Twitch Plays Pokémon: Alive and Kicking

Remember that thing that everyone cared about for one week in February? To a future historian it’ll look like a weird mind virus infected everyone for exactly a week and then disappeared. Let’s talk about it again!

If you missed it, in February a programmer created a channel on Twitch (a game streaming site) called Twitch Plays Pokémon to play Pokémon Red, the first Pokémon game.

The twist? It wasn’t the streamer playing the game, it was Twitch. There’s a chatbox by the stream where people can discuss it live. The streamer (identity still unknown) had the simple idea of writing code to make the game follow the chat’s commands. Along with regular chatting, stream viewers could type “up, down, left, right” to move the character in the cardinal directions and “a, b, start” to interact with things.

The result was a stream where (at its peak) hundreds of thousands of people were playing one single-player game. The protagonist, Red, turned into a schizophrenic lunatic. He walked in totally random directions. He’d check the menu every 20 seconds. He’d discard useful items. He’d make terrible decisions. It was hilarious.

For about a week, it went viral. Everyone was talking about it – it even made BBC news! People called it a ‘social experiment’ – could this many people cooperate in such an absurd, ad-hoc way? Thousands of people wanted to say where Red should go. Millions more just wanted to watch the chaos.

When a new game comes out, it’s a talking point for everyone who plays it. When this began, everyone was talking about the same game. We all grew attached to aaabaaajss the Pidgeot and ABBBBBBK the Charmeleon. (The game lets you nickname your Pokémon. The cursor starts on A. You get the idea.) They were our Pokémon. We were all watching the same character get stuck in the same place.

And of course there were the memes, most prominently the fossil. At one point the only item Red had was the Helix Fossil, a semi-useless item you can’t discard. Incessant spamming meant that Red would check his bag once a minute and try to use the fossil, leading many to joke that he was ‘consulting’ it. The fossil took on mythic status overnight. Within days it had formed a pseudo-religion. The chat was filled with demands that we consult our lord and saviour the Helix as much as possible. When the players miraculously used the fossil for its intended purpose, ‘reviving’ it into the Pokémon Omanyte, it immediately became a deity, Lord Helix.

And then, amazingly, they won. After 16 days of stumbling around caves/buildings and releasing (effectively killing) most of their critters, they beat the main game story. The stream shut down for a while and then restarted with minigames, but promising to return soon with Pokémon Crystal, the sequel to Red.

And then people left. Clearly a lot of viewers were just there for the novelty – just to see if it could be done. Once vindicated, they saw no reason to go on. Others were there to troll and derail the playthrough (was winning really the ‘point’ of the stream, though?), and got bored. You were probably one of these people. But I wasn’t. I’m still watching. That’s right – it’s still going.

The Crystal playthrough happened, beating a much longer game in a slightly shorter time thanks to the reduced trolling. Then a brief break, then the next game in the series, Emerald. Then Fire Red, then Platinum, Heart Gold, Black, Black 2, and finally a game only a year old, Pokémon X.

With every game viewership dwindled. By Platinum they were averaging under 1,000 viewers at a time (so still tens of thousands a day – the stream runs 24/7). The memes dried up.

Despite constant new events and stories, with fewer people watching there simply weren’t as many people making memes. It got to the point where chat was slow enough for ‘chat leaders’ to emerge – people who knew what to instruct the rest of the players to do to progress more quickly, whose messages could be read amidst the cacophony. The only people left were people playing to ‘win’, and so by Pokémon X the game was finished in six days.

By then a great community had emerged. People communicated over Skype, posted plans on the Subreddit, and even talked about their work day in chat. The people who stuck with the stream had become friends, united by their desire to collectively move a single game character from point A to a really far away point B.

Twitch Plays Pokémon is like the Pokémon phenomenon on a shorter timescale. Both started off massive, with global media attention and cultural awareness, and both gradually fell in influence, leaving behind a core of dedicated fans who want to do it again and again. Clearly part of the appeal of TPP was nostalgia – people remembered playing Red as a kid. Not as many people remembered Platinum, or Black 2 (which is only two years old), and so in that respect this situation was inevitable, but I’d argue not a bad thing.

What’s next for TPP? Currently they’re playing Pokémon Stadium, which has no narrative and can be played indefinitely. There’s a few hundred viewers at any given time. It’s been like that since August – beating all the games took 6 months, roughly. There’s a new Pokémon game, Omega Ruby, coming out this month, and they intend to play that ASAP, and the streamer has promised various other Pokémon games and gimmicks afterwards. In other words, the future looks bright for the TPP community, and in the streamer’s words:

“I like to think of it as seasons, this (and the upcoming Omega Ruby run) has been the 2014 season of TPP. There will be a 2015 season too, usually the second season is the best one, right?”