TwitchPlaysPokemon: The Ultimate Social Experiment

On February 15, 2014, an Australian Programmer put a hacked version of a popular 90s video game–Pokemon Red/Blue–on a video streaming and sharing site called Twitch. Then, he let everyone join in on the fun. By visiting the site and creating a free login, you can control the game. Well, sort of. You can control the game along with thousands of other people by cooperating all together to type in the right commands.

Pokemon Red/Blue is a relatively simple game. It’s in black and white, has rudimentary graphics, and there’s really only a handful of controls.

There are two modes in which the users can play the game–Anarchy, or Democracy, and both are fascinating for their own reasons.

Anarchy is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Everyone’s inputs are immediately entered into the system, if applicable, meaning that the character is being controlled by thousands of separate people at once. It renders a sort of puppet like effect–the character has the potential to be dragged in many directions.

Democracy is much more difficult. If the players decide on Democracy, everyone has 20 seconds to input a command, and then the most popular command will be chosen.

But what I think is most interesting is what it takes to switch between the two modes. In order to get from Democracy to Anarchy, 50 percent of users need to vote for Anarchy. To get from Anarchy to Democracy, 80 percent of users need to vote for Democracy.

This sounds simple, but you have to realize that so far, an estimated 650,000 total users have participated, and up to 120,000, maybe more, at the same time. Meaning that at any given time, thousands of users need to think and do the same thing. Most of these users appear to be located in the United States and Australia, but this phenomenon has reached all over the globe. Obviously, no one has been awake for the entire time that TwitchPlaysPokemon has been alive, so users jump on and off when they want, and usually by country. When I checked out TwitchPlaysPokemon this morning, I saw multiple, presumably North American, users saying they needed to log off and head to work.

Based on the Reddit thread dedicated to TwitchPlaysPokemon, there’s been a battle between Democracy and Anarchy, with different users preferring one of the modes for whatever reason. Over the course of what appears to be 16 minutes early this morning, the game switched from Anarchy, to Democracy, to Anarchy again.

There’s also been a ton of memes born out of TwitchPlaysPokemon. There are, for lack of a better term, religious symbols that have developed and now exist as their own inside jokes. For example, there’s an item that can be obtained called the Helix Fossil. It’s pretty much utterly useless, but it was often accidentally selected by the players. So, they would say they “turned to the Helix Fossil for guidance,” creating a facetious Helix Fossil cult. There are many others, jokes created out of this shared experience that have taken on meanings for those who participate in the game, but mean very little to the outside observer.

So, is TwitchPlaysPokemon just a silly group game, or can we see some deeper significance? The players of the game have made progress. Slow, halting, messy progress, but progress all the same. As of Friday, they were roughly halfway through the game, and they certainly advanced further over the weekend. If nothing else, TwitchPlaysPokemon is proof that a group of completely unorganized people can work together, albeit in pursuit of a very narrow goal.

There’s something fascinating about watching it. While writing this article, I’ve had the site up on my computer, and what I find most interesting is that while many users are interested in controlling the game, more of the commands are either “Democracy” or “Anarchy.” It’s sort of beautifully discordant, because even though everyone has the same goal, they fight over how to do it.

TwitchPlaysPokemon is an excellent social experiment, despite the fact that was not its intended purpose. After all, where else can you actually see the fight between anarchy and democracy play out without consequences? Where else can you see groupthink mentality at both its finest and its most destructive? Where else can you see a new society, complete with religious symbols, born from scratch? If you have a few minutes, go watch TwitchPlaysPokemon. It’s worth a look.

Featured image courtesy of [Nicolas Fuentes via Flickr]

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.