Twitch Plays Pokémon: Remix as a Fictional and Playful Matrix

This paper (based on a chapter of my PhD dissertation) will explore, with the tools of rhetoric and narratology, a specific case of video game reappropriation by players: the Twitch Plays Pokémon phenomenon.
Launched in 2014 by an anonymous Australian programmer, this experiment consisted in making Internet users play the game Pokémon Red (originally developed for the Game Boy) on the video streaming platform Twitch (with the help of a bot retrieving the messages written in Twitch’s chat and converting them into commands). Concretely, while Pokémon Red was broadcast live online, any user could enter in the chat the name of one of the Game Boy’s keys (“A”, “B”, “up”, “down”, “Left”, “right”, “select” or “start”) and see this message be transposed into the corresponding action in the game. The principle was, in other words, to share the control of a single avatar (the protagonist of Pokémon Red) between tens of thousands of players whose objectives could be very different, even contradictory.
Noteworthy in many respects, the phenomenon will be considered here as a way to apprehend the process of reappropriation (or “détournement”) of video games by players. Specifically, Twitch Plays Pokémon allows us to examine the alternation between two constituent processes of game appropriation, which are always in tension: the deconstruction of codes and the codification. Indeed, not only Twitch Plays Pokémon is a transposition of Pokémon Red (in a new media space) which redefines the original game’s meaning and functioning (including by sabotaging its gameplay, since the very control of the avatar becomes tedious), but the new device built in this way quickly became itself raw material for many other appropriations or détournements (creation of fanarts, fanfictions and memes by players; or even invention of a pseudo-mythology giving meaning to this chaotic gaming activity).
Twitch Plays Pokémon thus illustrates a double movement which is characteristic of video games reappropriations: by reversing, revealing or reconfiguring pre-existing games’ structures, players’ creations deconstruct them as much as they establish them as models (worthy of being rewritten) or as norms (codified enough to be the support of new reappropriations). The derivative work can, moreover, stabilize itself in a new code, in a shared language which is also a system of rules and constraints for future creations. Twitch Plays Pokémon is no exception to this “lexicalization” process (through which the reappropriation mechanisms gradually enter the “gaming vocabulary”): on the almost anti-playful basis provided by this device have actually emerged a viable game, a fictional universe and even almost a gaming genre. Through the analysis of several “figures of appropriation” and their evolution throughout the game, I will expose this formalization process.