Remember that epic Pokémon livestream-turned-game called Twitch Plays Pokémon we told you about Friday? Well, while you were enjoying your "House of Cards" Valentine's binge, those 10,000 players refused to rest in their quest to become a Pokémon master. And it seems like they invited a few of their friends to help.
It's been almost 6 straight days of Pokémon madness on Twitch, and more than 93,000 players are now participating in the game.
Background (ICYMI): Twitch is a livestream site where viewers can watch another player's game footage in real time and comment via a chatbox, similar to the chatrooms of yore. In this game of Pokémon, someone has modified the chatbox so that viewers can type commands to control the actual game, basically turning the chat feature into a controller that everyone can use at the same time.
This was madness with 10,000 players. With 90,000 it's just impossible.
So now, the chatbox has been modified again. According to Joystiq, the stream's creator turned the chat function into a sort of voting system. Players still input the actions they want to see, but instead of the onscreen character doing those actions, the typed commands become votes. These votes are tallied every couple seconds by the computer, and the action that the most viewers selected is the one the game character performs.
Players can also vote to have an action completed a certain number of times. Let's say you log into Twitch Plays Pokémon and want the character to go to the right three spaces. You input "right3." Then 50,000 other viewers do the same. Since your action has received the most votes, the character moves to the right three spaces. If only 40,000 viewers had typed "right3" and 50,000 had typed "right2," the character would move to the right two spaces. Majority wins.
Make sense?
Well, it gets a teensy bit more complicated. As you may have guessed, not everyone is happy with the new voting system, and some have taken it upon themselves to try and sabotage the game. So, to make things confusing for everyone, a new layer of voting has been added.
Players can now type in "democracy" to maintain the voting system, or if they just want to watch the world burn, they can type "anarchy" to go back to the old methods of playing, where every inputted action was completed by the character.
Needless to say, that chatbox is complete mayhem.
Twitch Plays Pokémon, while seemingly trivial, is proof of the power of the Internet. The game has grown exponentially in five days and has adapted and continued to thrive with each passing day. In-game progress continues, despite the best efforts by those trolls screaming "anarchy" in the chatbox.
Joystiq reports that there are a Twitter account, subreddit and GoogleDoc to track the game's progress and goals.
All in all, Twitch Plays Pokémon has become something beautiful, and we can't wait to see what happens next.