This reminds me a bit of Twitch Plays Pokemon[1]. In that setup, it was almost impossible to accurately control the character, which meant it behaved close to a random walk. In addition to hundreds of thousands of (disagreeing) people typing at once, there were dozens of seconds of latency between the inputs and the observed results. In the end, the hive mind had to figure out how to guide that randomness towards success.
the first twitch plays pokemon was wild because nobody knew if beating the game was at all possible, and if it were, nobody knew how much time it would take
note that TPP inputs resemble random inputs but aren't! The game is made easier because people could and did collaborate through the chat, and simultaneously made harder because griefers could and did attempt to sabotage the game
the only thing that made progress possible imo was that there is no game over screen, and at death you dont lose anything too important; however there was a clear "winning" ending screen (pokemon is a game where you can win but you can not lose), so the collaborative effort to win the game was at an advantage
random inputs put a bound on the expected time it takes to beat the game, but the time is astronomical. the game was beaten much much sooner than this theoretical bound, which means that collaboration eventually won out. this only happened imo due to social effects: if griefers were more determined and more numerous, perhaps the first iteration would be still ongoing
after the first, it kind of became much easier, because people already knew it was possible in principle
> pokemon is a game where you can win but you can not lose
As I recall, there are several ways you can lock yourself out of being able to complete the game (releasing unique pokemons, primarily), so there was a good deal of trepidation & danger when it came to some critical moments and when the trolls got the upper hand.
You are correct, there are ways to do so. There are also soft-locks which are states which are just incredibly hard to get out of (heat death of the universe type scenarios some times). Pikasprey yellow is one youtuber who chronicles things in that area.
But I think the commenter above meant that Pokémon was a game which was possible to complete in a twitch plays style because it doesn't result in game over like an FPS or platform we would for example.
It's a tad harder than that. "Common" softlocks generally put you in the elite 4 rooms, with 1 pokemon that is underleveled and knows splash, with all others released. These elite 4 rooms are generally the only rooms that you can enter but not leave (except by beating the trainer or losing), and then you create additionnal constraint to prevent a combat loss from freeing you, like purposefully not picking up a lot of optional items that would make it easier to bounce back.
I recall the way controls were interpreted from the chat was changed a few times to get past it being too random. At some point a voting window was made and the most common command from the last n was accepted
Anarchy and Democracy
TwitchPlaysPokemon now has two modes, anarchy and democracy.
Anarchy mode is the "old" mode, where everyone's inputs are applied immediately.
Democracy mode is vote-based and has a more sophisticated input system.
In order to switch from one mode to the other, the mode that isn't active needs 75% of votes as indicated by the dotted line, the current percentage of votes is indicated by the black line.
I wonder if this kind of thing could be implemented into a Reinforcement Learning model.. Like Playing pokem via Playing Twitch plays pokemon with Reinforcement Learning.
I'm thinking of how a house fly can or .. sheep .. can suddenly just go nuts and bounce about to get unstuck from somewhere.
The rules were changed on the fly too. Adding a "democracy mode" where inputs are suspended and a majority rule per action, made many parts significantly easier (or perhaps even taking the difficulty from impossible to possible).
> nobody knew if beating the game was at all possible
A few people including myself knew. Eventually entropy would settle and once the initial hype was over, it was only a matter of time before the chat would finish the game. Saying that "nobody knew" seems like historical revisionism.
If it were just up to randomness with an unmodified ROM, then (barring a glitch) they would have soft locked at the Safari Zone which costs some currency to enter and needs to be traversed to the Surf HM in a relatively tight number of moves. There's only a finite amount of money in the game, so they can only fail at most a few hundred times before the game becomes impossible to beat.
Meowth was only available in Pokémon blue. Once you get to the top 4 and can beat them money is infinite, but in red you theoretically can fail at the safari zone.
As a part of it I think most people believed that it was possible. There were strategy docs and images constantly being linked constantly in chat and it was clear the incremental progress was being made.
I was there for the first few iterations of TPP and it is probably my favorite moment of the internet.
The lore created around TPP was insanely good and captivating, like ascribing god-like status to certain Pokémons and finding funny interpretations of in-game events and random Pokémon names
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch_Plays_Pok%C3%A9mon