The Power of Teamwork

Remember Twitch Plays Pokémon? Well, it’s over now, or at least that particular game is. How can it be over, you might intelligently ask? Well, here’s the absolutely phenomenally astonishing thing: A group of up to a hundred thousand people, some of whom were deliberately trying to derail the attempt and all of whom were trying to deal with the effects of lag and the varied ways of accomplishing different tasks, actually managed to complete Pokémon Red. Yup, they beat the Elite Four, beat the Champion, got in the Hall of Fame. What a time to be alive.

They’ve now started up (they’re around two hours in as I write) on the second generation of games with Crystal, which will probably be almost impossible due to the precision-requiring nature of the ice puzzles and so on, but then I really didn’t think the first generation with its caves and fiddly HM puzzles would be possible to solve in such a notoriously imprecise way either. It’s absolutely incredible that this has been able to happen, although some might just point to the conclusion that all it means is that the game is actually incredibly easy. The more impressive thing, though, is the society which has arisen from this chaos.

I said I’d talk about a few of the details, so here we go. I can’t possibly begin to cover everything that happened over sixteen days of nonstop play, even if most of that was aimless walking in circles, but let’s give it a go. This may well end up looking like a historical account and analysis, but this stuff needs to be on record!

The most notable thing to emerge out of the experiment is almost undoubtedly its religion. Whilst I doubt that anyone genuinely holds a heartfelt belief that the Helix Fossil has legitimate holy power in the real world, I don’t think that prevents us referring to Helixism as an actual religion or belief system. (Is it even called Helixism? I suddenly realise I have no idea whether there’s an official name for it, but let’s go with Helixism.) The fact is that it emerged within a developing society as a way of explaining the world or attributing some sort of divine authority to the ‘right’ actions, which is a pretty good if oversimplified account of how real-world religions often begin. As such, I’m happy to apply terms like ‘society’, ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ to the weirdly semi-fictitious – by which I mean it’s made up of real people acting within a virtual space, making the community itself unreal whilst having real members – community of TPP players.
Helixism arose because players would often find themselves accidentally examining the Helix Fossil or trying to use it in all kinds of situations, since it was at the top of their item list and navigating to a specific item proved phenomenally difficult for an anarchic civilisation. As such, people started attributing a character to the Fossil based around the idea that it possessed some sort of supernatural guiding power, reinforced by the fact that success often reared its rare and shiny head soon after a session of helical examination. This quickly developed into a fully fledged monotheistic religion in which the Helix Fossil was God. Soon after this development we saw the introduction of the anarchy-democracy system (for an explanation see my previously linked post, or a quick Google search will undoubtedly yield a far better explanation than the one I provided); those for anarchy latched onto the Fossil’s powers of authority by claiming that anarchy was the true, Helix-endorsed way. This is where things get really interesting as far as societal development is concerned, because it’s here that we start to see a split into two opposing political parties, for lack of a better word.
The anarchy faction argued that anarchy was the original way, the way the game was meant to be played, and that the Helix Fossil was on their side. Those for democracy believed that anarchy wasn’t viable as a means to actually progress through the game, and so we saw the advent of a continued system of revolts. Following the introduction of the system whereby voting for anarchy or democracy could alter which system was in place (some argue that this suggests leanings towards democracy and is therefore unholy in and of itself), the metagame became a constant overthrowing of one party by the other. Much like in reality, the votes were swayed one way or the other depending on which system could bring the most to the present situation, although many stuck staunchly to one party or the other.
At some point not long after all this, a new member of the Helixism pantheon appeared: Flareon, the False Prophet. Nobody really wanted Flareon, but that’s what they ended up with anyway. Flareon therefore fell in with the Helix Fossil’s opposite, the Dome Fossil, and a whole new religion started up. This one’s kind of odd because virtually nobody actually supported the Dome religion in the way that people latched on to the Helix one, but it nevertheless maintained a presence if only as the corresponding ‘evil’ that all ‘good’ systems often need. So we now had two opposing systems of government both intrinsically tied to the religion: the anarchist faction might have been the one generally held to be Helix-blessed, but the democrats also argued that theirs was the true way.
Meanwhile, Pidgeot was continually proving itself the most useful ‘mon in the group, and before too long became known as Bird Jesus (or Abba Jesus, since it had been nicknamed ‘aaabaaajss’). Later, the group’s Zapdos (‘AA-j’) entered the mythology as the Archangel of Justice – or, rather more hilariously, John the Zaptist.

If all this is sounding confusing, that’s because it is. Bear with me, though: there are a couple more events in the history of Helixism that I think are developmentally notable.
After a fairly significant length of time spent clinging to the Helix Fossil in perpetual fear that it be accidentally discarded, the hive mind finally made the decision to try to bring it to life. This was, astonishingly, successful, and Our Lord And Saviour Omanyte joined the party. As the terminology of Helixism makes apparent (Bird Jesus, John the Zaptist, False Prophet and so on), it’s a religion that sticks fairly close to existing religious paradigms, particularly those of Christianity. The revival of Godmanyte was no exception, as we now had a Holy Trinity of sorts: Omanyte the Father, Bird Jesus the Son and the Holy Helix Spirit. This is all phenomenally confusing, what with Omanyte being the same entity as the Helix Fossil and all, but in that way too I suppose it’s similar to the mind-boggling ‘three in one and one is three but the three are three and also one’ rhetoric inevitably deployed in explanation of the Christian Trinity.
Finally (I promise this is the last point for now) we can see evidence of retroactive assimilation in Helixism. Early in the game, Abby (or ‘ABBBBBBK(‘, the group’s treasured Charmeleon) and Jay Leno (‘JLVWNNOOOO’, a Rattata that had proven it’s worth on many an occasion) were accidentally released. This happened whilst the culture was still developing and before Helixism took its memetic hold over the group at large, but the religion nevertheless assimilated these martyred figures into its tradition in much the same way as modern religions have absorbed holidays, saintly figures and so on from their predecessors in order to appear more appealing and viable to those against change.

This has gone on far longer than I thought, so consider this an essay on that one aspect of the TPP experience. Rather than try to sum it all up in one post I’ll try to follow this one up soon with more fascinating (you may or may not agree) thoughts on the whole thing.
Praise Helix!