14 DAY TRIAL // The nightmare or social phenomenon, depending on how you regard it, that is Twitch Plays Pokemon is now back firing on all cylinders, and the hive mind is now busily conquering Kalos in Pokemon X/Y.
The Twitch Plays... thingy has been pretty popular with people who don't know that other worthwhile games exist in this world and they would be much better off reading a book anyway, as evidenced by the heaps of wasted coins during the Twitch Plays Hearthstone event.
The main premise is that users logged on to twitch each select an action, and then from all the possible scenarios one is randomly chosen and played out, resulting oftentimes in disastrous suicidal moves and a copious amount of laughter.
The last time around, Twitch Plays Pokemon used the 1998 Pokemon Red, from the GameBoy, emulated on a computer and streamed to the masses to elect its fate.
Players tuned in and entered simple commands such as up, down, A, B or start in the Twitch channel chat, and the commands translated into in-game results and, of course, eternal glory.
The only thing is that when you have 50k people all typing contradictory commands and struggling for control of the game, things tend to get a bit weird. Especially when trolls started spamming the Start command, in order to make the rest of the chat input translate into menu navigation instead of useful game commands.
This is also how pokemon names such as Abby, Jay Leno and Bird Jesus popped up. And they were then released into the wild.
Anyway, the group is well on its way to becoming a poke-master, and this time around the community isn't playing an emulated version of the game, but is instead using a modified Nintendo 3DS handheld in order to enjoy Pokemon X and Y.
Using an actual 3DS means that people are able to take advantage of the game's online features, resulting in even more chaos than ever before.
The anonymous streamer hosting Twitch Plays Pokemon on the 3DS is back with Wi-Fi, after a short period of having it turned off.
Twitch Plays Pokemon is an interesting social experiment that led to people getting pretty riled up about political decisions such as whether the game should be played in anarchy mode or democracy mode, where the command that got a majority of votes would be selected instead of simply picking one at random.
In any case, nobody is sure what exactly the TPP initiative is testing, but it's now back with Pokemon X & Y, so enjoy!