Friday, February 13, 2015

Twitch plays pokemon

Guys, I will now talk about something very near and dear to my heart: pokemon. As a child, I grew up with amazing creatures and could make them fight with one another to become the champion. Last year, a development came into being called twitch plays pokemon. What is it? It's a server that has a pokemon game running, and everyone can put their own inputs into the game. This means that there can be thousands of people controlling a single game. This marks the one year anniversary of the original journey, and they have recently started a new game in commemoration (I actually just watched them beat Brock). I find it amazing that we have no way of coordinating the game whatsoever, yet somehow, the twitch community completed our goal and became the champion. Inside jokes developed, a minor religion was formed (praise helix), and bonds were made. This is very reminiscent of our democratic society. By all means of logic it should fail entirely, however, we have risen to the call, and for the most part we have succeeded. We have made several mistakes along the way (see the infamous ledge incident), but for the most part we have succeeded in our goal of progress, is it slow? Maybe, but the journey along the way makes it all worth it.

2 comments:

Ross said...

Your comparison between the Twitch Pokemon and our society today is very interesting and I agree with your points about how order can arise from chaos and that progress can be made. I also find it interesting that he Twitch Pokemon world actually developed its own religion. Remember the Might Helix aka God? The one who has returned from the dead and aided the Twitch Pokemon players i there goal of becoming the champion. I realize that this is not technically a true religion but when you have people blaring "ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY HELIX" in the chat it is a little hard to ignore. This is just one other connection to our society that I noticed. I am sure there are more: Flareon the defector is another.

Sri Korrapati said...

It's funny how even though these actions are random and chaotic, humans assign value in a deeper meaning to the events in the game. To an extent this parallels our world where the collision and movement of particles are random and chaotic, but they cause everything everything in our world. Does this mean our life is meaningless?