For those of you not following the craze that is TwitchPlaysPokemon, I’ll briefly introduce the concept. Using Twitch.tv, a website through which you can stream yourself playing a video game for others to watch and chat about in real time, someone hooked up the 1998 US released Pokemon Red video game (or an emulated ROM image of the game, at least) to be streamed. What made the stream unique was that button press commands, such as A, B, Start, Left, and Up, that were entered into the chat would be read and translate into commands and occur in the game. This means that anyone (with a Twitch account) can control the the main character and cursor, and I do mean anyone and everyone, sometimes over 100,000 people to put that into perspective. Having an audience this massive, all potentially entering commands, means even the most basic tasks are complicated by the sheer chaos of thousands of commands being entered at once.

Some find this style of play boring, and I don’t blame them, to be honest. Sometimes we spend hours doing something that would otherwise take ten seconds, and even the most trival of tasks take longer than they should:

And, yes, there are of course the trolls. Progress is a funny word in the context of TwitchPlaysPokemon, and it takes a while for us to even mouth it out.

But, personally, I’m in love with TwitchPlaysPokemon, though addicted is probably a more accurate description. I played Pokemon Red as a child, and I’ve loved the Pokemon franchise ever since. Like many others my age, Pikachu and all the others had a special place in my heart. I bought other versions of the games, collected trading cards, watched the anime shows, saw the movies… I even dressed up as Charmeleon for Halloween one year! It was a definitive part of my childhood, and certainly continued with me for a while.

But then I went to boarding school, and later to college, and over time my participation began to decrease. Not that my love for Pokemon did, but when the 6th Generation games Pokemon X and Pokemon Y came out on the 3DS, the new Nintendo handheld gaming system which I didn’t have, it seemed like I was finally done playing. The stress and workload of classes and everything about life seemed to suggest that it was time to put down the controller and move on. And I think it’s important to manage one’s responsibilities, and I acknowledge that doing so is a part of life and growing up.

Then a couple of weeks ago, TwitchPlaysPokemon caught my attention. Quickly I fell into the deep trance and obsession along with tens of thousands of others. Suddenly, a game I loved so much came to the forefront again. Even better was that it came with its own new challenge: overcoming the chaos that results when thousands of people can play. In a strange way, we, the players, were our own adversary, constantly walking into walls or stumbling around in circles. Yet at the same time, we were all united in that grand anarchy, all pushing towards the same goals in our own ways. We became our own enemy, and our own hero.

This naturally lead to a lot of inside jokes and laughs, since we collectively felt that many of our mishaps and their odd consequences needed to be explained. We needed to account for the setbacks we constantly and unintentionally caused ourselves so that it made sense to the game’s story, formulating reasons for wasting time looking at items in our possession and giving our Pokemon odd names caused by the equivalent of mashing buttons. Our imaginations ran wild, and lore of all varieties sprung forth to make sense of the madness. We became storytellers, adapting the game’s narrative to fit our own progression through the storyline. We wrote and shared tales of made-up gods and make-believe prophets. We gave traits to items in our bag, and character roles to the Pokemon in our party. Accidents turned into canon, and battles turned into legends. No longer were we playing the game: we were creating it.

Eventually we beat the final bosses, the Elite Four and our rival, Blue. Not too long afterwards we started the next generation Pokemon game, Crystal version, and we are currently progressing through it. Surely, we will begin the process anew.

I could say that this experience has allowed me to relive my childhood, but I don’t think that’s how I would describe it at all. In fact, what has made TwitchPlaysPokemon so addicting is that it has reminded me that having fun in the world of fantasy isn’t only for children. Why is it that only children can have imaginary friends, with whom they can and do save the world? Is imagination really something we abandon as we mature? We stumbled through the game tossing items and releasing Pokemon, but not once did I ever stop believing we could finish the game; we were all so invested in our own creation to give up on it. We birthed a story and sought to see it through to the very end.

That’s what I believe the true beauty of TwitchPlaysPokemon is. We started with a nostalgia trip only to realize we didn’t abandon our games, but our sense of imagination and wonder. What was once our individual endeavors to beat the game transformed into our unified goal of conquering not just the Indigo League, but mostly ourselves. And as we told our little character sprite what to do, we told each other our stories, our own versions of what was happening in that fantastical world we all shared.

I’m going to go back home this summer and trade in my Nintendo DS Lite to help pay for a Nintendo 3DS, and I’m going to purchase either Pokemon X or Pokemon Y. Some people may say that I’m refusing to grow up. They will say that I’m clinging to my childhood, that I need to accept change in my life. But I ask: how can I live in this crazy world without allowing myself to dream about another? That’s what makes dreams special. That no matter what life seems to suggest, we can overcome it and ourselves and accomplish whatever goals we set. That whatever futures we imagine, each one one is possible and valid in its own right. We create our own worlds and narratives in the hopes that we can work toward them in this one.

So I’m going to keep on playing. And while I have little faith that one day, before I retire, I’ll be a Pokemon master, I can tell you right now that I’ll be the very best, like no one ever was.

Your senpai,

Alec Delaney