Five days into “Twitch Plays Dark Souls” and it’s utter chaos

Only five days into the challenging “Twitch Plays Dark Souls“, utter chaos has ensued within the chat and has thus affected the gameplay. It was quite ballsy for Twitch to move on from Pokémon games to Dark Souls without any easier, buffer games, but it’s an accomplishment worth working for. And, man, are they working. 

Social Experiment Code: Dark Souls

By playing Dark Souls with the community of Twitch not only do the players face difficulties with the challenging game, but they face problems with people who just want to watch the world burn. Dark Souls is a difficult enough game to play alone, but when the chat is erupting with different movement commands, it takes the camera-delicate game and turns it into tomfoolery. 

A special feature that was used last year in “Twitch Plays Pokémon” was the democracy add-on that takes a certain vote from the chat to accomplish an action in game. While the vote is accumulated over a period of seconds, it still takes the most popular choice in the chat. When Twitch decided to play Dark Souls, they chose the anarchy feature instead of democracy, that completes the exact opposite, causing the chat commands to just happen instantaneously in-game. 

Watch live video from TwitchPlaysDark on www.twitch.tv

Accomplishments Thus Far

There aren’t many accomplishment markers so early on in the game, but with having a large community working together even climbing a ladder feels like a mountain. 

So far in Twitch Plays Dark Souls, the community has made through 5 markers that are impressive:

1. Making it through character creation screen.
2. Making it through the character creation screen a second time.
3. Reaching multiple bonfires.
4. Swinging weapons enough times to break them.
5. Encountering the first boss in the game, Asylum Demon, and hitting it once. 

Even though most of the time Twitch Plays Dark Souls revolves around hitting walls and missing targets, it’s quite an amusing stream to watch and even take part in. I can’t wait to see how long it takes Twitch to play through the game, and if possible how many times the character died in the game. The stats would be very interesting.

At the current stream there’s been a record 909,495 total views, but only 1,713 active viewers at the moment. It seems that Dark Souls is not nearly as popular in views as Pokemon, but does add a more challenging factor to the playing field. 

The Twitch Plays Pokémon Phenomenon

The original social experiment called “Twitch Plays Pokémon” was created by an anonymous Australian programmer who formatted the game to receive input from the Twitch chat. The programmer stepped out of the spotlight during the streaming so the experiment could be as organic as possible without interference.

During the growth of the experiment, the statistics showed that a record 120,000 viewers at peak, and a record 55 million views in the first episode. Having such a large following. There were 100,000 participants at one point all inputting chat commands, which landed a Guinness World Record for the experiment. With the total playtime accumulating 16 days until finishing Pokémon Red, it’ll be a miracle if Twitch Plays Dark Souls can make it through the beginning by then.

What do you think about this new challenge put forth by Twitch? Have any bets on the day total for completion?