Twitch, a website dedicated to streaming video games, was launched in June 2011. Currently, over 1 million unique broadcasters stream their gaming experiences and nearly 45 million more tune in every month.  Typically, these broadcasters range from popular gaming personalities to everyday gamers looking for an audience. However, on February 12^th, 2014, a channel appeared on Twitch entitled Twitch Plays Pokemon. This channel featured a script that captured specific inputs in the channel’s chatroom (up, down, left, right, “B”, “A”, SELECT, and START) and sent them into an emulator of Pokemon Red. At the beginning of the channel’s life, playing the game was nearly impossible due to the emulator being incapable of processing the thousands of commands being inputted at once. There were also legions of trolls, spamming the chat with a continuous stream of “START” commands, pausing the game endlessly.

            A new wrinkle was added to this “social experiment” six days later: all movements became subject to vote. After a 15 – 30 second window had passed, the program would tally up all inputs over that time period and execute the most popular command. This created widespread outrage as people argued this type of democratic system directly contradicted the random, elaborative social narrative that had occurred over the course of the game. In response, the creator (who still remains anonymous) enabled viewers to switch between two modes “Anarchy” (the original method of playing the game) and “Democracy”. Switching to Anarchy required a majority vote, while shifting to Democracy required a supermajority.

            On March 1^st, 2014 the Twitch viewership had successfully completed Pokemon Red. Over the course of the 16 days, 9 hours, and 55 minutes it took to beat the game, the channel had reached nearly 36 million views. Twitch Plays Pokemon has now completed 10 full Pokemon games, ranging from Pokemon Emerald to Pokemon Omega Ruby. 

Pokemon games become repetitive and unchallenging after many playthroughs since the structure of the game and narrative is always the same. In 2010, a student at UC Santa Cruz decided to make the experience more interesting, by setting two rules:

1. He could only capture the first Pokemon he encountered in each new area.

2. If a Pokemon fainted he would consider it dead and release it.

Rather than simply increasing the difficulty, these rules unexpectedly created new bonds for the player and added a new dimension to the games. He found new appreciation for Pokemon he would have previously never bothered to capture, and worried deeply for his team, knowing any knockout would mean goodbye. This student drew up a few crude comics of his adventure and posted them on the 4chan /v/ideogame board, and since then countless Nuzlocke runs have been attempted, completed, or failed, many of them recorded in comics or stories. By adding these constraints, a sense of permanence and loss were added to these nostalgic games, and I loved discovering the community of artists and their variety of takes on Nuzlocke comics and characters. A Nuzlocke run is a blend of documentation and storytelling, and everyone has a story of triumph and loss to tell.Artists can poke fun at the inconsistencies of the game, but ultimately, the core message always revolves around friendship and honoring lost ones.

-Kevin

http://www.nuzlocke.com/pokemonhardmode.php?p=1

http://s7.zetaboards.com/Nuzlocke_Forum/forum/30751/

http://www.deviantart.com/art/Nuzlocke-Run-2-194249597

oldversion.com

oldversion.com is an overtly anti-corporate website that provides guests with plenty of outdated softwares. They see users as seeking one or more of the following benefits from the site: downloading software that does not have spyware or software as a gesture of dissatisfaction with the software develop; providing software for people with older hardware; disallowing corporations from dictating which version of software will be used; and archiving cultural artifacts. The subtitle of the site, unsurprisingly, is “because newer is not always better!” Software is available for different operating systems and greatly varied: from nostalgia-driven programs like MSN Messenger and AIM to utilitarian CD burning software to virus-inducing programs like LimeWire. The site is equal parts nostalgia, counterculture, and utilitarian.

The website, in how it presents itself and doesn’t, touches on themes we’ve seen throughout the quarter. The site is a form of tactical media, providing programs that companies do not want used after releasing an update (and somewhat actively push users off of). The website asserts that the development of software programs is not as linear as we might think — that better software perhaps does not follow the aging of the Internet. The website is politically bent and yet somehow subdued enough to induce nostalgia about how we used to interact with the our computers and the World Wide Web.

I had forgotten about this story that blew up Reddit’s servers when it came out until just recently, but anyone that has not read through it should take the time to do so. Three long-winded Reddit posts (long-since deleted, but screenshots are still up on imgur) detail the story of the end to two brothers’ marriages. Taken at face-value, in summary form, the story is not incredibly exciting, as we have all likely seen similar stories in movies, etc. However, watching the emotional state of this man change as he provides real-time updates to his situation gives an incredible insight into an experience that many people have struggled with, but may otherwise have difficulty explaining to others. It’s fascinating to watch this man defend his story, which many have dismissed as fake, and provide his own self-conscious commentary. Real or fake, this aspect of the story is what makes it so riveting. The post is very genuine—as a third party observer we clearly see the mistakes and insecurities of the women in the story, but on a closer l

Perhaps almost as interesting as the story itself is its response. A quick Google search of “Jenny Reddit” reveals links to Fox News coverage of the story, hundreds of memes, and, my personal favorite, a series of animated videos portraying the first few segments of the story. Redditors fiercely defend their views as to the authenticity of the story, complaining about inconsistencies, spelling errors, and the like. I desperately want the story to be real, because although I too find this man irritating, his tale inadvertently reminds us that everyone is human. True, Jenny and sister-in-law Carly made a colossal, marriage-ending mistake and lied about it, but the man and his brother also followed and filmed these women without their consent and then immediately divorced their respectively spouses upon the initial discovery that their significant others cheated (and not to mention posted all of it online, and then hinted that they wished to make a profit from selling the story). There was no real discussion or openness between any of the parties involved, demonstrating that all four main characters are irrational and self-centered beings with their own issues, something with which anyone can identify. It also leaves the reader really wanting a final update.

A link to the animated rendition of the story:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-OqSffDjfPk2bdVR8SFGO3yDylWi5XlL