Since the famous instance ofTwitchplayingPokemon Red, programmers have found ways to replicate and expand upon the social experiment created by it. Recently, a creative programmer thought ofa new way to playPokemonthrough an entirely new and unique medium.
That programmer is a Twitteruser known as @screenshakes who found a way to program their Twitteravatar to playPokemon Crystal.Pokemon CrystalonTwitterfunctions similarly toPokemonon Twitch: Twitter users can comment movements and actions below the tweet that the character inside the avatar will follow, allowing users to progress through the game with their combined efforts.
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Much like TwitchplayingPokemon Red,playingPokemononTwitteruses a democratic voting system to decide what action the character will take next. The voting system is on a 15-second timer, with a movement being made after the votes are tallied. A scripting program on Lietard’s end takes the user comments and turns them into commands, which then are used to create an image of the character’s movement in-game.
This image then replaces Lietard’sTwitteravatar, showing a movement or action occurring. After the 15 seconds are up and these actions occur, the next round of voting begins. Only the first word of comments are counted as votes; this serves a double-sided purpose of stifling spammers and also allows users to comment along with their actions.
Lietard has actually accomplished this feat before, having first programmed their avatar to playPokemon Redin the same manner. ThatamazingPokemononTwitterplaythrough saw over 90,000 users participating and miraculously ended with the defeat of the Elite 4 after 40 days of posting. Lietard also found new ways to optimize the experience asTwitterplayed through the game, changingPokemon Crystalso that the game would save automatically with each round of voting and posting the Pokemon users had caught in Lietard’sTwitterbanner. As of right now, the banner still shows the final roster of PokemonTwitterbeatPokemon Redwith, but that will most likely change very soon as Lietard updates their banner with the newPokemon Crystalroster.
Fans of series deviating from thePokemonformulamay have hope for the future as well, as Lietard also tweeted about using their avatar forSuper Mario Land, a feat that seems completely impossible at first. After all, the reason that Twitch andPokemonworked so well is thatPokemondoes not require quick actions or reflexes;Super Mario Landrequires both.
However, using Twitter as a medium gives Lietard an advantage over Twitch: since the avatar is a still frame and the input changes only one frame at a time, it is potentially possible for games likeSuper Mario Landto be played as well.
