Everyone knows Pokémon. The franchise just celebrated it’s 21st anniversary, in that
time they’ve released over 20 games, a dozen
spin offs, and their mobile entry recently became
the fastest mobile game to gross $100 million. And that’s not even mentioning the anime
series, the card game, and the toys. It’s a cultural behemoth that you just can’t
escape.
Because of this it’s easy to forget just how innovative the series actually is,
In this video we’re going to take a look at the ways Pokémon could show the potential
for global human collaboration
especially when it comes to providing a space for communities to form. And in a bizarre way,
there’s no better example of this than the fan-created social experiment, Twitch plays
Pokémon.
Created in 2014, and in no way an official Pokémon game, it started when a gamer, who
chose to remain anonymous, wanted to use the live streaming platform twitch, to play the
original Pokémon game.
But he has a crucial twist - instead of just watching passively viewers would be able to
control the character via the comment box
on the stream by typing in the game commands from the original gameboy.
Working together with the other viewers, they would navigate the character through the game.
When making the stream the creator said he was only expected around 300 concurrent viewers
at peak as a best-case scenario.
Partly that’s because each viewer wasn’t controlling their own game, but they were
all controlling the same game together. Instead, after being posted on reddit, the
livestream blew up. With an estimated 1.16 million
active participants, 55 million views on the stream, and a peak of 121,000 individual comments
being entered at the same time.
This unprecedented success, led to absolute chaos in the game world.
Imagine you were making a cup of tea, now imagine that there were 120,000 people all
standing next to you also trying to make that cup of
tea, at exactly the same time. Only some people want
sugar, some want honey, and some just want to pour the water on the ground and smash
the mug.
Coordination became impossible, the character would spend hours walking in circles, falling
down ledges, or even releasing cherished Pokémon.
To any sane person, this should have been the death of the project. And yet, something
unique
rose from the chaos.
People were captivated by the bizarreness of watching the project, one
redditor compared it to
"watching a car crash in ultra-slow motion” . There was a fascination in
the completely unpredictable nature of the character.
Across reddit, imgur, tumblr, and other
sites, fans of the stream started furiously creating.
Short stories, images, and videos started
appearing. Somehow a character walking in circles wasn’t just a glitch of a project,
but a part of
the game narrative, and fans were fleshing out the journey.
In turn that drew in more viewers, who then went on to create their own content, in an
ever
expanding circle - all feeding back into the narrative and experience of the stream.
A community rallied itself around the game, determined to make the project succeed, in
the
same way that 20 years ago they had all worked together to trade and battle across their
gameboys.
Something about twitch plays Pokémon resonated with people, it provided a space for a
community to unite and create. People were spending real time, from their actual lives,
watching
a pixel avatar walk in circles and then creating content to feed back into the community. It
even got the attention of academics interested in the way it demonstrated emergent behaviour
among digital communities.
The traction that it gained and just how many people were becoming involved I think that’s
what was really striking out of like complete, seemingly complete chaos for something as
linear as moving through a story to manifest I think like we find that very very reassuring,
like we’re by nature pattern seekers as human beings. It’s the promise of community
in some ways, that you can just get a group of people together from anywhere in the world
and say input commands into here and we’ll complete a game and we’ll tell a wider cultural
story, even when there’s a few people that are trying to damage that aim, there seems
to be something almost transcendent about the fact that that actually works.
Completely by accident viewers were given a new way to experience the game. Their
biggest challenge wasn’t battling enemies, but walking in straight lines. Where the original
games made each captured Pokémon feel like your own, twitch made every step single feel
like a
colossal community achievement.It was impossible, unthinkable that it would ever go anywhere,
and yet somehow, after 16 days
solid - twitch plays Pokémon completed the game.
Since then the twitch plays Pokémon community has gone on to play each successive
generation of the Pokémon games, and while the numbers never reached the height of the
first
stream, the community carries on. It’s left a lasting legacy in the minds of gamers online,
but
more than that, people made genuine friendships from the experience.
People think that Pokémon is about the buzz of collecting, or the childish appeal of the
creatures. But Pokémon at it’s core has always been about creating and playing with
a
community.
That’s what creator Satoshi Tajiri built into the original game with his focus on
trading - for the first time gamers had a need to navigate the real world alongside
the virtual, to
experience and share the game with their friends, if they really wanted to catch ‘em all.
Pokémon as a cultural phenomenon has succeeded over the last 20 years because it gives
people a structure on which to build their own stories and their own community.
The series doesn’t script every encounter, but instead has always provided a space for
human interaction and personal experiences
Twitch plays Pokémon took this concept to it’s most unnatural extreme, completely
separate from the official game entries, and it worked perfectly. It’s crowd sourced
culture at it’s finest.