It was a crazy idea that rational beings thought wouldn't work, and yet, it somehow has been. Take thousands of players from all corners of the intrawebs logged in to Twitch and have them input their collective commands into a chat to play a game as complicated as Halo. What, by all means, we thought would have been a boring, painful, even hilarious experience to watch, turned out to be not bad at all!
It took a while for the collective consciousness of Twitch players to get the hang of it. But the training wheels are now off and they're actually progressing. An amazing feat considering how complicated a 3-dimensional game with so many commands even for just one player to control that Halo is.
Halo: Combat Evolved is the latest game to be added to Twitch Play. Other games which had a run on the gaming phenomenon were Pokemon and Legend of Zelda. The latter two are relatively simple and make sense on a platform like Twitch. But Halo requires much more coordination, problem-solving, and navigating over a 3D environment, not to mention aiming and other fine-tuned movements.
And yet, you can't help but be hypnotized by the unfolding game. Even the simple task of walking over a bridge took hours for the players to complete.
As some observers have noted, if you were watching a single player aimlessly wandering through the world of Halo and randomly shooting like a headless chicken, you'd be bored out of your mind. But take the same game and have the thousands of Twitch Play users input their commands at the same time and you get a beautiful mess that you just can't peel your eyes away from, almost like a train wreck.
"Watching a crowd of people fight over inputting single commands, which might get Master Chief killed or might somehow actually save his bacon, is a lot more fun," said Kotaku writer, Luke Plunkett.
And wouldn't you know it, hours into the game, they're actually getting somewhere. Progress may be slow and somewhat random - even miraculous - but maybe, just maybe, the collective commands will somehow get Master Chief to the end.
Watch the live stream of Twitch playing Halo: Combat Evolved below, or join the hive mind yourself.
Watch live video from TwitchPlaysHalos on www.twitch.tv
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