The current (i.e. right now) events happening in Twitch Plays Pokemon are an exciting trainwreck to watch, and strangely fascinating, but they also raise an interesting puzzle: Is it actually possible to control the game well enough to accomplish anything?

The pool of players inputting commands into this game have, several times, managed to band together well enough to accomplish quite complex tasks, and often share information well enough to have an idea of their current goal, but so far, nothing has been proposed that’s reliable enough to manipulate menus without risk of failure. Can it be done?

There are five major hurdles to controlling the game:

1) Knowing the Game State.
2) Inputting two commands in a row.
3) Figuring out what commands to input.
4) Convincing everyone else to do what you say.
5) Co-ordinating simultaneous inputs.

Can these be overcome? I think so:

Introducing, THE HELIX ORACLE

The Helix Oracle is a solution that allows one benign dictator to control the inputs to TPP without the use of a botnet. It requires the support of enough players to force a majority vote, so it only solves issues where everyone is frustrated enough to resort to it.

The Helix Oracle is a dynamic website, controlled by one individual who has enough knowledge of the game to be able to figure out what commands are required to solve a specific task. Everyone who wants to support this player simply loads the website and follows the instructions given. This much is fairly obvious, but how to overcome the specific hurdles above?

1) Knowing the Game State.
In Anarchy Mode, it is impossible to know the game state. Commands happen too fast, and there is too much lag to accurately predict the game state. In democracy mode, it is possible to force the game state by having all supporters of the Helix Oracle spam the B and DEMOCRACY commands. This cancels out of all menus and leaves Red standing and staring into space.

2) Inputting two commands in a row.
Due to the game lag, and the difficulty of co-ordinating players more accurately than within an error of 10 seconds or so, it’s not really possible to reliably input two democratic commands in a row. It is however possible to input command chains in democracy mode. With use of the wait command in the chain, it’s possible to construct a command that deposits or withdraws a specific pokemon or item from the computer, or walks through a particularly tricky area of the map. It’s also possible to re-order pokemon, teach abilities, it should even be possible to give a pokemon a specific name at the name rater.

3) Figuring out what commands to input.
So far, reddit has shown that it’s not trivial to figure this out, however if the Helix Oracle supporters are patient, the dictator can input half a trial command to help figure out the correct command exactly.

4) Convincing everyone else to do what you say.
In order for the players to believe the command will help, they need to be able to see it in advance and think about it. It should be presented with a clear explanation of what it’s meant to accomplish, along with a full plan of what the current use of the oracle is meant to accomplish. Most of the time, people will not want to follow the oracle, at which point it should be used to move Red safely away from all computers, and then used to command that people input “Anarchy”

5) Co-ordinating simultaneous inputs.

  • This is the trickiest aspect. In order to control the gamestate before an Oracle Command, all players should have a window open watching the Helix Oracle, and be spamming the B and Democracy commands.
  • The Oracle website itself should ideally be as simple as possible. The top of the page contains an image of the helix fossil, a link to an explanation page for how it works, and a second link to a page showing the current goals of the oracle (e.g. “Deposit venomoth into the computer, get lapras out of the computer, switch to anarchy mode”
  • Underneath this information, there should be in large green text the current command to be spammed. (This will usually be B, Democracy)
  • Underneath this, there should be a large clock showing the current UTC. (Or, if you prefer, a countdown timer)
  • Underneath the countdown timer, there should be the “next command” along with the time at which it should be inputted. (e.g. B5wait5await5await5down etc etc etc)

The dictator operates the website by taking their time to figure out the right command for everyone to input, then they update the page to show the next command, along with the time to input it – ideally giving 20s or so of warning so everyone is ready. Ideally they should also try to predict their own lag, so they can time the input window to start a couple of seconds after a command is inputted.

Everyone else just needs to watch the site, spam B and Democracy, and then paste the command-chain into chat when the timer hits zero. Once you input such a command, you wait for 20 seconds, then return to spamming B and Democracy.

This implementation should allow one player (with the support of many others) to control the game when needed.