Twitch users are about to join together to take care of a Tamagotchi. Following in the "Twitch Plays" tradition, events that had thousands of viewers simultaneously mashing buttons in an attempt to play games like Pokemon and Dark Souls, Twitch Plays Tamagotchi will do the same for the retro virtual pet simulator. Previous "Twitch Plays" descended into chaos, but ultimately proved successful; thousands of users managed to catch each and every original Pokemon, and even defeat the final boss in Dark Souls.

The Tamagotchi variant will likely be a bit less exciting. There are only a handful of commands for the virtual pet toy, letting you do things like give food or turn on the light, and every five seconds the most popular button from the stream's chat will be pressed. But it won't be using a virtual Tamagotchi emulator: instead, the team behind the project has hooked up an actual Tamagotchi with a robot finger, which will press the appropriate button at the appropriate time. "How long will it live?" the creators ask. "That's for you to know and decide."

The stream starts at 1PM ET today — and you can check it out at the Twitch embed below.

Watch live video from tamagotwitch on www.twitch.tv