The Olympics ended Sunday. That means that the moments of triumph shared by entire countries are put on hold for two more years (or until the summer if you are a huge World Cup Soccer fan like I am).
But for those nerdy enough, there has been no need to despair, for another gaming event is uniting thousands from around the world.
I’m talking, of course, about Twitch Plays Pokémon.
For those who haven’t experienced the madness, Twitch Plays Pokémon is perhaps one of the unique forms of online gaming ever invented. A user of gameplay streaming site Twitch enabled a ROM of Pokémon Red/Blue to be controlled by people typing into the conversation box at the side of the screen. You type up, down, left, right, a, b, or start, and lo, little player Red does exactly what you tell him.
(Not to be confused with my boyfriend, also called Red, though he is also a very good listener)
The biggest hitch is that as you are typing commands to little Red, so are thousands of other Internet users from around the world. With that many hands in the pot (and a bit of technological delays), the game is exponentially slower than an average game of Pokémon, but way more befuddling and absolutely enchanting to watch.
It begs the question: Can it be done?
I found out about TPP a little bit late into the game, after almost five days of play, somewhere after the tree but before beating Giovanni and right around the introduction of democracy. But by that time, something magical had already started. There was a community. There were memes. It was like cracking open a beehive and finding it abuzz with activity.
Except not really. Because why would you crack open a bee hive?
Anyway, since day four when I boldly ventured onto Twitch, I have been OBSESSED with TPP. And I am far from alone, with the numbers hovering on average between 80,000 and 60,000 viewers on the site.
On the page for TPP, the creator claims:
It was created as an experiment to test the viability of this format, the way people interact with the input system and the way they interact socially with each other.
Upon becoming enamored with the site, I tweeted:
#twitchplayspokemon is the most important social experiment of our time.
— @zozoembie February 19, 2014
And the Twitch Plays Pokémon fan twitter retweeted me. And I felt special.
But after reflecting on what I said in that tweet, in that moment, I realized that I really believe that this experiment is important for defining the character of the internet. I will talk about the Internet and all its silly goings-on a lot on this blog, because that mass, amorphous blob of people and code and wires has accomplished a lot in my lifetime. It has redefined our discourse and how we think in so many ways. But there has rarely been a testing ground for defining what makes the Internet, how do we define the culture of the Internet, and how that relates to human nature overall.
So here are some of my observations from Twitch Plays Pokémon:
Pokémon brings us together.
I feel like it is a sign of my generation that even though most of us are in college, working, or leading regular adult lives, we’re all okay with the nerdy nostalgia brought by Pokémon, and it is not a sign of immaturity to be interested and even passionate about the game.
from Kate Tiedrich
The fact that there were 36,269,711 total viewers for this is astounding. I’m willing to bet most of those people didn’t know about game streaming site Twitch before all this started (and I can’t blame them; if (boyfriend) Red and his friends didn’t play League of Legends a lot last year, I probably wouldn’t have). But this one game experiment brought over 30 million people online. I think that’s pretty significant.
Anarchy can succeed.
I was really skeptical of this experiment at first. I really was expecting it to take months, if it ever got done at all. But lo, I’d tune in for a bit every afternoon and view progress. The hive mind would, in an astonishing act of cooperation, be leading the little Pokémon trainer Red back one town to acquire something that as a 7-year-old playing this game I had struggled to understand.
With all those hands in the pot, you gotta figure at least some of them will have true directional sense: beyond just going through that damn door on your left, if 1,000 of the 80,000 playing know which town to go to next, despite all odds, technological lags, and glitches, you can still get there. It just might take some time and a bit of luck.
…But people will inevitably demand democracy.
The democracy feature was added soon after I joined in the crowd. Though many people, from the regular players to event the Twitch moderators, were firmly against democracy mode, it did allow for some real progress (like getting out of the maze).
Its biggest flaw was that it was just too slow. It took a while for commands to be compiled and executed. It also kinda ruffled some feathers, because it took away from the randomness of the experiment; as (boyfriend) Red argued, this just meant the game was lots of people playing the game slowly, rather than a test of pulling order out of chaos, like it was meant to be, but we will revisit this idea at the end.
Still, the people wanted to democracy, and though it was harder to activate, democracy was used several important times. democracy mode came in handy for not only making this a social experiment about the human condition, but also the ability for thousands of anonymous people to work together to succeed on a given project.
Anarchy: Getting nowhere fast.
Democracy: Getting somewhere verrrrryyyy slowlllllyyyyy.
There will always be trolls.
