A programmer enables crowdplaying an old handheld game, and the crowd wins
By G.F. | SEATTLE
ACCORDING to Andy Baio, Kickstarter's first and former chief technology officer, Twitch Plays Pokémon is "the best thing on the internet right now."
The game combines an array of online trends. It starts with Twitch, a live-streaming site with a twist: gamers can broadcast their action to all users (even opting to have a camera fixed upon them). The site, an offshoot of the lifestreaming service Justin.tv, claims 45m unique monthly visitors and 1m unique monthly broadcasters, including some of the world's most highly rated players of certain videogames.
But it took a nearly two-decade-old game, Pokémon Red, released in 1996 for the Nintendo Game Boy portable player, to make Twitch truly interactive. A still-anonymous programmer wired the input controls for a black-and-white emulated version of Red into the Twitch chat room that appears alongside any streamed game. (Emulation involves the use of a virtual machine that executes instructions just as the Game Boy would, and the Pokémon software runs on top of that.)
In the chat room, viewers can type any of the commands that correspond to the Game Boy's physical controller: a, b, start, select, up, down, left and right. While this might work for a small audience in which only a few people issue instructions, it could have been expected that tens of thousands of simultaneous participants would have caused the experiment to fall apart. And yet, over a period of 15 days, hordes of visitors ultimately succeeded in playing through the entire game.
It attracted routinely 30,000 to 70,000 viewers, and at one time peaked with 120,000 bystanders. Over the 15 days of the game, more than 37m unique views were recorded. Outside of games controlled by a series of non-interactive online votes, has any game before ever seen such widespread, ungoverned interaction among a mass audience? Babbage cannot recall nor find a reference.
But why was there such interest? Perhaps because the wisdom of the crowd seemed to play out even at the large scale of Twitch Plays Pokémon.
The developer adapted rules as the game played. It began as a free-for-all in which commands were executed as entered, with many queued, skipped or ignored by the emulator. Days in, the programmer classified this mode of play as "anarchy" and added a counterpart, "democracy". Chat-room participants could vote by entering the name of either mode to switch between them.
With democracy engaged, the system would poll for 20 seconds to determine the most popular command, or sequence of commands, and then execute them. But the game's operator apparently found it was too easy for the tyranny of the simple majority to impose democracy (something not found in politics). Consequently he re-pegged the "voting" so that 80% of participants needed to shout for democracy in order to embrace it, while letting the mobile vulgus reconvene an anarchic scrum with just 50%.
On March 1st, the game was won. The developer hit the pause button for a few hours and then restarted a new round, this time with Pokémon Crystal in vivid 15-bit colour. The rules were altered. Democracy mode now averages across 30 seconds and starts at the top of each hour, after which visitors may vote for a free-for-all. Seemingly when it comes to the views of dedicated gamers the programmer felt he had gotta catch 'em all.
