Twitch Plays Pokemon? More Like Twitch Hates Democracy

In the 11-hour “clip” that we were assigned to watch last week, the mechanics of Twitch Plays Pokemon (TPP) were pretty simple. Players typed one of seven basic commands (left, right, up, down, a, b, and start) into the chat, and a Twitch bot read each command as it came in before translating it into the corresponding in-game action. The game was made interesting by the fact that there were thousands of players inputting commands all at once, turning what would usually be a simple game of Pokemon into a multiplayer game of such epic proportions that effective communication and coordination between all of the players was impossible. As a result, the avatar character’s actions were sporadic, inefficient, and uncoordinated, which served to add a new challenge to an otherwise outdated game and turned TPP into an overnight sensation.

What the video didn’t show, however, was the interesting change that the streamer in charge of the game (who I’ll call the “gamemaster” for simplicity’s sake) made on the sixth day of play. By that point, the stream had grown so popular that there were tens of thousands of commands being inputted at any given time. To deal with the high volume of players, the gamemaster developed and launched what became known as “Democracy Mode.” Instead of implementing every single command as it came in, this new mode had the Twitch bot total up all of the commands that players inputted over a ten-second period, then implement only the action that had been commented the greatest number of times.

The change was met with such huge backlash from the TPP community that the gamemaster quickly implemented a dual method of play in which the game could switch between Democracy Mode and Anarchy Mode (which represented the original style of gameplay). This compromise was unsatisfying to many players, however, who took to Reddit and other social media platforms to blast Democracy Mode for “ruining the game.”

A comment from the r/twitchplayspokemon subreddit complaining about Democracy Mode.

There’s some merit to these complaints. Back in week 1, when we were talking about how to define a video game, a concept that came up over and over again was the idea of “arbitray obstacles.” These are hindrances that, although they make a game needlessly more challenging, are accepted by the game’s players because it makes gameplay entertaining and fulfilling. In TPP, the main arbitrary obstacle was the fact that it was impossible to get the thousands of players to agree on anything, so the chat was constantly being spammed with conflicting commands. At first glance, Democracy Mode seemed designed to take this obstacle away by bestowing order on the TPP universe, so it makes sense that fans of the game would be upset -- after all, the last thing they wanted was for the game to become boring, which is what the removal of arbitrary obstacles often does.

When you really look at it, though, Democracy Mode didn’t change the base difficulty of the game. Sure, it introduced a 10-second lag time between moves, which frustrated players because it made the game “more boring to watch” -- but to be honest, the game was pretty boring to watch even before Democracy Mode because of how little the avatar character was able to accomplish. And, while Democracy Mode enabled players to “work together” in a way by combining their individual commands, it didn’t do anything to make communication between players easier, so the commands that players were inputting were still completely random. In other words, Democracy Mode was just as susceptible to trolling as Anarchy Mode was; it simply raised the threshold on the number of trolls that needed to work together in order to actually disrupt the game. But, because it also raised the threshold for the number of non-trolls that were needed to get a productive action through, both effects were basically negated, preserving the base level of difficulty.

The vocal outcry against Democracy Mode continued regardless, and an interesting trend began to show up in the comments about it on Reddit. People weren’t just saying that Democracy Mode made the game “boring” -- instead, they also frequently mentioned it as being a method of “cheating.”

Comments taken from the r/twitchplayspokemon subreddit that associate Democracy Mode with cheating.

Unlike most methods of cheating in games, which often involve discovering glitches or exploiting inconsistencies in the game mechanics, Democracy Mode was a developer-sanctioned update to TPP. So what led so many people to equate Democracy Mode with cheating?

Because TPP is technically a multiplayer game, we can apply some of the concepts that Tony Manninen outlined in “Interaction Forms and Communicative Actions in Multiplayer Games.” The intensely negative reaction to Democracy Mode is akin to “normatively regulated action,” which “occurs when members of a social group act in accordance with common values.” In this case, the “common value” was the belief that Anarchy Mode is the only “real way” to play the game, as it was the method of play that the original players of the game had access to. Because this group of original players was relatively small compared to the huge audiences that TPP began to accumulate a few days into gameplay, this belief in Anarchy Mode’s superiority served to unify these original players as a single social group. (Newer players who had been introduced to the game after Democracy Mode was already implemented would be less likely to have such strong feelings against it, therefore identifying themselves as outsiders to this “OG group.”)

It must be noted, however, that TPP is a special case of normatively regulated play. This is because there are so many players (even in that OG group) that it’s pretty much impossible to actually implement norms that everyone will follow. Manninen mentions that interaction forms are important to multiplayer gameplay because interactions between users are richer than interactions with systems, so enabling things like normatively regulated play makes a game experience more fulfilling. But what happens when those types of play are half-realized, as in TPP? The OG group could by no means guarantee that every one of its members would be against the implementation of Democracy Mode because, yet again, they were simply too great in number and had no common communication space. But it’s undeniable that they were attempting to do so by posting on Reddit and other forums frequented by TPP players. And, despite all of the debate that went on, there was no breakdown in the game itself; Twitch managed to collectively complete the game after 17 days of play. So how do the play styles that Manninen mentions actually contribute to multiplayer games? Is it possible that failure to implement these styles effectively can actually improve the game experience in certain cases, such as how the failure to realize normative play in TPP contributed to greater fan discourse and thus enriched the sense of community among players?