"w", they shout, and "a", and "s", and "d", a mob of discordant voices

July 31, 2017 7:19 PM

Twitch Plays Battlegrounds, in which a formless crew of chatroom drivers on a Twitch stream try to play battle royale circles-of-death surviv-o-shooter plunkbat.

Previously:
- Twitch Plays Pokemon
- Twitch Plays Dark Souls
- Twitch Installs Arch Linux

posted by cortex (9 comments total)

To set expectations: a thousand people are currently trying to convince a crawling robot to get into a dune buggy. They've been at it for a couple minutes now. They managed to get him to stand up, and then to crouch, but he's still not in the dune buggy.

Now he is looking at the sky. There is a tree. He's running under a tree. No one knows where the dune buggy is anymore. There is only sky.
posted by cortex at 7:29 PM on July 31, 2017 [18 favorites]

Back before voice-to-text software was really any good, I would read a bit of text into a microphone, let the translator turn it into text (badly), then read THAT text into the microphone, and iterate on it over and over and over until it had become just strings of language-seeming noises.

What I'm saying is there's something I find deeply relaxing about watching the interface of a computerized system that's built to deal with human input, and the willful corruption or sabotage of that input. It feels creative. This (also Saltybet) scratches that itch veeeeery nicely.
posted by penduluum at 7:33 PM on July 31, 2017 [2 favorites]

I LOVE THESE Twitch plays streams. They're epic in how absurd they are. It's lovely watching this kind of crowd-sourced insanity.
posted by Fizz at 8:03 PM on July 31, 2017 [1 favorite]

Also recommended: Awful Squad.
posted by axiom at 8:07 PM on July 31, 2017 [5 favorites]

the beast that shouted WAWSDDSWASDDASWADASWASADASSAWWDSSA at the heart of the world
posted by Sebmojo at 8:12 PM on July 31, 2017 [5 favorites]

I find the nihilism of PUBG goes well with a lot of different things; the absurdity of Awful Squad's trivia game episode or Breakfast & Battlegrounds sedate music intro. This takes it to a whole new level - thousands of people trying to work together to keep one avatar alive. There's something poetic about it; like we're finally seeing the Internet used for direct democracy and this - a man unable to get into a dune buggy - is the result.
posted by nubs at 9:07 PM on July 31, 2017 [4 favorites]

I had this on for a bit before, and they got to 10th by basically just crawling in a circle for a while and then getting stuck on a wall. I probably need to rethink how I play multiplayer games…
posted by danb at 9:08 PM on July 31, 2017 [6 favorites]

I LOVE THESE Twitch plays streams. They're epic in how absurd they are. It's lovely watching this kind of crowd-sourced insanity.

Video games, yes. Elections ... no so much.
posted by sebastienbailard at 1:19 AM on August 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

So, not a crowdsourced bot, but Mefi's own cortex shares his experience with Operation Autorun - playing PUBG where all he does is autorun to the centre of the circle.
posted by nubs at 1:15 PM on August 11, 2017 [1 favorite]