Twitch Plays Pokemon: A Streaming Phenomenon

The original box art of Pokemon Red Version.

On a small, brightly lit screen, a pixelated hero in black and white seems to consider the path in front of him. He faces a ledge that stretches five spaces right and turns one space up. Below the ledge is a similar path that leads right back to where he is standing now. If he makes the mistake of moving down one space, he will have to return to the start and try again. He takes a tentative step forward, followed by another, and another, and soon he is just one tile square away from continuing on his journey. But suddenly, he faces left, then upwards, then left again, and to his own dismay, he hurtles himself over the ledge, forcing the player to try again from the very start. This process, which would normally take a regular player somewhere around ten seconds to complete, has taken over 4 hours.

The game is Pokemon Red Version, and it revolves around an easy to understand system where the player travels around the world, collects Pokemon (creatures that help you in battle), and battles other trainers to make progress. Despite its simplicity, the live stream of the game has over 100,000 viewers on Twitch.tv, the internet’s most popular streaming website for video games. The reason why? All 100,000 viewers are playing. The stream itself is called Twitch Plays Pokemon, and it is the most popular gaming event of the year.

Pokemon is a video game franchise that many fans of gaming have been familiar with since they were children, but never has it captured the attention of so many people quite like this. The stream Twitch Plays Pokemon began on February 14, 2014, and has accrued hundreds of thousands of followers in just a little over two weeks by attempting something that has never been done before: allowing everyone in the audience to contribute to the game.

The anonymous programmer who set up the Twitch Plays Pokemon channel began the stream as a social experiment. The premise was brilliant: take what is usually an individual effort, i.e controlling the character in Pokemon, and hand it over to a larger audience. But what began as a simple social experiment to see how a group of people would work together evolved into a full blown internet phenomenon. Within days, the humble 300-500 player audience that controlled the game swelled to include over 100,000 viewers who actively contributed to the game play. And as time went on, the purpose of the stream began to evolve as well.

Twitch users enter commands by sending simple messages in the chat menu.

Members of what was now becoming a community began to create lore, in-jokes, and give nicknames to the Pokemon that Red, the main character, had captured. Over time, even more amazing events took place. A religion formed within the community, praising an in-game item as “god” and asserting that one of Red’s Pokemon was the proverbial messiah or prophet. Soon, dissension set in as the religion broke down into various sects that worshiped different items or Pokemon as the “true god”. After the creator of the channel installed a new voting system that made communicating commands easier, a rift formed between those who supported “democracy” and those who supported “anarchy”. Artists from across the world began to create fan art for the channel, including photo-shopped versions of religious paintings like “The Last Supper” featuring the cast of the game. Soon, almost every social media site featured posts related to the games, with the sub-forum on Reddit exploding to more than 100,000 followers, found here.

An example of some of the fan art and "religions" that developed in the play through

 Some players were such big fans of the experiment that they went so far as to broadcast the stream in public venues as entertainment, like offices, bars, and even college classrooms. Now the question that everyone is asking, of course, is what does all of this mean for streaming?

  With an average audience of 75,000+ on the channel, found here, and ad revenue pouring in from every person who tunes in, we know one thing for sure: the person behind Twitch Plays Pokemon is making a nice profit off of the stream. According to an article from Pro Gamer Hub, a streamer on Twitch makes around $2.00 for every 1000 people that watch ads on their stream. With just 50,000 one-time viewers, this would means that the channel would make $100, but with over 200,000 favorites, and a rotating audience that usually peaks around 100,000 people, we can safely assume that Twitch Plays Pokemon is making more than that every few hours. Other streamers seem to have sniffed out the potential profit as well, and several streamers have attempted to replicate the system on their own channels, but all have been met with limited success.

It's unclear how long the channel might last, although as of today, March 3, the channel is still pushing 80,000 viewers during the day. Regardless, the programming that Twitch Plays Pokemon has introduced to the streaming world has made an undeniable impact on the streaming community and opened new doors of possibilities for interactive streams.