Game Theory: How 70,000 Pokemon Players Sabotage Themselves
minimaxir.com
minimaxir.com
On the other hand, this stream isn't random. If it were truly random, the player would just move pointlessly in a horrible Brownian motion. It's nonsensical, to be sure, but in some weird way it encapsulates knowledge about the game, and as a result the game makes progress.
It sort of enlightens other places where true randomness is required, and the presence of any information or understanding radically changes the behavior of a system. In cryptography, even the slightest weakness in the probabilistic underpinnings of a cryptosystem can render it useless. In finance, even the slightest edge over the market can be leveraged to produce gains.
An actually randomly (well, pseudo-randomly) controlled Pokémon game.
This wouldn't have been a problem in Generation 2 and onwards, because there you can exchange numbers with trainers to have rematches which can yield more money.
And then the process of smashing random buttons at the PC restored the precious helix fossil.
And the players decided to accept this wonderful result and not tempt fate, and left to continue on their journey.
Still with the rattata.
This one I just love reading about. I think it's because of the way people write about it. It almost sounds like Hitchhiker's Guide or something the way it's so random but accurate.
Trying to explain this to people in person has resulted in some odd looks but I still try...
^1 Which we actually do constantly, i.e. athletes being mostly weighted random number generators, but at least then there is a thin veneer of motivations at play.
But going to the PC vs. staying away from the PC is very much a goal-based decision. A fight between people that want to change the pokemon/items being carried and the people that are unwilling to take that risk, with majority rule.
Check this out. You can clearly see it the majority of the commands move in the desired direction (or at least some of the time).
Such a shame that twitch changed streaming technologies recently. It used to be easy to get as low as 2-3 seconds of latency. A world of difference in something like this.
For example, that ledge, it was easy to get enough 'right' movement to overpower malicious 'down' commands, because the first input in a direction only turns the character. But there were 'down' commands needed to get to the ledge, and the lag caused them to keep pouring in after they were no longer needed.
This article is a nice overview of the spectacle but its premise is fundamentally flawed.
Since twitch.tv recently added up to 30 seconds of stream lag, you want to spam start during the trickiest movement sections to minimize latency between the stream and gamestate. This is most important in ledges and mazes!
More of the chat catches up to the current position and starts putting in the right input, which actually has a higher chance of being accepted, after the start spam delay.
The obvious parallels are to a public-facing computer system, where attackers are constantly trying to get in. The difference, here, though, is that no one has privileged access. I find that an interesting thought experiment: is it possible to have any security when attackers have the same rights as legit users?
Isn't this roughly the problem that bitcoin set out to solve?
And that question, everyone already has equal rights on the internet, that's why security software focuses mostly on identity verification.
And on individual places in the internet, people do not have equal privileges. For example, there are things that the moderators here on HN can do that you and I cannot.
That's achieved through identity recognition. All computers are generally treated the same.
I love to see new implementations in gaming, I feel the gaming industry really cultivated me as a hacker, and Pokemon was my first hack....anyone remember getting "Missing No."
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.
In democracy mode you can compile a sequence of inputs. left2 will move left twice, left2down2 will move left twice and down twice.
But I have no idea how this could be solved (best thing would be multicast directly from source to viewers, but this doesn't work on the open internet, which it why sites like twitch exist).
> If trolls have absolute power, they will use it and they will use it without mercy.
> A five-second rule was introduced at one stage to try to bring some order as several players typed commands at the same time. Whichever command was typed the most over a five-second period was carried out.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26240191
Unsure what happened to it, though.
The stream can now vote between the two modes and it'll switch if one receives enough votes.
A version that played the game on your local PC (with periodic save state syncs maybe) would probably be more robust (and quicker to play).
It's simply because aggregate makes the game so much easier that it makes the stream seem less interesting.
Progress is not inevitable with the original system, it's miraculous. With democracy it actually plays the game somewhat normally.