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“Twitch Plays Pokemon” was a project created by an anonymous Australian programmer in 2014. The project ran on the video game-streaming site Twitch, meant to be played by any user who visited the stream alongside thousands of other users. Commands for the game were typed into the chat, allowing any user to influence the gameplay. The programmer wrote a script in Python to take the commands typed in chat and send them to an emulator running the game. They also created a program in JavaScript that tallied the moves so that those in chat knew what others were doing.
The programmer stated that they initially created the project as a social experiment. While there were some slight changes to make certain inhibitory actions less frequent, I admire that Twitch Plays Pokemon brings together a huge amount of unrelated people for a single purpose. Thousands of people were all working towards the purpose of completing the game. No matter all of the small moments in the game where it seemed like nothing would happen, Twitch chat was able to beat the game. This extreme crowd-sourcing has only become recently plausible technologically, and it illustrates how we can bring people together with technology.