Crowd Sourcing Play

So Twitch Plays Pokémon  (affectionately known as TPP) has been all the rage lately. For those who don’t know, somebody set up a Twitch stream (Twitch being the game streaming service) with a ROM of Pokémon Red and allowed players to input commands in chat. Soon thousands and thousands of people were participating.

 As expected, having people simultaneously input commands is not a great way to play a game. At first TPP rose in popularity because of how funny the concept is. The character in the game moves completely randomly due to all the inputs (and the 14 second delay between chat and game doesn’t help either). Yet somehow, the players got 3 gym badges in a couple of days . That fascinates me to no extent. If you look at them playing, it looks completely random, but there is enough agency there to actually play through the game. Thousands of players, surely some of them being trolls, are able to to play the game, although slowly. There were of course troubles (releasing the starter Pokémon or other top Pokémon into the wild for example). But all in all, It’s been a success in a way only the internet can make something a success. For example, here are all the religions that have popped up in TPP.

When I first saw this, I told my roommate that I would have done it using a tick system. Every 5 seconds, the chat would accumulate the inputs as votes and do the command with the most votes. Turns out they ended up adding a Democracy/Anarchy slider which allows for the same idea. Players, in addition to typing in commands, can vote for democracy or anarchy. Anarchy mode is how the original system was set up. But if enough people vote for democracy, the tick system is activated. It’s really interesting how the players prefer anarchy. Only when the game is really difficult do they end up going to democracy mode.

I’ve always been a fan of crowdsourcing, even since one of my professors at CMU, Luis von Ahn, talked to us in class about his work with reCAPTCH and The ESP Game (check those things out). Crowdsourcing playing a game is something I never thought of, and it’s fascinating. I wonder what it takes to design a game that’s meant to be played with a crowd, and how other examples of crowdsourcing play do it. Here are my random musings on the subject:

It would have to be more than a simple voting system. There’s a reason the TPP players prefer anarchy. It’s more fun, more interesting. I feel like, with voting, you feel like your contributions to the action in the game aren’t as significant (maybe why kids our age don’t vote in the real elections?). In the TPP model, democracy mode is only enabled when trolls could easily ruin the gameplay.

In the Civilization community, there is an interesting game type that players have made up called Democracy games. A group of players play a single game together from the point of view of a single Civ. But they run the game as a government. There is the finance minister and the military minister. The President gets to actually take the turns. There are election cycles. The save file is passed around from president to president. It’s a great way to add role-playing and social interaction to a game which otherwise doesn’t have it. Perhaps a specifically-for-crowdsourcing game would use a similar system.

Another option might be to have a game where all the players have the same goal, but there are many roles. And people in the crowd would need to be able to perform all the roles to make sure the game goes according to plan. A simple example of what I mean is this scenario: There is button A and button B, and both need to be pressed 100,000 times, but if A is ever pressed 1000 more times B, you lose (or lose hp or points. Now extrapolate that to a better mechanic than button pressing and it might be successful.

All in all, this is a design space that’s pretty open. Hopefully TPP inspires people to try designing more games that can be played by a crowd.