Mike Snider

USA TODAY

No monkeys are involved, as far as we know, and the goal is not to recreate the works of Shakespeare.

But a mind-boggling example of crowd-sourced behavior is currently happening on streaming video network Twitch. More than 550,000 Twitch members so far have participated in an attempt to complete the game Pokemon Red.

It all began a week ago when an anonymous member of the Twitch community uploaded a playable version of the original GameBoy game, released by Nintendo in the U.S. in 1998. Those who are watching on the Twitch channel can play along by typing a command in the channel's chat window.

"My goal was to see how a community would interact with a game in this manner, it was been mostly to satisfy my curiosity but I also wanted to gain valuable experience to put towards future projects," said the creator of the TwitchPlaysPokemon channel. The self-taught programmer from Australia prefers to remain anonymous (Twitch connected USA TODAY with the programmer via email.)

The community has done extremely well so far – getting more than halfway through the game -- but whether it can actually finish the game remains to be seen. "The second half is much more difficult than the first half," the programmer said.

Players can type in the commands -- a, b, start select, up, down, left, right – using the chat window. They can also type in "Anarchy" or "Democracy" to change the input mode. Initially, all inputs are applied immediately in "Anarchy" mode; but if 75% of players opt for "Democracy," inputs will be applied in a more democratic method.

The "Twitch Plays Pokemon" merges video games, live video and participation into something new, says Twitch's vice president of marketing Matthew DiPietro. "We've never seen anything like this before," he says. "What is really interesting is this is totally community- driven, organically-growing emergent behavior. We did not do this. We did not create this. This is entirely the creation of one Twitch broadcaster and the community that has now coalesced on his channel."

Twitch's online game broadcasting grew out of Justin.TV and officially launched in 2011. It has grown to more than 1 million broadcasters with 45 million unique viewers; and is available on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, as well as the web.

Beyond the half million-plus who have gotten involved in the game nearly 15 million viewers have come by to watch, at least for a while. The appeal? "It could even be that Twitch Plays Pokémon is a bleak-but-perfect summary of the human condition—a group of people unified behind a common cause that struggles and fails to accomplish even the most basic tasks," wrote Andrew Cunningham in a story on the tech news site Ars Technica.

And it's probably only the first of many such experiments to come, DiPietro says. "The most interesting things that happen on Twitch on any given day and in any given week are the things that come from the community themselves and our job is to support them when they happen."

Follow Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider