All hail the Helix Fossil

At this very moment, there are around 70 thousand people simultaneously playing the same game of Pokémon. How, you ask?

Well, for the last – as of the time of writing – six days and fifteen hours, Twitch Plays Pokémon has been a thing. (I notice they’ve now also started up a game of the original Final Fantasy.) What exactly Twitch Plays Pokémon is can be kind of hard to explain, but here’s a bash: a whole load of people are in a chat room. They can type any of the commands available on the Game Boy (so up, right, a, b, start and so on) and the chat room has been programmed to recognize these and input them to the game. The result is that every person in that room can affect what happens in the game almost instantly, and it is absolute chaos.

It may well still be going as you read this, in which case I don’t really recommend you check it out as it can be rather dull to watch play out. Bearing in mind that each person can facilitate a button press, and a single button press can make a lot of difference, it does take them rather a while to get anything done.
However, the truly amazing thing is this: They actually are getting stuff done. As I write this, they’re arbitrarily flicking through the settings menu (this happens a lot, since all it takes is one clever sod pressing start), but they’ve actually managed to clear four gyms, which is no mean feat. It’s taken them six days, true, but progress is genuinely being made somehow, which is frankly astounding bearing in mind that each person may well accidentally cause a screw-up that could cost hours of progress, as well as the fact that there are, as in all things, quite a lot of people along for the ride for the sole purpose of ballsing it up for everyone else.

Twitch Plays Pokémon can be described as a few things. It’s an online game as well as a livestream of a game played by other people – so in some sense it’s kind of a Let’s Play of a sort too – but it’s probably the first instance of a crowd-sourced effort to complete a single-player game. I almost want to call it massively multiplayer, but that seems inaccurate given that it’s thousands of people collectively controlling a single character. It’s also a hell of a social experiment, seeing what sort of situations arise. For example, so far an entire religion has formed around the Helix Fossil, an item those crazy sods keep trying to use in any and all inappropriate situations because it’s so easy to accidentally navigate to. There’s even a ‘false prophet’ in the Flareon that not a single person wanted to get but somehow the hive mind ended up getting.
There’s also the fact that there have already been several revolts against the system. When the programmer behind the whole thing (who has thus far remained anonymous) tried to implement a voting system so that the button with the most presses in a given time period would be the one that got used – presumably in an attempt to facilitate better and more consistent progress – an unhappy populace collectively started voting ‘start9’. Start9, by the way, basically involves just pressing start over and over. It’s not gonna get anyone anywhere, but it did get the people what they wanted: there’s now an ‘anarchy-democracy’ system whereby players can vote to use the old ‘every button counts’ system or the new ‘majority vote’ system. It’s evolved into a multi-layered event, in which the players are simultaneously playing Pokémon together and, on a meta level, competing against each other to see their preferred system instated. It’s super crazy.

This whole event has become almost a society now, and I’m imagining that sociologists are going to be using it as a model for something or other for a while after it’s over (assuming it ever ends, but that might have to involve beating the Elite Four and I’m not sure anyone’s convinced that’s ever going to happen). Similar to how the Corrupted Blood incident in World of Warcraft has been used by real-world epidemiologists as a model of what would happen in a similar real-life situation, Twitch Plays Pokémon is presenting one of the most bizarre incidences of an emerging society the internet’s ever seen.

It’s really insane, and I’ll probably feel like writing up some of the major events that transpire once it’s over. Or possibly before, we’ll see. At any rate, I’m not sure the world’s ever seen anything like this before.