A Million Monkeys

We interrupt current conversations on future selves for a short riff on something a bit more topical. Right now, and for nearly seven days, Twitch.tv has been playing Pokemon. This isn’t abnormal, Twitch hosts streams of all kinds of games hosted by people from all over the world, but TwitchPlaysPokemon is a little different. Instead of watching the game, the audience is playing it. A script parses commands from the chat and enters them into the game. The result is that just about eighty thousand people are playing the same game of Pokemon, frantically hammering a controller made of computer code and rageohol. It’s a giant coordination problem, and one that thousands of gamers are slowly solving.

Dealing with the delay

There’s a thirty to forty second delay on commands, and thousands of people entering them at the same time. It isn’t a speed run, it’s more amazing that they manage to get anything done at all. They spent almost a day trapped in Lavender town, and have developed some kind of religion around their Pidgeot and the helix fossil in their inventory in the process, but eventually the right commands make it through, and they progress forward. There’s no real way to deal with the delay, I think. It cannot be solved, merely endured. But people keep it up, hoping their command is the one that arrives at the right time.

Democracy vs. Anarchy

There’s a solution, though. If enough people vote “Democracy”, the mode changes so it polls periodically, and counts queued actions like votes, so the group can reach a consensus on what to do. Otherwise, they get the delay that is Anarchy. To my knowledge, the stream has never been a democracy. Anarchy reigns supreme over there, with chat commands being entered will-nilly. It hasn’t been demonstrated that democracy is strictly better than anarchy in the game, but enough people are willing to vote for anarchy that it might never be shown.

The horror of trolls

What anarchy really brings out is trolling. There are tons of people determined to just mess around, to the point where the twitchplayspokemon subreddit has a drinking game based around it. At any given point, some of the many thousands of players are determined to set back play as best they can. The delay impacts them too, so it’s hard to attribute malice to all of it, but there’s definitely malice involved. I can tell from the cackling in chat, and the consistent trollery.

They are making progress

But despite all this, they’ve managed to get four gym badges, raise some pretty successful pokemon, and generally have a good time doing it. There’s a weird community there now when there wasn’t before, and that community is continuing to progress in the game. It’s madness, no doubt, but it’s also a huge group of people simultaneously creating and solving a giant coordination problem. And they’re getting it done. It’s taking time, but bit by bit it goes on. There’s something heartening in that, I think.

If you want to play, or just get a taste of the madness, head over to twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon. It’s a thing.