Twitch Plays Equestria Online
Part 1
It was the kind of idea that one might wind up going to hell for, so of course like all grand plots to overthrow the natural order it struck while I was doing something as mundane as reaching into the fridge to grab something to drink.
I walked back to my desk and tried to ignore the thought in the hope it would go away, after all I had a chess tournament to train for and if I didn't win that then putting off moving to Korea until afterwards would have been a giant waste of time that I could have put towards finding a new sponsor for my eSports career.
Yet it was such a temptingly simple idea, though if learning to play strategy games has taught me anything its that the best plans are almost always the simplest ones. I sat down and tapped my chin in contemplation. Simple in conception maybe, but now that I thought about it the execution would be problematic to carry out in the long term.
I had never been into bronies or ponies or whatever they called themselves, the whole my little pony thing had been just another weird news story in a world full of them and was really better off just ignored.
I sighed. That was before the pony pad...
Now all the top gaming live streams were dominated by the thing and it wasn't hard to see why. Like a lot of other professional gamers I relied on money from donors for when sponsors didn't come through, a twenty dollar donation or a five dollar subscription to my gaming stream was a large part of what let me pursue a career playing strategy games instead of being a tax accountant. Wins at big poker tournaments were certainly nice when they happened but you couldn't rely on them with there being so many other people out to win the same money.
Usually we got followers through a combination of playing VERY well and being entertaining and accommodating towards our viewers. But we were mostly still playing the same games, the games being played in eSports tournaments. The pony pad had no tournaments, no leagues, no rankings. What it did have was the ability to craft amazing, individualized stories and challenges tailor made for each individual player.
The lets plays had taken off almost immediately, but it was quickly leaving the traditional professional gamer core in its dust because no two games were alike. Some pro gamers had tried streaming the game only for their audience numbers to plummet as people watching realized they could have their own pony pad instead of just watching someone else play.
If this trend continued it could very well mean the death of the eSports community...
A troubling thought to be sure, especially for those gamers like myself who aren't interested in the my little pony fandom. But contemplation may have just handed me a personal solution.
While it was true that every one could buy their own pony pad and have an amazing time on their own with it there was one experience they couldn't get that I could supply. That being a community experience.
I grinned as I grabbed my notepad and started scribbling down what I might need to pull this off.
Not long ago there had been an interesting social experiment called Twitch Plays Pokemon, in it the audience members of the stream were the ones controlling the game through simple commands like up, down and A,B or more often Start.
Impossible to adapt to a dialog driven game like the pony pad right? Well what if the audience had an avatar acting on its behalf? Someone used to the experience of thousands of people watching him play a game and making suggestions in mid game? Someone who wasn't at all personally interested in playing out some pastel colored pony fantasy and who would focus solely on fulfilling the audiences commands to the best of his ability?
My smile only grew as I thought this through. Playing the game in this fashion would be the easy part, the only hard part I could think of would be monetizing it with an inventive enough donation system...