of each other.)
If you’re wondering what all that “anarchy” and “democracy” nonsense filling up the feed is all about, as an experimental twist, there are two modes of play in this game. Anarchy is the classic input mode described above, whereas democracy’s more sophisticated input mode requires a vote before implementing a command and allows for sequencing of inputs (as in two action inputs in a row). In order to switch between the modes, people must vote for the mode of play by typing it as an input, resulting in this spamming civil war interspersed between commands.
An interesting variation of this Pokemon livestream is the Random Number Generator (RNG) version, where all the actions are randomized. If you thought Twitch Plays Pokemon was going to take forever to win, even at 100 inputs per second, the RNG Plays Pokemon livestream will certainly take an eternity. Another parody comes as Twitch Plays Pokemon Plays Tetris, where all the inputs from the original stream are implemented in a dysfunctional game of Tetris. It’s hard to imagine they’ve cleared very many rows since they’ve started, especially because the pieces also follow the “up” command.
It will be interesting to see the evolution (no pun intended) of the community of players collectively, if the overall coordination of commands will become cohesive enough to eventually allow Red to advance to defeat the ‘Elite Four’ or if Red is doomed to pace aimlessly back and forth for eternity.
If watching this play out is a bit too frustrating, here is another cooperative online activity that is a little less stressful
