Crowdgaming
About how Twitch showed us a new way of playing video games
Some weeks ago, the internet witnessed the results of the [kind of] coordinated efforts of thousands of Twitch.tv users around the world. Called TwitchPlaysPokemon (or TPP), the channel allowed its watchers to play Nintendo Game Boy’s Pokémon Red game, by using the chat system as a means to give input to the game. Having more than 46 million total views and having reached a peak amount of 121,000 players simultaneously, the channel has seen the game being finished after more than 16 days, although a new sprint has already begun more than one week ago, with the Nintendo Game Boy Advanced title Pokémon Crystal.
The impact caused by the idea was gigantic. There was a point when nearly every “internet veteran” knew about it, and you could read about it everywhere on social networks. A countless amount of fan art was created about it, including a new virtual religion (the Helixism, a joke about an in-game item called the Helix Fossil). The amount of data traffic even demanded Twitch (which wasn’t involved in the creation of the channel) to change its server configurations so it could handle all of it properly.
TPP creator, who chose to remain anonymous all the time, was initially inspired by SaltyBet, another Twitch channel which simulates an online virtual betting system on a fighting game (which is quite interesting on its own), and saw his creation as a social experiment. He believes “the internet is capable of handling things of this nature”, and well, his experiment showed us so. It also showed us that there may be a big potential in a paradigm of video gaming that’s pretty much unexplored. Well, where there’s people, there’s money to be made, though it’s hard to predict whether this new way of playing will gain traction in any way or not. I believe that it’s something worth taking a deeper look at, and that there may be a “big thing” lying dormant in this concept.
