Twitch Plays Pokemon
Thousands of people online have helped play a single game of Pokemon for seven days straight!
For the last seven days, thousands of people have played one game of Pokemon red/blue through Twitch TV. By using a chatbox monitoring bot, the game accepts all button presses possible on a Gameboy Advance. Anyone watching the stream with a Twitch account can log in and enter a command of their choice, however, with thousands of people entering commands, the game can get more than a little hectic. The player will move in all sorts of directions, and will bring up the menu, and will do random things that may not serve in the best interest of completing the game. In fact, may rare items have been completely lost and Pokemon released into the wild due to the multitude of inputs.
However, in order to help control this, the host has also implemented a voting system. Viewers may also enter in "Anarchy" or "Democracy", which swings a vote bar on the top of the chat box to the left or right. If the bar is in the Anarchy Zone, all inputs are done, but if the bar is in the Democracy zone, the players vote on the next button press.
This has erupted across the gaming community and beyond this past week, with many memes and references to the stream across multiple forums and websites. Here are some of the highlights of the reaction to the stream and major events within it:
http://i.minus.com/iGvOVJPcW6Isi.gif
http://i.imgur.com/6JZLHaJ.png
http://i.imgur.com/5RReq39.png
And Here is the Livestream:
http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon