The bizarre, mind-numbing, mesmerizing beauty of “Twitch Plays Pokémon”

Most gamers in my Twitter orbit have been spending their time with the Titanfall beta since invitations began going out late last week, but I’ve become entranced by a different kind of online multiplayer game. I’m talking, of course, about “Twitch Plays Pokémon,” and I haven’t seen anything like it in a decade-and-a-half of Pokémon playing.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Twitch Plays Pokémon is described as “a social experiment” by its creator, who is streaming an emulated version of Pokémon Red to Twitch.tv. Viewers type commands into the Twitch chat stream, and an IRC bot translates those commands into input the game can understand. Typing “up,” “down,” “left,” “right,” “a,” “b,” or “start” will lead to an onscreen action after 20 to 40 seconds, depending on how far your video lags behind the chat window. You can see just what this looks like in the below video, which is representative of basically any given minute-and-a-half of gameplay.

As you can see, with up to tens of thousands of people feeding commands into the game at any time, the results are a bit… chaotic. Poor Red behaves as though he has been lobotomized, wandering the streets and hallways of the Kanto region like he’s seriously tripping balls. He gets stuck in corners. He walks in circles, compulsively checking his Pokédex and saving over and over again. Commands stream in from the chat channel faster than the game can possibly process them, making progress difficult-to-impossible even without the lag factor or the “help” of gleeful trolls. The result is something as mesmerizing as it is pointless.

Both a Reddit liveblog and a Google document exist to track Twitch’s progress, such as it is. Yes, progress was actually possible, early on. Believe it or not, the Internet hivemind managed to catch a team of Pokémon and clear four of the eight gyms in the first four days of play. The game seems to have become a victim of its own success at this point though—Twitch has been stuck in or near the same room in Team Rocket’s lair for the better part of a day now. With over 50,000 players issuing delayed commands, the herky-jerky forward motion that was possible over the weekend appeared to have ground to a halt as of early this morning.

Even if the Twitch community can clear this hurdle, it still has to perform some impossibly precise maneuvering to beat the game. Victory can only plausibly happen when enough players get so sick of being stuck that they quit, making coordination viable again. I’m sure that weeks or months from now gaming sites will be running short, disinterested stories about the thousand-or-so people who stuck around long enough to beat Twitch Plays Pokémon.

The Twitch stream has spawned both in-jokes and fan art about the in-jokes.

Credit: @taraofforest

In the meantime, I’m left to ponder the larger meaning of this not-quite-a-game. The closest gaming phenomenon I can think of is “Salty Bet,” another Twitch flash-in-the-pan from last summer. That “game” pits computer-controlled, poorly programmed versions of various fighting game and pop culture characters against each other in the generalized fighting game emulator M.U.G.E.N. While spectators don’t take an active role in the proceedings, they can bet fake currency on the randomized outcome of each fight. Twitch Plays Pokémon is a little more directly interactive, but it and Salty Bet are cut from the same cloth. Both combine spectator sports with participatory group play, and both are equally difficult to explain to people who don’t “get it” (in my experience it helps to be a little inebriated, extraordinarily tired, or both).

Also like Salty Bet, much of the appeal of Twitch Plays Pokémon is the fan community of sorts that has sprung up around it like a virtual shantytown, spewing countless memes and image macros until it’s time to move on to the next faddish distraction. Many, many imitators have sprung up, whether they’re playing other versions of Pokémon or other games entirely.

Why are these communal watch-and-play experiences so appealing to so many? Maybe it’s the fleeting, collective joy from the spectators in chat when Red finally budges forward after hours of running headlong into walls. Maybe it was the bone-deep sadness we all felt when, four days and nine hours in, Twitch released its starter Pokémon—a level 34 Charmeleon, nickname ABBBBBBK(—into the wild, never to be seen again. Or maybe it’s just the amusement of leaving the computer for five hours and coming back only to see that Twitch is stuck in the exact same spot in the exact same room, content to save its non-progress in an unending loop.