Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: April 2012
Have you heard about Twitch Plays Pokemon?
Twitch is a website that’s great at livestreams of all sorts. There’s also a chat box running along the side.
Well, someone hooked up the chat to the inputs for a game of Pokemon. Old school Pokemon, at that. I’m not sure if it’s Red or Blue version, but it’s the first generation of the series, with all its poor graphics, 8-bit style music, and absurdly poor game balance. In other words, one of the most beloved games out there.
And thousands of people are playing this game. At once. It is marvelous insanity. It can take minutes just to make one attack thanks to how many inputs are being fed into the system, all conflicting and jostling with each other. Not to mention the many people who want to see things go, shall we say, the amusing way.
The person running this thing had to create an “anarchy vs. democracy” system so they could get past certain areas of the game where walking in random directions all the time can make it impossible to solve the puzzle. Anarchy means all the inputs are put in, democracy the majority of all the inputs put in for a 20-second period. It works, sort of, but adds yet another type of madness as people fight to get their favorite.
And yet, with all this craziness, they have made it to the final set of battles, versus the toughest trainers in the game, the Elite Four and the Champion. It only took them 16 days of continuous play, too!
…Not that they’ve managed to beat them yet. Oh look, as I type this, they’ve lost another attempt. I wonder how many they have tried. More than 10, from what I can tell…
Time for another bout of wandering into corners and talking to people five times in a row. Maybe in 15 minutes they’ll manage to make it to the next room…
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this isn’t that they’ve gotten so far, but the culture and scientific data this is creating.
All the pokemon-friendly parts of the internet are full of memes about this thing, complete with its own pseudo-religion. PRAISE THE HELIX!!! *Ahem* This will probably affect the whole fandom for years to come just from that. It’s already spawned a massive amount of creativity, from videos to fanart to who knows what.
And I wonder how many social scientists are salivating at the results of this experiment. It’s a beautiful test of how humanity works together. Lots of missteps, lots of errors, but progress is still being made. And then there’s the way it infects your brain, draws you in, makes you want to think in random patterns and sit and watch for hours on end, perhaps even entering a few inputs yourself…
