At the moment I’m writing this, in the middle of a work day, there are 75,000 people watching a fidgety video game character jitter restlessly in the corner of a pixelated black and white room. Twitch Plays Pokemon is complete and utter chaos, and it’s the latest piece of internet ephemera to tweak our collective imagination so strongly that millions have jumped in to participate in just a few short days.

Twitch Plays Pokemon; The Internet Watches

Some background, if you aren’t caught up: Twitch Plays Pokemon is a live stream of the original oldschool black and white Pokemon, modded to be controlled by the Twitch.TV community chat itself. Typing Left or Right, A or B, and so-on actually carries out those commands in-game. All of the typed commands are registered in-game, to the best the clunky old Pokemon software is able to keep up.

This was an amusing an innovative bit of silliness when the stream first went live last week. It was fantastic to type “left” and actually see the on-screen Pokemon trainer walk left. It got even funnier when a couple hundred people were in the room, all trying to collectively guide the trainer to victory. But the numbers grew, and grew. And grew. At its peak more than 115,000 concurrent viewers were watching live. Over 17,000,000 total views have been logged. With thousands issuing commands, game progress ground to a halt. It was anarchy.

“ It has existed just one week, and it’s gotten over a million people’s attention.

Twitch Plays Pokemon is absurd. It’s entertaining and maddening in almost equal measure. But perhaps more important than the idea itself, it has existed just one week, and it’s gotten over a million people’s attention.

The Internet Makes Everything Faster

The bandwagon effect is very real, and most certainly wasn’t invented in the internet age. Kilroy was here. The hula hoop. The pet rock. Pogs. Furbies. Gangnam Style. Fads have existed as long as humans have shared ideas with one another.

But fads are inexplicable and disappear in the blink of an eye, almost as quickly as they leapt into our collective awareness to begin with. They can’t be engineered, or forced, or faked. They’re a force of sociological nature. Just ask any marketing team that was sure they were engineering the next big viral video hit.

“ It seems every internet meme has a predetermined amount of fuel.

in jokes and language , factions vying for attention and mindshare, imitators gifs , and plenty more . It’s an entire subculture, created out of thin air, in under a week. Every morning, it is possible to wake up and spend an hour on a TPP wiki or subreddit, just catching up on how the scene developed overnight.

It seems as though every major social trend, every fad, every internet meme has a predetermined amount of fuel. Decades ago, a fad might have burned for years. But now memes explode onto the internet, burn incredibly brightly, and blow themselves out in weeks, or days. As soon as they get on the evening news, more or less.

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There’s a real feeling of acceleration. The Harlem Shake feels like the oldest, most worn-out, most cringe-worthy thing now, doesn’t it? Imagine if someone you knew said they wanted to make a Harlem Shake video - how that would make you react. And now consider that the meme is just one year old!

Rage comics rose to internet prominence in 2008 and enjoyed a good 3-4 years in the limelight before the tables turned and the crude stick figures began to feel cringe-worthy instead of cool. But just a few years later, we would give the Harlem Shake a month, at best. It’s possible this is just an apples to oranges comparison. Maybe rage comics were just funny enough to last for several years and Harlem Shake wasn’t. Or did we all just burn through Harlem Shake’s set amount of fuel that much faster? It would certainly seem so.

Google search volume for Harlem Shake was massive... for two weeks.

Video games are not immune to this increasing pace of adoption and replacement. Remember that summer we spent obsessing over Farmville? (It’s OK - I won’t tell). Then a couple years later we spent a month playing Draw Something. And now, just a couple weeks ago, we collectively obsessed over Flappy Bird... for a week. These might all be mass market social or mobile games, but console and PC gamers flit between the flavor of the moment more and more rapidly these days, too.

We now have nostalgia for game concepts like mascot-powered 3D platformers that were barely gone to begin with.

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The internet ruthlessly weeds out inefficiencies in all things. Why stock 20 items on shelves in malls all over the country, make people drive there, and pay thousands of employees to sell those items? Just keep them in a central warehouse and sell them on a single online storefront. Then figure out 2 (and 1) day delivery. Then get to work on 30-minute drone deliveries. Why try to meet a date in a bar, or through friends, or a singles event, when an algorithm can find someone tuned exactly to your interests? Why get the news delivered to you just once or twice a day?

I won't pretend to fully understand the impact this acceleration is having on video game culture. All I know for certain is that the ease that a truly good idea can go from 0 to cultural phenomenon is now virtually nothing, as evidenced (most recently) by Twitch Plays Pokemon. Good news for innovators. Bad news for the status quo.

Fifteen Minutes of Fame. Literally.

The amount of time it takes an internet in-joke to go from Reddit’s front page to a Cringe Subreddit’s front page is now under one year. Twitch Plays Pokemon captured the attention of millions in under one week.

How much more room for acceleration is there? Could a trend rise and fall in a single day? Could a meme have a literal fifteen minutes of fame, before it becomes uncool to hit the Retweet button?

Is any of this even a problem?

When an idea rises one year and then fades into cliche the next, a lot of anxiety can be created trying to keep up. Is Tumblr still cool? Are all the kids still sharing pictures on Instagram or have they moved on to something else? So in some ways the increasingly rapid adoption (and eventual abandonment) of trends and ideas is a comfort, not a concern. Once it's fast enough, it all just becomes noise. It’s a roiling mass of remixes and ideas and enthusiasm. It feels messy. It feels more like a real approximation of how ideas flit around our own minds day in and day out, but on a global scale. There’s no need to keep up, because there’s nothing to keep up with.

So, if you checked out Twitch Plays Pokemon and just didn’t get it, don't worry. There's sure to be a new idea next week.

Justin Davis is the second or third best-looking Editor at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter at @ErrorJustin and on IGN