Twitch Plays Pokémon
Twitch Plays Pokémon, a social experiment on video game streaming site Twitch, has evolved into a society.
An anonymous Australian programmer launched the TPP stream Feb. 12, according to an interview published Feb. 16 on BADatVIDEOGAMES.net. The stream is a hacked version of Pokémon Red Version, the hit 1998 Game Boy title, which allows anyone with a Twitch account to input commands (left, right, up, down, “B,” “A,” select, start) via the stream’s chat window. A computer relays the commands to the game’s protagonist, Red, as quickly as players can type them in.
The creator is quoted in the interview: “I thought it would get a small but dedicated following with many other people showing a short passing interest.”
Instead, the viewing and playing audience ballooned to tens of thousands at any given time, peaking at about 120,000 on Feb. 18. As of one point Monday night, more than 603,000 players had submitted more than 9 million commands to the stream, and Red was spinning drunkenly around Cinnabar Island as players mashed the virtual buttons 13.92 times per second.
With no guiding authority and limited ability to communicate on the TPP page itself, players created forums and resources, including the subreddit r/twitchplayspokemon, to document the stream and attempt to coordinate their efforts.
“So far, it’s been really interesting to follow, if only because people are so superhyped about it,” said Alex Ryan, a fifth-year mechanical engineering major and founder of the UMD Pokémon League, who started watching TPP in the first few days after it launched. “I mean, if there were thousands of people playing it but no one really talking about it, then it would not be nearly as interesting as it is. That said, I feel like some of the mythology of it is getting a little out of hand.”
The players decided early on that the Helix Fossil — a preserved Omanyte — was their lord and savior, and “PRAISE HELIX” became a popular phrase to dump repeatedly into the chat. Players also created nicknames for the Pokémon in their party, mostly derived from the random strings of letters players collectively chose as the party members’ in-game monikers. (For example, AATTVVV is All Terrain Venomoth.)
The team members have personalities, too. The Pidgeot dubbed Bird Jesus is revered for keeping the party in a fight after players accidentally ditched two of their more powerful Pokémon, a Charmeleon called Abby and a Rattata named Jay Leno, on day four.
Recalling the loss of Abby and Jay Leno, who were accidentally released from the party via an in-game computer, Ryan said the crises involving team members have become historic events in the TPP community.
“People had come up with personas for those characters. … They were core members of the team, and then they got lost in a freak PC accident, which still, even saying that right now is funny,” he said. “That was a big deal early on, and people just still won’t stop talking about it. … Really just the major standout moments are when they screw up and basically accidentally kill off party members.”
The Pokémon sacrificed to the PC live on in the sketches and GIFs of the subreddit, as well as in a Google Site that includes a stream timeline, profiles of current and former party members and links to stat-tracking sites and a roadmap with objectives.
Sidney Carr, who studies computer science and mathematics at New Jersey Institute of Technology, works with a team to keep the Google Site up to date. He wrote in an email Friday that the document had seen more than 194,000 unique visitors since it went online shortly after the stream launched.
“I made the document because I realized that thousands of people in a mob needed one place where they could quickly get the up-to-date information that they needed to move forward,” Carr wrote. “It is unrealistic to expect that every player is always watching the stream, so when people come back to it, they need to know what has been accomplished, and what the current objective is. Moreover, I thought it would be a good place to give people access to other TPP-related resources. … Centralized information is a huge asset for any type of project.”
Jack Kersch, a sophomore electrical engineering major, said he has been using Carr’s Google Site to stay in the TPP loop.
“If I’m just sitting around doing work or watching TV, I’ll just have [the stream] open on the other side of the screen,” Kersch said. “The rest of the time it’s just like I either check the Google [Site] … or, like, a couple of times I’ve been bored in class and pulled it up on my phone.”
“I was watching when they first fought Giovanni. … I’d been waiting all day for it to happen, and then they finally got to it,” he said. “I got so excited — and then they used Dig right after they fought him, so then they had to go back in, and that took another two hours, and just, like, ‘I can’t believe we just did that.’”
The players accidentally used their Raticate, BigDig, to dig them away from objectives on several occasions.
“We used Dig a lot,” Kersch said. “I’m happy they finally moved the Raticate to a box so it can’t happen anymore.”
To give players a way to progress through technical puzzle sections, the creator instituted democracy and anarchy modes. Players can type “democracy” or “anarchy” into the chat box to vote for a mode; when democracy is in effect, the computer tallies up command inputs and executes the most popular option every 20 seconds. In anarchy, it follows every command.
“I see why people don’t like it when it switches to democracy, ’cause things just start to really slow down,” Ryan said. “A lot of people thought that [the creator] kind of ruined something about it, but I thought it was a fine mechanic to experiment with. … I mean, prior to that, they were stuck in the friggin’ Rocket maze … for literally, like, 24 hours. It was absurd.”
Despite heartbreaks and setbacks, Red had beaten six of the eight gym leaders as of Monday night. Ahead lay Blaine, Giovanni again, then Victory Road, and the Elite Four and Champion.
Kersch said he is hopeful players will eventually complete the game.
“There’s the potential for it to happen, but … just as easily something terrible could happen — they could just release all their high-level Pokémon; then there’s no point,” he said. “Either it’s going to keep increasing … in viewership and it’s going to do fine, or … people are going to get bored and it’s going to die off, and then the people who are still there are probably going to do a good job and it’ll finish.”
Ryan said he hopes the spirit of TPP will surface again after Red finishes his quest.
“In terms of the cultural experiment, it’s really fascinating. I don’t know if there’s ever gonna be something like this again,” he said. “This is like a new genre of, like, gaming experience.
“Pokémon was, like, the perfect game for this because … it’s very difficult to permanently screw up the game, so this was a good thing to kind of test it on. I don’t really know if this kind of thing is ever going be that big again unless they do it with something else equally interesting, but I think it was just kind of the right game at the right place at the right time.”
