PBS Idea Channel

Does Twitch Plays Pokemon Give You Hope for Humanity? (2x44)

Air date: Mar 05, 2014

You asked, and we delivered: a Pokemon episode!!! Specifically Twitch Plays Pokemon, which it turns out is a metaphor for ... well, lots of stuff. Twitch Plays Pokemon is a version of Pokemon Red controlled via chat on the video streaming site Twitch. And TENS OF THOUSANDS of people are playing this one game simultaneously! How can a group steer the direction of a game? And what can this tell us about anarchy vs democracy? (Maybe that the US government is a bit more like Pokemon than we realized.)