Twitch Plays is a category of channel on Twitch in which groups of people of varying sizes get together to collectively play a game that in most cases is meant to be played by a single person. It's inherently chaotic, but sometimes it works out better than you might expect. In 2016, for instance, Twitch played Punch Club and beat the entire game in 36 hours, easily surpassing the developer's expectations.
Now Twitch is playing Teamfight Tactics, Riot's League of Legends-based autobattler, and it's doing a pretty job of it. Viewers can enter commands to buy, sell, place, and move champions, and they'll be carried out (based on consensus, I assume). Other commands enable rolling for a new store to get different champions, using in-game taunts, and clicking various end-game buttons to keep the action rolling.
Whoever set up the channel was apparently dubious about its prospects—the description of the !continue command is, "If somehow we manage to win a game, this will hit the continue button on the victory screen"—but so far, so good. Teamfight Tactics uses the same ranking system as League of Legends, with Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Grandmaster, and Challenger tiers, each of them divided into four divisions, and Twitch Plays is currently at Gold 4.
I don't know what percentile that puts the hive mind into, and the current 16 percent win rate sounds brutal. But it's squarely in the middle of the ranks, and probably a hell of a lot better than I'd ever achieve on my own—and it's only been playing since Saturday.
PCGamesN hypothesized that part of the reason for the Twitch Plays success may lie with the fact that there's a relatively small number of people playing: For as long as I've been watching, it's hovered a little shy of 200, which is quite a small number as Twitch audiences go. There's plenty of time and space to grow, though, and lots of ranked ladder still to climb. You can follow the progress at lolchess.gg, and watch the ongoing action above.
