In case anyone hasn’t been following it, Twitch Plays Pokemon is a social experiment involving an emulated version of Pokemon Red and thousands of people trying to play it at the same time. An anonymous user created a customised IRC bot that is capable of transcribing chat messages into game inputs for the emulator. Over the last 8 days this has lead to the channel overloading the Twitch servers.
A post on the Twitch blog by Jason Maestas, Director of Customer Experience, explains that the number of people interacting in the same room is causing an unusual amount of stress on the chat system. This has lead the team to move TPP to its own dedicated server; the same one that they generally use for streaming large events like the League Championship Series.
The actual game has progressed very slowly, mostly due to the immense number of players all trying to accomplish different goals. With some 100,000 users at the peak, TPP has seen events like the starter Charmander being released into the wild, a strange obsession with the Helix Fossil, and rising calls to free the party Pigeotto (whom some are calling the Bird Jesus).
There is also a system for players to vote to use either a democratic system for controls or remain in pure anarchy. Democracy has been winning out as of late, although this could just be a sign that people want to finish the game. Those interested in playing along can take a look at the TPP channel, or just catch up at the Reddit livestream.
