Geek Corner: Twitch Plays Pokémon
I signed up for Reddit about a year ago, and it has proved itself to be an outlet for all kinds of news and information, whether it’s current events, facts you may not have known, discussion on a novel, or debating about the latest Skyrim mod. There’s something for everyone on Reddit.
It was on Reddit that I first started seeing confusing posts about someone playing Pokémon with a chat attached to the side of the screen, chats that contained directional arrows, A, B, and repeated invocations for “anarchy, anarchy, anarchy” against cries for “democracy, democracy!” That first day, I ignored it because I didn’t understand it. The next day, there were more screenshots on the r/gamer subreddit: screenshots of some frustrating game called “Twitch Plays Pokémon” – “TPP”.
Twitch is a site that allowed for streaming games, allowing viewers to watch a certain player play a game, or many players participating in a tournament. “TPP” is a complete turnaround of the established norm on Twitch: instead of thousands of players watching an insulated player, millions of participants were working together toward the goal of completing one game: Pokémon Red.
“TPP” is the brainchild of an anonymous Australian programmer that began February 12, designed as “an experiment to test the viability of this format, the way people interact with the input system and the way they interact socially with each other” (from the “TPP” website). It’s the social and cultural aspects that I find most interesting about this project. When you have millions of individuals interacting with each other, the potential for creativity is limitless. On Reddit alone, there have been thousands of posts about “TPP”, which has polarized the community into four camps: those who don’t care about it, those who don’t know about it, those who love it, and those who hate it.
First and foremost is the prolific creation of memes stemming from “TPP”. For those non-denizens of the Internet, a meme is an element of cultural transmission that spreads from person to person via writing, speech, and symbols. Memes are self-replicating and subject to changes within the culture or subculture that produced it. It’s like Darwin’s theory of evolution, but on the Internet. For example, Ned Stark’s motto from Game of Thrones: “Brace yourself…winter is coming.” This phrase has become a meme: “Brace yourself…finals week is coming.”
In reference to “TPP”, it’s hard to trace when exactly these memes pop up, because millions of players are constantly chatting and generating an internal dialogue that is unreadable to an outsider. The anarchy vs. democracy – which is a reference to the two modes of the game – evolved into the image of a Pidgeotto, representative of anarchy and associated with those who choose the Helix fossil in Mount Moon, fighting a Flareon, the representative of democracy and associated with those who choose the Dome fossil.
From the conflict between the Helix and the Dome fossils spawned a band called “Church of the Helix Choir” who write and produce songs about the events that take place during “TPP” gameplay. What’s amazing about this is that “TPP” was running for 16 days with 400 hours of gameplay. Sixteen days, and a group of musicians wrote and recorded an album of songs dedicated to the dialogue within the chat and the memes that spawned off of it.
“TPP” is remarkable because it’s proof of the incredible things that can happen when millions of people interact with each other. They have created art, music, symbols and artifacts, creating a bond between them, creating meaning. They created a culture.
And yes, they’re still playing. You can watch it here.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme#Meme_maps
http://www.dorkly.com/article/59505/the-majesty-of-twitch-plays-pokemon
https://churchofthehelixchoir.bandcamp.com/
http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon
http://www.shellypalmer.com/2014/02/twitch-plays-pokemon/