TwitchPlaysPokemon

[BRickAstley]

Has anyone else been following this wonderful insanity?

For those unaware: http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon

Basically, for almost 7 days straight now, this stream has been running, where an emulator running Pokemon Red is hooked up to a program that reads button commands in from twitch chat, and executes those commands in game, letting anyone and everyone watching to play this game together. This started as a small affair and quickly grew viral with up to 100k people on the stream at once and a also fast growing subreddit coming up too. At this point the endeavor has reached legend status, and has brought out people making up convoluted lore to the story, as well as large discussions about government kinda. (People can vote for the game to either be controlled via Anarchy: every button press counts, or by democracy: all commands over 30 seconds are tallied up and then the most voted on one is executed).

I've not participated but I'm watching all of this develop with fascination. I mean, they're halfway through the game even though they've thrown away itens and released pokemon and spend 20 hours trying to cut down one bush.

[dtay]

Not that closely, but I've been observing from afar. Praise be to Helix!

[Bobchillingworth]

It's interesting, although I haven't been following it very closely. I think a lot of the people who are trying to compel the game to move forward via sensible moves are missing the point. Nobody cares about Pokemon being completed- everybody and their cousins have beaten the games. Even a cooperative experience where people vote for party members has already been done in a dozen Lets Play threads. The real appeal is people just entering random nonsense and seeing if anything sensible can serendipitously unfold.


Also the mind-bendingly stupid political discussion about Anarchy vs. Democracy makes me want to punch all of Reddit and Tumblr in their collective gawping idiot faces. Although I've wanted to do that for a long time anyway :P

[BRickAstley]

FWIW I would prefer it to stay in Anarchy as well.

[Jowy]

It was fun until the memes and voting

[Ichabod]

and spend 20 hours trying to cut down one bush.

I think the first time I watched the stream was when they managed to cut the bush. It happened in like 2 minutes, so I guess I gave the game some luck.

[DaveV]

On my drive home, I heard a piece on NPR about this stream. My son says that Twitch had to spin off a separate server to handle the traffic.

[antisocialmunky]

[NobleHelium]

Okay, that's funny for like one minute but there are really too many people for it to be that interesting. It'd be more interesting with fewer people, or say five bots programmed to give random commands to the playing bot. Or five bots programmed with their own agendas giving commands to the playing bot.

[scooter]

Perfect: http://xkcd.com/1333/