An infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters would rapidly type the works of Shakespeare. How would they do at videogames?

Currently, 56,312 people are attempting to play Pokémon Red at the same time. At times, that has been as high as 150,000. That is: there is one game of Pokémon Red, and all 150,000 people are controlling it at once.

It is going strangely well.

“Twitch Plays Pokémon” is half art project and half reality show for the 21st century. The idea is relatively simple. Pokémon Red, the 1996 Game Boy hit that kickstarted the Pokémon franchise, is running on an emulator hooked up to Twitch, a website which lets gamers broadcast video games live.

Viewers can enter button commands in the chat window, and they get passed onto the emulator, which enters them in order.

In theory, it harnesses the wisdom of the crowds to find the best way through the game, with playing 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (The game has currently been running for just over eight and a half days)

In practice, however, it looks like this:

Twitch Plays Pokémon

With tens of thousands of players all entering commands at once, coordinated action is nearly impossible. Worse still, the footage is delayed by around 20 seconds, leaving players voting on actions they haven’t actually seen. And even when the decision is obvious, just enough viewers set out to deliberately disrupt events that nothing quite goes to plan.

Take the Ledge (an event which earned its capital L). In Pokémon, ledges are one-way barriers, which the player can jump off but not climb up. One particular ledge, encountered three days after the stream began, was just below a wall. To get past, all the players had to do was press right for a few seconds to walk twelve paces east, then up. Pressing down at any point would send them back to the start.

It took them seven hours to walk those twelve paces.

History

Twitch Plays Pokémon’s creator has mostly taken a back seat in the whole thing. Speaking to the Guardian under conditions of strict anonymity, they expressed surprise at the stream’s popularity.

“I wasn’t expecting it to get very popular at all. When I put it up I was thinking it would peak around 300 concurrent viewers at most, I wasn’t expecting over 100,000!

“I’m sitting at a computer all day and frequently dealing with servers anyway. The biggest change [since the stream began] has been the amount and nature of messages I receive. I have TPP opened on a secondary monitor all day so I can keep an eye on it.”

But while the game mostly plays itself, there have been times a hand from above has been required. The biggest change since the stream began was the introduction of “democracy mode” on Wednesday, which replaced the original “anarchy mode” with a system of votes on which button should be pushed next.

“It was made to make otherwise impossible sections possible,” explains the creator. “I knew when this thing got very popular and the inputs became chaotic that I’d eventually have to make a change that wouldn’t go over well with everyone…

“The problem was that some sections of the game are impossible without some amount of precision with the inputs, precision that just wasn’t going to be possible with the existing input mode.”

Initially, democracy mode was mandatory. But after the backlash, a system was introduced to let players vote on whether or not to vote.

“I made a change to the way inputs are determined but it didn’t go over well so I put in a toggle to switch between the original mode and the new mode. The viewers had already named these modes anarchy and democracy and I thought they were cool and descriptive names and used them.

“I think the community has responded much better than I was fearing: I was expecting viewer [numbers] to drop by a lot more, and to receive a lot more abusive messages.”

Community

TPP has generated a fanatical community, which has taken its devotion to almost-religious levels.

Typically, that would be hyperbole, but in this case it’s accurate. On the second day of the game, players received the Helix Fossil, an item with no practical use. But because it was at the top of the item list, it ended up being selected – often repeatedly – in the heat of battle. The community interpreted this as “turning to the Helix Fossil for guidance”, and so the meme of the blessed Helix Fossil was born.

Other legends were born along the way. Eevee is a low-level doglike Pokémon that can evolve into three different forms depending on which elemental rock is used. The water form, Vaporeon, is tremendously useful because it can use Surf to travel on water, which is crucial for finishing the game. Unfortunately, the players bought and used the Fire Stone instead, turning Eevee into Flareon. The fire dog became known as the “False Prophet”, before being released into the wild a few days later.

It goes on: a high-level Pidgeot is known as “Bird Jesus” for winning so many battles; a Rattata with dig, a move that can escape dungeons, is damned for digging the player out of Team Rocket’s HQ after hours spent navigating a maze; a Drowzee is the “Keeper” of Flareon after the two were placed in storage next to each other.

The whole thing has a tongue-in-cheek element, a self-aware attempt to find method in the madness. Even without the community, TPP is frequently gripping. Watching the community attempt to name a pokémon (party members have included “x(araggbaj”, “AAJST(????” and “aaabaaajss”), or feeling dread as the cursor hovers over a command which will destroy hours of work, is strangely compelling, even if it’s bookended with hours of dull repetition.

It’s provoked essays on the nature of anarchy and democracy, fan art detailing the history of the faith, a mention in XKCD and a lot of faintly terrible memes. There are even spin-offs, such as Twitch Plays Pokémon Plays Tetris, which takes the same commands and puts them into a hacked version of Tetris.

As I was writing this, the players had reached the most risky section yet, an area called the Safari Zone. It’s one of the few places it’s possible to render the game unfinishable, by running out of money entirely, and it relies on near-perfect commands to be entered 270 times in a row. But then they did it anyway, coming together and producing detailed maps to help with co-ordination.

The players are well over half way through the game, now, with three gym badges to go before they can fight the elite four, and finish the game.

It can’t be long, and the creator is already planning what comes next. “I’ve received a lot of requests to continue with the Pokémon franchise after the Elite Four and the Pokémon Champion get defeated, so I’m going to do that. I’m still deciding which of the generation 2 Pokémon games to go with.”

It’s tempting to draw wider conclusions about the success of Twitch Plays Pokémon. As tech blogger Andy Baio writes, it is “to me, the most wonderful thing online right now, a microcosm of the internet at large.”

• Half-Life 3 – the game that doesn’t exist