Living in a Media World

As I worked on the fifth edition of Mass Communication: Living in a Media World during the summer of 2014, a fish named Grayson was playing the video games Pokémon Red and Blue on a Game Boy emulator using a motion sensor aimed at his fish tank. Each area of the tank is assigned to a different Game Boy button, and as he swims into the area, the button is triggered. That a pair of technically oriented college students in New York would rig some equipment to allow their fish to randomly play a video game is not surprising. It’s the kind of hack that might seem reasonable on a late Friday night. The fact that as many as 22,000 people at a time would watch the fish play Pokémon using the video game streaming service Twitch is kind of amazing.

Should you join in on the party, you will see a divided screen showing the Pokémon game on the left, the swimming fish with the control grid imposed over it in the center, and a chat session on the right where viewers either try to kibitz the fish or proclaim that he is dead. (The fish’s owners point out continually that Grayson isn’t dead; he’s just sleeping.)

Watch live video from FishPlaysPokemon on www.twitch.tv

Catherine Moresco and Patrick Facheris, Grayson’s owners, were likely inspired by the efforts of an anonymous Australian gamer who rigged the fifteen-year-old Game Boy game Pokémon Red to be played by the inhabitants of the stream’s chat room. At its peak, as many as 75,000 people at a time were inputting controller commands with text comments. The stream differs from most of the video game viewing that takes place on Twitch because it combines the sport of watching someone play a video game on Twitch.tv with actually participating in the progress of the game.