Age of the Geek

Order, Chaos, and Catching Them All

     At one time we wondered if infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters could reproduce the work of Shakespeare. Today, on the Internet, a similar question is being asked.

     Can 100,000 people work together to beat a Pokemon game?

     Allow me to explain...

     Two weeks ago, a clever gamer set up a live stream of Pokemon Red on Twitch.TV.

     This is not uncommon. Twitch.TV is where gamers congregate to watch other gamers play video games.

     Yes, you read that sentence correctly. It is a website where you can watch other people play video games.

     However, this particular live stream comes with an added twist. The host set up a program that reads the stream's accompanying chat log and uses it to input commands into the game. If somebody types "up," the character moves up. If somebody types "start," the pause menu comes up. Anybody and everybody watching the stream can join in.

     The result has been two separate but equally fascinating experiments.

     The first is an experiment in random probability.

     When tens of thousands of people are trying to issue commands at the same time, there's going to be problems. The poor player character, Red, spends the bulk of his time wandering aimlessly across the world, haplessly trying to move in every direction at once.

     The fact that there's twenty seconds of lag between what the viewer sees and what the game is doing doesn't help matters. By the time you enter your plea for Red to move to the right, he may already be facing a wall.

     There's no way to tell who Red will listen to at any given point, so progress is only made when there are enough people issuing the same command to tilt the odds in their favor. And even if all of the viewers were on the same page about where to go and what to do, there's very little that can be done to coordinate an efficient effort.

     And that's without accounting for the trolls. The ones who input commands with the intention of denying or delaying Red's progress. The ones who get more enjoyment out of abusing their power than using it toward productive ends.

     Their vote matters just as much as anybody else's and with no mechanism to stop them, progress is slow going at best and counter-productive at worst.

     Paths that a lone player would easily walk become seemingly impossible obstacles requiring hours of time and no small amount of luck to pass.

     And yet the system has prevailed. The collective commands of thousands of gamers have managed to guide Red through challenge after challenge, including the nefarious Rock Tunnel, where none of the 70,000 people trying to play the game could see where they were going.

     It was only after poor Red spent a full 18 hours trying to navigate a particularly touchy floor puzzle that powers from on high had to intervene. And thus, the second experiment began.

     Recognizing that the current system was unlikely to proceed any further, the game's host implemented a new system, "Anarchy vs. Democracy."

     With "Democracy" in play, the game issues one command every twenty second. No one person can disrupt the game and the only votes that matter are the ones in the majority. The tradeoff is a much slower pace and less "fun" for the people more interested in watching chaos unfold than completing the task at hand.

     So now there's a second layer to the social experiment. Along with inputting commands to keep Red moving towards his goal of becoming a Pokemon champion, coalitions of viewers are now locked in a constant struggle to either change or maintain their preferred system of government. (If this is reminding you of Congress, you're not the only one.) Two very different social philosophies are locked in an ideological battle and the battlefield is an 18 year old Game Boy game.

     At the rate things are going, I expect the game to be beaten in the next week or so. By that time, behavioral scientists will have enough study material to write a book with.

     It would be a book worth reading.

     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and prefers democracy over anarchy.