A Murderer Named A

The premise was this: tens of thousands of people all typing commands simultaneously into a Twitch chat, and whatever they typed became live inputs in a game of Pokémon. Democracy versus anarchy as competing control modes. The result was chaos that somehow, improbably, completed Pokémon Red after sixteen days, then Pokémon Crystal, and now Pokémon Emerald—with a trainer the crowd had named A, who at any given moment was either making meaningful progress or running in circles mauling Pikachus because thirty thousand people couldn’t agree on a direction.

What I kept thinking about was the protagonist—this player character dragged in every direction at once by a crowd with no unified intention, somehow still moving forward. It was almost a metaphor for something, though I was never sure what. Democracy, maybe. Or just what it feels like to exist online in 2014, pushed and pulled by forces that don’t coordinate, still ending up somewhere.