EPJ Data Science Highlight - What ‘Twitch Plays Pokémon’ tells us about crowd behavior

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Published on 05 July 2019

No one would deny that the behavior of the people we know, and even of our own, can radically change depending on those who surround us. The problem of understanding how being in a group changes the way we behave has been subject of intense research in psychology since the beginning of the past century. The beginning of the XXI century gave rise to a new kind of group: the online crowds. Nowadays, it is no longer necessary to have all individuals in the same place in order to have a ‘crowd’. What is more, it is possible to connect together thousands, even millions, of individuals in a matter of minutes.

In the work recently published in EPJ Data Science, we study one such occasion that gathered millions of users: Twitch Plays Pokémon.

Continue reading the guest post by Alberto Aleta on the SpringerOpen blog.