And succeed, they did, in the face of people actively working to sabotage their efforts. However, it’s hard to call people trolls, since it is damn near impossible to pin any specific blame on one individual for acting out of malice. Because of the time delays, it took a long time for things to work, and a stay button push that was well-intentioned in previous seconds might be destructive now.
But then there are those idiots who pressed “Start.” No one needed to press “start” more than a few times in the game. That resulted in the dropping of several objects, not to mentioned the release of several Pokémon. My Red once told me that several of the loudest anti-democracy protestors once even banded together to use democracy to tear down the progress by release Zapdos from its box on the PC. And don’t even get me started on “Bloody Sunday.”
We’ll visit the impact of trolls upon the overall gameplay in a sec.
Memes can come from anything.
OH MY GOD THE MEMES. There are many memes, as is to be expected from an event with a community of so many people. Beyond the simple naming of the caught Pokémon, through the use of social media and forums like reddit and the specific r/Twitchplayspokemon subreddit, the memes spread like crazy. Everything became meme-fodder. If you don’t believe me, head over to the site. I could make a whole post on just the memes from this event.
And man, can they get annoying.
But there are some seriously talented fans who made moving pieces of fan art that bordered on fan fiction as they tried to make sense of the noisy, chaotic game universe.
The Internet: Capable of so much good, so much harm, and so much annoying.
People make their own gods.
There is a debate whether God makes man, or man makes god.
In TPP, man made god. And it is known far and wide on the Internet.
And it is good.
The loudest, most aggressive meme of the game is that of the Lord Helix. Because of the command input, in the middle of battles Red would try to use the Helix fossil during battle. People saw this, and yea, it was good. It look’st as if Red were consulting the Fossil for advice. And the people saw this. And believed. Amen.
It’s an annoying meme, but it’s funny to see how people adopted the religious imagery in the game. For the past two weeks, it’s been damn near impossible for me to go on Facebook without seeing people thanking or praising Helix. But it’s funny how in the midst of a game that favors Anarchy, they also seek out a pseudo-religion. Heck, I could write another ANOTHER post on the theological allusions in the game and the way in which religion was drawn as a basis for the game culture. Helix God. Bird Jesus. False Prophet. Heresy. It’s all there.
And it’s more than slightly insane.
It can be done.
After over 16 days, and almost 8 hours, it is done. The Internet has succeeded. Victory. The monkeys have typed the complete works of Shakespeare. But was it really as random at that?
At least less random than this naming schema?
The answer is no, surprisingly. The game is a valid social experiment because there were a few interesting controls at play.
The first was TwitchplaysPokemonBlue. Because it was slightly less popular, this game made progress rapidly. There were fewer trolls, but fewer commands in general. While TPP was in the Elite Four, TPPB had moved onto a different Pokémon game entirely, with only a few hundred people tuning in. Though (boyfriend) Red argued that TPPB was nowhere near as interesting as TPP because it was so straight-forward, I argued that this experiment is a good background for TPP; given its different circumstances, it showed that the fundamental idea of cooperative Pokémon gameplay is possible.
The other was RNGplaysPokemon. This was a Random Number Generator inputing controls and following a similar format as TPP. It inputs controls faster than TPP, but the only times I saw it, it was stuck in a corner. Probably not uncommon, but it shows how difficult it is to make progress when you have the proverbial monkeys on the keyboards. The fact that TPP progressed in the plot and the RNG didn’t shows that, while it was less successful than the Pokémon Blue version, given the sheer mass of people it drew (the major variable) it was still a success as a functioning game.
Last night while playing card games with my friends, we had TPP up on my laptop to watch while we played. Little player Red was stuck right outside the door to the Elite Four. We all turned away from our game to watch and see if Red would get another chance to fight. We were totally transfixed. We started shouting at the screen, “Come on…come on!”
And then he did it. He went through the door. And we cheered like our team had scored a touchdown.
For better, for worse, this experiment has united the nerdy hoards together like our special Olympics through the power of the vast network we call the Internet. It’s like a less abusive Truman Show; something we all watch, engage with, talk about, and become invested in. We loved the teams we formed. We named the Pokémon we as a collective caught. They were our pets. This is our accomplishment. We did it.
Thank you Internet. Thanks for the past few weeks with TPP.
I’ll see you again when TPP: Gold starts tomorrow.
One final note:
Dammit, Australia.
While Americans slept, the real work was done.
The Elite Four was defeated with only about 34,000 viewers.
Those players across the globe are amazingly efficient and really get stuff done while the Westerners are asleep.
Does this mean that the trolls are mostly of the Americas?
Damn you, Australian players! I wanted to be up to see this end!
Idiot Nerd Girl 