by Nick Dowell
Twitch Plays Pokemon has beaten Red and has moved onto
Crystal, but is that really necessary?
When playing Pokemon Red, TPP was exciting because it was a
new and totally original concept. Never before had anyone really done something
like it. Everyone got totally immersed in the jokes and the backstory and the
conflicts with each other and it was incredible. People sat on the edges of
their seats to watch Red beat Blue in that final confrontation. When all was
said and done, it was a good, climactic ending to the whole game.
But the excitement is kind of gone now that there’s another game to play.
When I heard that Red was beaten, I was excited that the
social experiment had been completed. It was a fun adventure to see how thousands
of people would learn to cooperate with each other to reach a common goal. When
the game was beaten, the experiment should have ended. But now we’re on to a
new game. It’s no longer an experiment. It’s just...a thing.
What do I mean by “a thing”? Good question. In this context, a "thing” is basically a trend that becomes popular, gets a ton of knockoffs,
and then fades into obscurity. Think of any major trend in the past few years.
Gangnam Style was a thing. Nyan Cat was a thing. Heck, Flappy Bird, which made
tons of money, was a thing.
And soon enough Twitch Plays Pokemon will be a thing.
There’s really no way to stop it from happening. Literally
anything that becomes popular on the internet becomes a thing. It’s the way of
the world. We get bored of what we have and sit around, waiting for the next to
trend to make its way around the web. All we can do is sit, scroll, and click
around to find the newest way to distract ourselves from the real world.
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Image: Forbes
