We're a little over a week into the phenomenon that is Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP), and the "social experiment" is still going strong—so strong, in fact, that it has overloaded Twitch's servers. A blog post by Twitch Customer Experience Director Jason Maestas noted that the game "has put enormous (and unforeseen) stress on our chat system." The game was moved to its own dedicated server on Sunday, something normally reserved for large Dota or League of Legends tournaments, but there were still "some fundamental issues with [Twitch's] chat infrastructure that required a review."

Twitch engineer Michael Ossareh has also written a pair of blog posts in response to TPP, one of which is about improving scalability for events as large and fast-growing as the game. On the technical side of things, Twitch has added more redis servers to handle the load, since the number of join requests and messages had pegged its servers at 100 percent CPU usage. It has also added more alerts to notify Twitch when this sort of thing happens. Fixing "some configurations that were not optimal in [the] chat stack itself" has helped to lighten the load as well, though Ossareh couldn't be more specific when we contacted him for comment.

More interesting is his first post about the philosophy behind Twitch's IRC-based chat system. Though other chat systems are newer and more feature-rich, Twitch sticks to IRC because it's "a lowest common denominator technology" that's easy to build custom things on top of.

"Similar to how Twitter succeeded due to its API and the clients that third parties developed for it, our chat succeeds because IRC is incredibly easy to integrate with and our custom bindings are few and far between," Ossareh wrote. "Thus you get the same experience on our client as you do in your IRC client. We've had people build auto moderation tools, poll tools, random chatter selection tools... and now massively multiplayer Pokémon! Who'd have thunk it, eh?"

As for the game itself, Twitch's progress has been slow, but the Internet hivemind is further along than it was the last time we checked in. Players have moved past the Team Rocket maze they were stuck in to Lavender Town, where they're currently trying to scale the Pokémon Tower. They've also caught (and released) several more Pokémon, including a Gastly lovingly referred to as "Rick Gastly."

While we worried a bit that the then-new Democracy mode would distract from the game's schizophrenic charm, Twitch still seems to be playing the majority of the game in the old-style "anarchy" mode. As a perhaps-unintended side effect, the number of participants spamming the "democracy" and "anarchy" commands has cut down on the number of players spamming random button presses, making the game a little less chaotic. While the democracy mode and a throttle on the Start button have both been added to alleviate spamming, the creator of TPP told Polygon earlier today that there are no current plans to add more features to make the game more beatable.

"I didn't want to babysit the stream and nerf the game," the as-yet-anonymous creator said. "I'd rather the game be beaten on its own terms (even if it is a romhack)."

As always, you can follow the action as it happens or use the Google document or Reddit livestream to stay abreast of the lunacy.