Great Lessons About Secret Shenanigans: Twitchy

My roommate Wil introduced me to a new phenomena. On the surface, it seems to be a basic emulator of a classic game, Pokémon Red. But delve inside, and you find a story of civilizations of order and anarchy, betrayal, torture, and triumph. A hundred thousand souls fighting gladiatorial battle under the cruel gaze of the goddess called Chance.

Twitch.tv is a channel where, if you're tired of playing video games yourself, you can watch other people play video games in real time. They play and sometimes talk while they play, and you watch them play and sometimes write a comment in the side chat bar.

I know. I'd put it beneath "sorting uno cards by closest prime number" on my to-do list as well.

But somebody got innovative, and Python'd up our beloved Pokémon Red so that the chat window is routed directly to the game's controls. I type "left" in the chat window, Red takes a step to the left. Problem is, if any one of the several thousand people also watching this game type "right" he takes a step to the right.

So what was once the story of a spunky up-and-coming Pokemon master becomes the tale of a child possessed by a hundred thousand souls all desperately clawing for control over his mind and body. This is Twitch Plays Pokémon.

Sounds fun!

When I looked up this stat, TPP had:

120,000 Simultaneous participants.

19 million unique views.

Although the emulator mimics the game perfectly, the opensource control mechanics transform the game into something wildly different. There are only a few controls (D-Pad, A, B, Start, Select) but since there are thousands and thousands of people entering them simultaneously, our little protagonist Red looks like a seizure ward's annual disco ball and strobe light festival. He goes up, down, start menu, tries to use an unusable item, tries to use an unusable item , tries to use an unusable item, goes left, goes down, goes right, ad infinitum.

Every command entered is streamed in a queue into the emulator. The number of commands and a 40 second delay before your typed command hits the screen makes trying to consciously control Red comparable to trying to type an article by throwing paper airplanes at a keyboard in 30 mile an hour winds. But if you have enough paper airplanes… Indeed, perhaps the most common metaphor applied to Twitch Plays Pokémon is the infinite Shakespeare monkeys and their literary designs.

It's interesting to see the difficulty of various tasks be inverted. Finding the time to level up your Pokemon becomes irrelevant when there are thousands of people playing, literally 24/7. Conversely, incredibly trivial tasks became insanely difficult obstacles. With the chaos of inputs, just getting Red to go in the right direction was difficult. If the right direction includes more than one turn or a path along a ledge, insanely difficult becomes nigh-impossible. For example, in front of one gym right above a ledge, TPP spent 24 consecutive hours trying to walk into a building.

They spent so much time accidentally jumping down ledges that they had just spent 6 hours climbing up, that some began to wonder if Red had found a new life purpose. As one fan wrote in a parody letter to Prof Oak:

“Dear Oak, Its been 3 days since i started this journey. And you know what? Screw becoming a pokemon master. I am going to be ledge jumping master. I been training 8 hour a day. send my love to mom. signed Red Ledge jumper.”

To counteract the randomness, the amassed thousands organized themselves. They made websites with strawpolls about major decisions, made a google-doc[1] to announce the current goal and record their stats, outlining plans for navigating the complex challenges of walking, fighting battles, and catching pokemon[2]. They even made their own subreddit. The spontaneous order had a surprising effect on the game.

Not only did they make significant-- and frankly astounding-- progress, the quirks and oddities of the game took on a life of their own in the memes of the fan pages. Their starter, a charmeleon named "ABBBBBBK (" they affectionately nicknamed "Abby" while a rattata named "JLVWNNOOOO" was dubbed "Jay Leno". The start menu opened and closed constantly, and one random item, the Helix Fossil, was checked so much that players decided Red must be consulting the Helix for guidance. Soon they were convinced that Red was on a quest to resurrect the fossilized god Helix, and to triumph over the evil dark Dome fossil.

But this being the internet, not everyone wanted Red to progress. On top of the randomness element, TPP had to fight against trolls who would willingly sabotage any current goal. So if Red had to walk along a long edge for 10 or 15 steps, all it took was for one troll to manage a "down" command, and a hundred thousand people would scream in agony as they watched Red jump a ledge and destroy hours of effort. To a troll, enraging an audience of thousands on a livestream game with a single button input is the scent of sweet lamb's blood on the morning breeze. Some people just want to watch the world burn.

But as bad as the trolls were, the pure randomness was worse. At the PC, the players accidentally released Abby, their starter pokemon, and Jay Leno, never to return (releasing your starter pokemon is something you should never EVER do). This past Sunday was named "Bloody Sunday" when they accidentally released 12 pokemon, several of them high-leveled.

At one point, they had reached a section of the game where they could not progress without precision movement, and the designer introduced a new mechanic "Democracy", where the responses would be summed up every 10 seconds or so, and the most popular would be followed. Many players rebelled at this mid-game change, interfering with the goal or typing "start9" which would open the start menu nine times in a row.

So the designer tweaked the game again, allowing players to type in the chat to vote for "anarchy" (the original setup) or "democracy". When there was a 75% majority of one, it switched the control method.

As time went on, the mythos and politics became more complicated, and the stakes higher. Anarchists fought to uphold the purity of their traditional gameplay, and reviled against the new democracy, calling it "Dome-ocracy" (i.e. pertaining to the evil Dome fossil). Democracists maintained that slow and steady was necessary for sections requiring delicate control. But it was so slow and a good deal more boring.

Factions divided by Anarchy/Democracy or different paths and game choices got pretty riled up at times. Epics of governments and rebellion, religion and destiny were enacted in the following of the Helix fossil. Here is one of my favorites: the story false prophet Eevee, as told by a player:

In order to progress we needed a Pokémon that can learn surf. We had 5 of our 6 Pokémon slots full, so if we bought, caught, or obtained a Pokémon, it would go into that sixth slot. Eevee if evolved into Vaporeon works. Or we could be given Lapras which works. Or they could catch a Pokémon which is super hard to coordinate with 70k users. If eevee evolved into a non surf learning pokemon, we'd have to go to the pokemon PC to get a surf pokemon out of storage. We picked Eevee, evolved it into the flareon, tried to go to the box, and released two of our pokemon, including a starter, and deposited the helix fossil, which is being revered as a sort of God. If we didn't go with Eevee, we may still have our two released pokemon and our God. Instead, the false prophet killed them.

Pasted from <http://cheezburger.com/196869>