Overview:

TwitchPlaysPokemon was an experimental video game experience in February 2014 where hundreds of thousands of participants played an emulated version of Pokemon Red through Twitch's livestream platform. The crowdsourced effort took just more than 16 days to beat the Elite Four. In this talk, game researcher and PhD candidate Alex Leavitt will conduct an analysis of the TPP phenomenon, analyzing traces collected from chat logs and fan forums to show how the crowd made TPP successful, why a flash fandom emerged, and how game companies might conduct similar experiments in the future.