Continuing the time-honored tradition of a whole bunch of folks trying to play the same video game at the same time via the popular streaming service Twitch, there will now be a stream dedicated to folks trying to keep a Tamagotchi alive.

Yes, the little digital creature that lives in a physical plastic egg with a screen. Hundreds of viewers will be trying to feed the critter, keep it alive, kill it and generally press buttons.

"Twitch Plays Tamagotchi," which is the obvious name when you think about it, started at 1 p.m. EST today — so it should already be going by the time this is published — and the set of controls is easy enough: interested parties need only type A, B, C or reset (also RST) to send commands to the device. Like, an actual, physical Tamagotchi. Every five seconds, the most popular command from the chat will trigger a robotic finger that the folks behind the project have set up to actually press physical buttons that correspond to the buttons on a real Tamagotchi from 1997.

Unlike several of the other games played in this manner previously, like Pokémon, there's just ... not as much to do with a Tamagotchi. This kind of stunt tends to draw interest because watching a mob try to do something complicated can be both fun and terrifying at once. There's no arguing that successfully raising a Tamagotchi can be a complex task, but there's only so many combinations of buttons that folks could potentially want to push at once.

How long will it live? Will it just start back up after dying? Or, perhaps more likely, how long until it dies the final, permanent death of all Tamagotchis to date — alone and forgotten after being discarded?

Source: Twitch Plays Tamagotchi via The Verge