Twitch Plays Pokemon: A Case Study in Big G Games Dennis Ramirez University of Wisconsin Madison dennispr@gmail.com Jenny Saucerman, Jeremy Dietmeier University of Wisconsin Madison jenny.saucerman@gmail.com, dietmeier@wisc.edu ABSTRACT Given enough time, a thousand monkeys sitting at a thousand typewriters will produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Under a similar premise, the phenomena that is Twitch Plays Pokemon has set out to see if order can arise from chaos. Can a thousand gamers at a thousand computers can collectively beat the game Pokemon? In this paper we analyse the phenomena of Twitch Plays Pokemon using Gee’s (2003) framework of big G Games ((G)ames). Keywords Pokemon, Twitch Plays Pokemon, Big G game, Participatory Culture, Narrative, Affinity Space, Player Types, Stumblecore Man. This isn't a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters. It's twenty thousand monkeys at a single typewriter, and half those monkeys are screaming and desperately trying to progress while the other half throw shit everywhere. It's wonderful. —Anonymous, Twitch Plays Pokemon Red Archive INTRODUCTION Why would anyone willingly play a game with over 60,000 other players? Anyone who has played games knows how hard it is to share a controller with one other person, let alone 60,000 other people. The selfproclaimed social experiment “Twitch Plays Pokemon” (TPP) provided players with the unique opportunity to attempt just that, and quickly became an internet phenomenon (know your meme, 2014). Sixteen days after its debut on February 12, 2014, TPP garnered over 36 million views, 1,165,140 active players, and over 9 million inactive players, with a peak of 100 thousand people participating simultaneously (Chase, 2014). Jim Gee’s (g)ame and (G)ame theory provides a useful framework for understanding how the “Twitch Plays Pokemon” game and community came about and why it became so wildly successful in a short period of time (2003). Although current literature has described how (G)ame arises around (g)ame, there is a shortage of theoretical work regarding the cyclical influence of (g)ame on (G)ame. “Twitch Plays Pokemon” is therefore of theoretical interest because it provides a case study in the cyclical nature of (G)ame informing (g)ame. (G)ame and (g)ame Gee defined (g)ame, in the case of videogmaes, as a piece of digital media (or even transmedia) and Proceedings of DiGRA 2014: <Verb that ends in ‘ing’> the <noun> of Game <plural noun>. © 2014 Authors & Digital Games Research Association DiGRA. Personal and educational classroom use of this paper is allowed, commercial use requires specific permission from the author.