Twitch Plays Pokemon is the wildest thing I have ever watched and I frankly can’t stop.
If you’ve been living under a rock (or you’re just not up on Pokemon news, that could be a thing, in which case, your life must be so very sad), there’s a Twitch chat room with far too many people in it undergoing what the creator refers to as a “social experiment.” Each person in the chat submits a command they want the player to do and, with a 20-30 second delay, the Pokemon Trainer does the command.
It’s made it the most frustrating game of Pokemon ever played but also the best. Because they’ve been playing for five days straight, have four badges, and have somehow maneuvered two cave mazes.
Due to the delay and trolls, we have often found our poor trainer opening his menu, checking his bag, and looking to the Helix Fossil he acquired in Mount Moon.
Which of course, does nothing.
But in the middle of a Pokemon battle, better open my bag and check on the Helix Fossil.
About to cut down a tree. Better open my bag and check on the Helix Fossil.
I’m trying to enter this cave. Gosh, I need to make sure I haven’t dropped my Helix Fossil.
The people in the chat room have come to the conclusion that the Helix Fossil is an artifact of the Pokemon Trainer’s religion and that his ultimate goal is to resurrect Omanyte from the fossil.
Oh yes, they’ve brought religion into the game.
Even to the point where, when players in the chat were discussing that they needed a Pokemon to learn Surf, some had said “Let’s just wait until we get a Lapras later in the game. That just gets handed to us and will be much easier to do and we won’t run the risk of needing to deposit anybody in the PC and accidentally releasing anybody.” (We’ve already accidentally released our starter, so our current strongest Pokemon is a Pidgeot we call Based Pidgeot or Bird Jesus)
Others said “Let’s pick up the Eevee from Celadon Town! We’ll go to the Department Store, buy a Water Stone, and get a Vaporeon! It will be much better.”
We wasted all of our money on 8 Poke Dolls and an accidentally purchased Fire Stone.
Flareon has been called a heretic in this game.
Flareon is literally Satan to these players.
You weren’t there for the Celadon Department Store, okay. We got lost in there for one whole day and I watched it happen. It was awful. The work we put into getting this dumbass Flareon was awful.
So, we had to deposit Flareon in the PC because he was utterly useless. Which was when we accidentally released our Charmeleon.
The players determined this was simply what the Helix Fossil wanted and we had to trust in our Bird Jesus and never follow false gods again. Just let Lapras happen. Trust in the Helix Fossil.
Now, the players had been stuck in Rocket Hideout on those damn moving arrows for exactly two days. So the creator instated a chatroom based vote where you could decide on anarchy—the way we had been playing the whole time with individual players participating in a free-for-all—or democracy.
If 75% of the players had agreed on one form of governing, that was the system we were currently using in chat.
Democracy involves each player submitting a command and the game tallying to see which action is voted for most and popular vote wins.
This game has user-inserted religion and now creator inserted government.
The players spend so much time arguing over which form of government to use that we often get nowhere.
This is the weirdest virtual reality based Japanese RPG I have ever seen.
I have no idea what kind of social experiment the person who created this chat room is trying to do—they wish to remain anonymous—but this is positively delicious mayhem and I may never see this many people excited about a game made in 1996 again.
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