from Hacker News

Thousands Play a Single-player Game Simultaneously

by toksaitov on 2/18/14, 2:46 PM with 18 comments

• by danielweber on 2/18/14, 3:44 PM

  There are ideas that I see and say to myself "why didn't I think of doing that?" This is one of them. Any of us could have made this in the past several years but no one did so.

  It's fascinating how the community must have to work to protect themselves from griefers. It only takes a few commands to release a pokemon (which happened a few days ago).

  What's the threshold on parsing commands? Does it send a new command every frame, or is the emulator smart enough to let the old command "finish" before issuing a new one?

• by Osmose on 2/18/14, 3:11 PM

  There's a subreddit for discussing the stream: http://www.reddit.com/r/twitchplayspokemon

  Of particular note is the live updates and google doc for current party status. Make it way easier to check in on progress than watching the stream itself.

  (Praise Helix)

• by KVFinn on 2/18/14, 4:58 PM

  People are really upset about the switch to a vote based input system.

  I can sort of understand why. Progress now feels inevitable rather than miraculous. There was places and menus where it is quite possible to dismiss all your pokemon permanently, or use up all the currency in the game and not be able to earn more. So the tension was quite high! Can we really risk going into a building that would let us get rid of all the pokemon?

• by bitwize on 2/18/14, 4:20 PM

  The main character of Pokemon, the game, is named "Red".

  "Ash" is the name of the main character from the anime. I know they're supposed to be the same guy, but serious hardcore players distinguish the two.

• by toksaitov on 2/18/14, 4:02 PM

  There is an interesting development. A five-second rule caused a riot (in the Twitch chat and in the game). So the developer decided to add a system that people can vote whether they want to pass commands directly to the emulator (anarchy) or allow the system to select the next most popular command. Now they can select an appropriate strategy based on a situation at hand.

• by donquichotte on 2/18/14, 3:56 PM

  When I read the title, I thought they were writing about Flapmmo [1]!

  [1]http://flapmmo.com/

• by JonnieCache on 2/18/14, 4:01 PM

  Apparently they discarded their charizard (their starting monster, which is generally the most powerful one throughout the game) pretty early on, and it went downhill from there.

  Most amusing. Reddit in general seems to be extracting an enormous amount of fun from this. Makes me wish I was 12 again. Sort of.

• by trendnet on 2/18/14, 4:12 PM

  All this can turn into a completely new genre of games: turn-based single-player MMOs. The potential is rather interesting.

• by heartbreak on 2/18/14, 7:15 PM

  It's a crowd-sourced fuzzer for Pokemon Red!

• by nfoz on 2/18/14, 3:08 PM

  .... I was hoping this would be about the olympics ;)