Voting with Adversaries: (Late) Analysis of Twitch Plays Pokemon
Voting situations, as discussed in chapter 23, can be roughly organized into situations where each participants goal can be distinct or shared. For instance, a jury in a criminal trial should all have the same goal, justice, whereas participants voting for which candidate they want to take a role in their government might have completely different goals in mind. One aspect that is notable about the second scenario is that generally each voter is looking for who they think is the best option for the job. Even if their judgement of what is the “best” differes from other participants, their strategy remains the same. What happens when you throw a wrench into the works? What happens when a voting system has adversaries, participants who are looking for the worst outcome, not the best.
In February 2014, a user named “twitchplayspokemon” started a live stream on the popular streaming website Twitch that offered viewers a novel experience: shared control over an instance of a game of Pokemon. The specifics of the game itself are not that important ([1], [2], and [3] all offer concise summaries of the goal of the game). The important part is that any given viewer can input a command to the game, at the level of pressing a particular key or button, by typing the name of the button in the chat box associated with the stream. One can imagine that with a non-trivial number of viewers, all selecting different commands, this quickly becomes an absolute mess. To organize these commands, the user managing the stream (known as a “streamer”) set up three systems. The first would pick the command that, over a period of time, was the pluarity selection, referred to as Democracy. The second would pick a random command out of some number submitted over a period of time, referred to as Anarchy. The third system would select between Democracy and Anarchy based on the number of messages within some time frame that were just the phrases “democracy” or “anarchy.” Source [4] covers this system in more detail. Another facet is that any given player has an unlimited number of votes, so a given participant can emulate any number of participants through spamming votes.
Overall, one would imagine that the goal of the viewers participating in the game by sending messages in the chat (referred to as “Twitch Chat”) is to complete the game in a sane and timely manner. Of course there might be conflict in how to complete the game but everyone wants to complete it right? Wrong. Firstly, Twitch Chat is known as an overall source of cruelness and toxicity [1]. It has been well recorded how participants in the chat will routinely harass streamers or make insensitive and obscene remarks. It comes as no surprise that a dedicated sect of the chat that wanted the worst possible outcome by impeading the progress of the rest of Chat. How would these adversaries operate? In one instance, a group of players flooded the voting at a particular (low traffic) time in order to heavily impede the progress of the rest of the Chat (see Destiny: Democracy’s Downfall in [4]).
What can normal players (read: players collectively aiming to maximize their own payoff versus minimizing the payoff of other players) do to combat this? Is there a system of voting that negate this? Unfortunately no; the players in [4] worked within the system provided. Even in a scenario where voters are encouraged to vote sincerely (see chapter 23 section 8) a given malicious voter has the same goal and will vote accordingly.
[1] http://www.mjjfeeney.com/web-2-0/huxleys-nightmare-twitch-plays-pokemon/
[2] https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/religions/article/view/18510
[3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.4925.pdf
[4] http://www.diplomaticourier.com/anarchy-vs-democracy-the-politics-of-twitch-plays-pokemon/