Twitch Plays Pokemon

Twitch Plays Pokemon was lauched February 13, 2014 on Twitch by an anonymous Australian programmer who wanted to conduct a crowdsourced social experiment. The stream feeds Nintendo's 1996 role-playing video game Pokemon Red through its server and allows viewers to enter commands into the chat box to control the game. Any viewer is allowed to enter commands into the public chat such as "A," "B," "Start," "Up," "Down," "Left," and "Right." Within five days of launching, the stream had gone viral. At its peak, the stream reached over 120,000 viewers. 

 

The server was originally built to execute as many commands as possible, but with tens of thousands of players implementing commands, it often became a mass of confusion and it was difficult for the players to make progress in the game at all. Red, the protagonist of the game, was commanded both accidentally and by people messing with the game, to walk into walls repeatedly, save the game without any changes multiple times in a row, continuously listen to the cry of Bulbasaur in the Pokedex, and enter and reenter the same house over and over. At one point, players were stuck for 24 hours in Team Rocket's Hideout, a puzzle-like area in the game where the player walked through spinner that could take them in any direction. It was at this point that the "Democracy" and "Anarchy" modes were added to the game to encourage progress in the game. When viewers entered either command into the chatbox, the game would enter the mode with the prevailing votes. During Anarchy, the server continued with the original method of executing as many commands as possible. To combat this, Democracy mode tallied and implemented the most popular command. Surprisingly, however, Democracy mode was rarely utilized unless it was necessary as players found this mode to be less exciting and mundane. Anarchy was preferred as a more exciting and entertaining game play.