Its pretty cool actually. The premise is this: Thousands of people input commands via twitches chat. Those all become seperate inputs into the game. Think of it as a glorified random number generator trying to play Pokemon…and win.
Edit: The Reddit community also has been great in forming a sort of narrative around everything thats happened in the game, and amazingly its been quite interesting. Case in point, one time it visited a PC…ended up releasing the starter pokemon along with half of its (at the time) current lineup. They vowed never to go near a PC again. Nicknames have been given to all past and present team members, because some custom names got rediculous, like Pidgeotto being named aaabaaajss (now affectionatly dubed Bird Jesus, which is also trending on twitter currently)
I couldn't watch this for more than a few minutes at a time. It made me too frustrated. But my boyfriend watched it like crazy and told me everything about it.
Yes. Thousands of people and bots spamming commands endlessly.
Thats the entire point though!
The social experiment here is facinating. Can a group of people crowdsource their commands to play and finish a single player game? Could complex game puzzles be solved with such a huge and seemingly random input stream?
Thats the appeal for me. That and its a game I'v been familiar with since a child which is just gravy. A community grew out of it, creating their own narrative.
It's amazing what the internet has allowed us to do, and this proof of concept really hints at something deeper than videogames and pokemon.
Except, the answer seems to be "no, they can't do it because so many random inputs are the equivalent of noise". I would imagine that if they had a control group that was just a computer spitting out random inputs, you'd get the same results as from the crowd.
I very much disagree spiff. How could this be? Even though there were bots involved, it was mostly live people watching and inputing. The collective had its own intelligance, soemthing a true RNG just can't emulate.
As an amazing case in point, the collective was able to figure out how to make the best use of its Anarchy/Democracy system, where the collective would switch into Democracy to carry out precise manurvers for puzzles (like Victory Road and the Rock puzzle) but then imediatly go back to Anarchy since it was the quickest way to complete the overall goal of "finish the game". It had its own goal and it figured out how to complete it as quickly as it could. Thats skynet stuff man.
Intelligance learns and adapts. Random number generators can't do that. A collective conciousness is like a True artificial intelligance. This is a crude proof of that concept.
So AA-j (a Zapdos affectionally nicknamed "Battery Jesus") beat Blue and The Elite Four, winning Pokemon Red. The new TPP is Pokemon Crystal, and last I checked they were being incredibly boring in The Ruins of Alph.
The Anarchy/Democracy system also changed, and I'm not a fan of the change. The voting system was by far one of the most interesting aspects of the last stream.
ive been watching this mostly out of the amusment that comes of the 'Lore' That is growing up around it
Lord Helix Stone is our Lord
Flareon is the false prophet and was sent by the evil Lord Dome Fossil
Bird Jesus Pidgeot is our savior (And the Rival has a Pidgeot that is the Antichrist)
And social movements like Start9 when democracy mode was first introduced
And hillarious things like
Rattatat being helpful and using DIG right before the final boss of Team Rocket HQ
lvl36 ATV beating 60something Dragonite (its a design flaw in the AI - the AI for Gen1 automatically uses a power that has the most effective subtype against the type of pokemon. Venonate being a bug is weak to Psychic. Dragonites Psychic powers are Agility and Defend. So that is all he'll use, he'll never use Dragon Beam)
The LEDGE
Considering that roughly 80,000 viewers at a time somehow managed to beat the game, Id say it works out. And Bots were all spamming Down so while they sorta affected the game, not overly so, and Twitch banned the bots en masse too.
In the last stream, there was a Supermajority needed (80% vote) to switch into Democracy. A simple majority (50% vote) was needed to switch back to Anarchy
With the new stream, it seems that Democracy happens for a certain period of time every hour. I am not a fan as it kinda looses an interesting cog for the hive-mind to turn.
Every hour it switches to democracy. Then there is a vote option (50% majority) to turn it back to Anarchy again. This just garantees there will be moments when things can get done, for 5-10 minutes.
Democracy mode works where all the commands are collected for 30 seconds, and the majority selected wins. Stops trolls who are just hititng the start button for no reason, or down. Allows very specific stuff to get done, like the Safari Zone.
Actually its a little different than that Lynkfox, and the system changed once Gen II went live.
During Gen 1, there was a voting system. The base mode was Anarchy, where every input that was entered in the chat would get parsed into the game. With a Supermajority vote (80%), the input system would switch to Democracy. Democracy would tally up the most popular voted command in a 20 second window and then input it into the game. Democracy could be switched back into Anarchy mode with a simple majority (50%). Anarchy/Democracy modes are just different ways for the hivemind to control the game.
In Gen II, things changed. The game starts in Anarchy as before, but every 60 minutes it switches into Democracy automatically without vote. Democracy now has a 30 second voting window, and Anarchy can be voted as a command along with Up, Down, A, B ect. If Anarchy wins the most votes (it doesn't have to be by percent, just has to be ahead by sheer numbers), Anarchy kicks back in and the Democracy timer starts again.
I prefered the Gen 1 style of Anarchy/Democracy, but TPP had its reasons (which they talk about on the streaming site)
They changed the Anarchy/Democracy system once again.
They pretty much merged both modes into a hybrid input selection system that leans more to the Anarchy side of things. It looked weird at first, but I think it'll work very well for the stream.