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80,000 players control single Pokemon game by chat

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday February 18 2014, @11:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the infinite-Primapes-with-infinite-gamepads dept.

laserfusion writes:

"CNET is reporting on a massively-mono-player gaming experiment. From the article :

In what can only be described as the best thing to happen to Valentine's Day, about 12,000 people are participating in a collective game of Pokemon Red on the live game-streaming service Twitch, all by simply typing in directions in the comment box in a messy frenzy. Not every single one of the viewers is mashing in commands of course, but because anyone with a Twitch account can comment on a public stream, any viewer is a potential player in this wacky experiment.

Currently there are 80,000 players. Despite all the noise and trolls, they were able to make progress in the game and multiple goals have been achieved. Now there is a new control mode "democracy" in which the most popular commands in every 10 seconds are executed. "Democracy" and "anarchy" modes can be switched by a 75% vote."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by gallondr00nk on Tuesday February 18 2014, @11:37PM

    by gallondr00nk (392) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @11:37PM (#2024)

    I've been watching this on and off since yesterday and it's absolutely brilliant. Amazingly, they've managed to get about half way through the game, collecting four badges, though in the last 24 hours I've noticed they've made little progress.

    One problem seems to be the stream on Twitch.tv progressively falls behind the longer you watch the stream, which means that IRC comments are sometimes in reponse to action that happened a minute or more ago. In democracy mode, you see players voting for the same actions three or four times when it's obvious they're all watching different action on the stream.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by DarkMorph on Wednesday February 19 2014, @04:03AM

    by DarkMorph (674) on Wednesday February 19 2014, @04:03AM (#2138)
    Not long ago Twitch made a major adjustment to their video buffering system where the latency is significantly higher. Their intent was to reduce the frequency of occurrences of buffering the video feed for their viewers. Naturally, the trade-off is that you create this very noticeable delay; the broadcaster feels like the chat takes time to respond to what is happening and the viewers feel like the broadcaster is taking time to respond in turn. Across several channels both large and small it seems that the delay is typically 30 seconds.

    I'm not so sure how much drift occurs if you continuously watch a stream without any buffering occurrences for a few hours, but even when you first load the feed you will be roughly half a minute behind immediately.

    Reference: Blog post by Twitch introducing the aforementioned change [twitch.tv]

    • (Score: 1) by gallondr00nk on Wednesday February 19 2014, @09:45AM

      by gallondr00nk (392) on Wednesday February 19 2014, @09:45AM (#2288)

      I'm not so sure how much drift occurs if you continuously watch a stream without any buffering occurrences for a few hours, but even when you first load the feed you will be roughly half a minute behind immediately.

      I can confirm Twitch definately drifts further behind the longer you watch it. I used to be quite into watching Speedrun streams on it, and it was pretty well understood that watching for a couple of hours would add a couple of minutes to the delay.