From Parody to Shared Language: A Study of Lexicalization Processes in Twitch Plays Pokémon

This paper will study, with the tools of rhetoric (Bonhomme, 2014) and narratology (Genette, 1982; Ensslin, 2015), a specific case of video game reappropriation by players: the Twitch Plays Pokémon phenomenon. Launched in 2014, this experiment consisted in making Internet users play the game Pokémon Red on the video streaming platform Twitch, using the chat as a controller. 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 became itself raw material for many other appropriations (fanarts, fanfictions, memes and even a pseudo-mythology; Pruijt, 2014; Ramirez et al., 2014), which quickly structured themselves into a very singular media mix (or “ludo mix”) ecosystem (Steinberg, 2012). Twitch Plays Pokémon thus illustrates a double movement that is characteristic of video games reappropriations (Bonenfant, 2015): by reversing or reconfiguring game conventions, players’ creations deconstruct these conventions as much as they establish them as norms. The derivative works thus generate a shared language, i.e. they make reappropriation mechanisms gradually enter the gaming “vocabulary”. Twitch Plays Pokémon is no exception to this “lexicalization” process: despite its apparent unplayability, it became the basis of a viable game, a fictional universe and even a new video game genre. Through the analysis of several “figures of appropriation” and their evolution throughout the game, the paper will expose this formalization process.