How a Week-Long Game of Pokémon Became a War of Religion

What started as a relatively small, crowdsourced play-through of Pokémon has become something of a global cultural experiment — spurring fan-created mythology, a battle of political systems, and even warring religions.

On Feb. 13, an anonymous programmer started Twitch Plays Pokémon. Viewers of the gaming service Twitch would enter various commands — up, down, left, right, a, b — in a chat window; those commands would be performed in the classic Nintendo game Pokémon Red and Blue

At first, this experimental interactive game had a fairly small audience of around 1,600 people, but it has since amassed a following of over 100,000 viewers, becoming one of the most popular streams on the streaming website, Twitch. Read more...