For just over a month now, an extraordinary tale has been unfolding at the hands of thousands. It is a story of friendships, of betrayal, of overcoming impossible odds. It is an ongoing saga of uncertainty and self-conflict the likes of which have never been seen before. It is…
…a Pokémon game.
On February 17, an anonymous Australian coder set up a channel on the massively popular livestreaming website Twitch under the name “Twitch Plays Pokémon.” Declared as a social experiment, the premise of the channel was simple enough. The channel, which has run almost non-stop since it began, would display a PC-emulated version of the hit video game Pokémon Red, and by entering commands such as “left,” “A,” or “start” into the channel’s chat bar, viewers would collaborate in an attempt to play the game to completion.
So far, things have progressed quite well. The stream’s peak viewership registered at over 120,000 people simultaneously contributing to the madness. Pokémon Red was successfully beaten after almost 16.5 days of continuous work, and the viewers are now working through the second half of the sequel game Pokémon Crystal. Oh, and somewhere along the line the whole deal evolved into a religion.
When it first began, the goal of Twitch Plays Pokémon (referred to from here onward as “TPP”) was similar to the Infinite Monkey Theorem, which states that an infinite amount of monkeys bashing at an infinite amount of typewriters could eventually replicate a complicated text, such as a Shakespeare play or Finnegans Wake. The point of the livestream was to show that, even when total chaos was the dominating factor of a mission, humankind could collaborate and eventually achieve a seemingly impossible goal. With tens of thousands of people constantly giving the game commands all at the same time, even getting through the game’s intro seemed like enough of a challenge.
But indeed, while a rather impressive pace was maintained throughout Pokémon Red, it was the other result that perhaps no one saw coming. When faced with what could often be hours of frustration for an originally minute-long puzzle, the collective viewership began to form stories around the events of the game. The random-letter nicknames given to the player’s Pokémon were interpreted such that a Pidgeot called “aaabaaajs” came to be known as Bird Jesus, a Venomoth named “AATTVVV” became the All-Terrain Venomoth, and “AAAAAAAAAA” the Nidoking turned into King Fonz. Significant events were given names such as Bloody Sunday, a day on which several important Pokémon were released in a mass exile that was blamed on the “False Prophet” Flareon. Key items were treasured as idols due to how much time was spent staring at them when an unintentional button press opened the game inventory for a few minutes.
Of those key items, one was viewed as more significant than all others, and it is what began the “religion” which fueled the game from that point onward. In Pokémon Red, the player is given a choice between two items known as the Helix Fossil and the Dome Fossil, both of which can later be given to a specialized laboratory to revive them into prehistoric Pokémon. TPP selected the Helix Fossil and, due to its special use, soon began to revere it as Lord Helix, often “consulting” it for advice. Lord Helix came to be known as a deity representing anarchy, power, and liberty, while those who opposed this ideology were said to worship the Dome Fossil. Dome followers were generally shunned as traitors and tended to hold an association with the previously mentioned False Prophet.
As the rift between the anarchy of Helix and the democracy of Dome became more and more relevant, it even began to affect the actual gameplay. Towards the end of Pokémon Red, the standard system of command input gained two new commands “anarchy” and “democracy” which both affected a balance meter at the top of the screen. There was a heavy bias towards anarchy, but enough votes could switch the game to Democracy Mode, in which commands would be pooled together for a short period rather than taken as they were submitted, and the most popular action would be selected. In the end, however, it was indeed Anarchy Mode which won the game.
Once Pokémon Red had been defeated, the game changed. With Red and Lord Helix resigned to who-knows-where, there was a short break before the stream started up Pokémon Crystal. Of course, the community storytelling continued, but in an interesting direction. AJ (full name AJDNNW) began his Crystal journey in Johto, a region right next to the Kanto region in the Pokémon world, and as has long been known, that journey will end when AJ has crossed into Kanto, climbed the legendary Mt. Silver, and defeated Red himself.
The eventual culmination of AJ’s journey in challenging his predecessor, combined with the heavy experimentation with the Anarchy/Democracy division (at one point even briefly switching to Lottocracy Mode) has cast him as a heretic in the realm of Lord Helix. AJ’s team, led by “Lazorgator” the Feraligatr, is viewed as a band of god slayers, tasked with the downfall of the previous generation’s deity. A Google Doc file following the game’s progression has even set up a counter to track how many times AJ’s team defeats and loses to each of Red’s Pokémon – and with the game files altered so Red’s endgame team matches the superstars of TPP Red, it may be quite some time before the battle is won.
So what is the point of all this? How did such a nonsensical, chaotic “experiment” turn into the talk of the Internet, with community-written lore so intricate a small novel could be written on it? In all honesty, it’s rather difficult to draw any real conclusions from this event. Some are annoyed by it, some are enraptured by it, and others still are going so far as to write songs about it, but what can actually be said about it all without going into some deeply convoluted psychological analysis?
I, personally, have no real words short of the strictly objective summary I’ve just given. But, regardless of what is to be gleaned from the tales of Red, AJ, and whoever might come after them, one thing is certain. Society was issued a challenge to succeed amid chaos, and in the process went above and beyond all that was asked. One can only imagine what sorts of mayhem might unfold if the stream continues into the rest of the series when the controls and challenges become more and more complex, but whatever happens, it goes without saying that the story of TPP is something truly remarkable.
Update: Shortly after the writing of this article, TPP succeeded in winning the final battle against Red. Pokémon Emerald is set to begin at approximately 8:00 p.m. CST on March 21.