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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."
(Score: 2, Interesting) by lothmordor on Wednesday February 19 2014, @07:20AM
Seems like this is an attempt to use crowd sourcing to play a game, but I'm not really sure what the developer's goals are. I've seen videos where a game reviewer will play (somewhat) based on feedback from an IRC audience, which actually works well for solving puzzles. In that case, the reviewer had the freedom to ignore the input if it was nonsense or conflicted with his current goal. Effectively, he was acting like a filter to the input stream.
In the case of this pokemon game, the only filter seems to be "majority rule", at least in the democracy mode. The fact that very much progress has been made at all is impressive, although whether this is due to intelligent collaboration or the 80K inputs acting like a fuzzer seems uncertain.