Shit Hot Games For Fuck All: Twitch Plays Pokemon

This is an interesting one. And it’s free!

We all know the internet can be an evil place at times, but with an incredible force of will between like-minded members of the human race, good things have risen out of the abyss; Wikipedia, tumblr, Pornhub, Sick Chirpse, the list goes on.

In this particular case, the idea of making a viewer-controlled Pokemon game spontaneously came about – presumably during a long shower or mid-shit as all great ideas do.

â˜›More Pokemon: Once You Go Black, You Never Sleep Again

Twitch Plays Pokemon is this idea made so. It’s a live stream of an emulated game of Pokemon that has been programmed to accept commands from the Twitch.tv chat console. Don’t ask how or why, just dive in. The commands are all relayed in real time, so you’ll often find it takes hours to complete certain quests or get from A to B (no pun intended) because everyone will be jamming in completely random commands. A whole bunch of in-jokes have cropped up as usual, mainly about repeatedly selecting the Helix fossil in the inventory, which is apparently a common occurrence.

Unintentionally or not, Twitch Plays Pokemon is quite a suitable allegory for The Internet, or even human society itself; there are some that seek progress and glory, while others will aim to hinder those that take things seriously for the simple fact that it’s funny. Sounds like being at school again, doesn’t it?

To avoid having to keep everyone behind after school until they behave, a democracy mode has been introduced which means a certain amount of votes have to be made before an action is taken. It sounds like this would slow the game down, but amazingly, they’ve gotten several gym badges and some decent Pokemon.

Twitch Plays Pokemon has been going straight for almost six days now, so if you’re interested in catching up on what was missed, you’ll need to get in on this Google Doc to see which landmarks have been reached, which pokemon are in the party, etc. At the time of writing this, the Twitch community have made it to the Team Rocket Hideout, which looks a bit like this: