1333: First Date

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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First Date
I sympathize with the TPP protagonist because I, too, have progressed through a surprising number of stages of life despite spending entire days stuck against simple obstacles.
Title text: I sympathize with the TPP protagonist because I, too, have progressed through a surprising number of stages of life despite spending entire days stuck against simple obstacles.

Explanation

'TPP,' or 'Twitch Plays Pokemon,' was the first of a creative and radical new variant of streaming gameplay videos created in early 2014.

With the increasing popularity of watching video games be played (usually by 'popular' gamers known for entertaining gameplay), streaming sites dedicated to streaming gameplay were created; twitch.tv was one such site.

Whereas traditional video game streams involved the channel broadcaster or other personality playing the game, the channel "Twitch Plays Pokemon" recorded a bot playing an emulated Pokemon game. The game was given inputs by the bot based on players' messages in the video stream itself; meaning that for all intents and purposes, the watchers of the stream were playing the game, using chat "commands." The player behaved incredibly erratically, frequently gettign "stuck against simple obstacles" (as mentioned in the title-text) and moving about in a strange manner ("Why are you up there?"/"Bye...Okay, coming back now") TPP surged in popularity rapidly from its inception, reaching 80K channel viewers within a mere 5 days. Derivative channels (such as 'TwitchPlayers') soon arose, turning "Twitch Plays..." into an idea rather than a single channel - the idea of crowd-sourcing a task, such as controlling a single person (as in the pokemon games) for erratic and often hilarious results.

In the above comic, Cueball and Megan are on a date, however, Megan is behaving very erratically. Cueball determines that Megan is being "controlled by Twutch," as her behavior matches well with that of the "TPP Protagonist" (whose name, canonically, is Red). Megan loudly declares at one point that she is "SAVING" her 'game progress.' Her fascination with the "cool spiral" is an allusion to TPP players' fascination with the "Helix Fossil," an in-game item regarded with a near-religious reverance by TPP players for its constant appearance (because user input often leads to the checking of the in-game backpack, where the Helix fossil and other items resided, the players jokingly decided that the protagonist was "looking to the Helix for guidance;" this quickly led to its regard as a "religious symbol.")


The title-text, as esplained above, simply is a light-hearted joke from xkcd, empathizing with TPP as he has also "spent days stuck against simple obstacles."


Transcript

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Discussion

PRAISE THE HELIX, ahh TPP is just so fun to watch 141.101.99.20 21:02, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

HAIL HELIX ‎173.245.54.74 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Should this be put into the Pokémon category? The comic has nothing to do with Pokémon itself, but the subject matter does. Blitzer (talk) 07:37, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Kill me for being a stupid nerd, but when I first read the title "First Date" I thought it was going to be a strip about the Unix Epoch. 173.245.53.201 10:30, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

I think that was a very cool deducton, Monica. 173.245.53.138 15:47, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
Thats nothing. Ive actually nerd sniped myself with an xkcd comic before. thinking that the one about DNE referred to the concept of an undefined value (ie 1/0) BruceJohnJennerLawso (talk) 19:00, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

This is the first strip for a while that I had no idea what was going on. Thanks, explainxkcd! BTW I do think the Pokémon category is probably relevant enough. Mark Hurd (talk) 11:02, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Ah, ditto. Cheers for the explanation (not sure whether I'm happy or not that I'm so disassociated from apparently popular culture though). I actually thought "Twitch" was some sort of "random Twitter feed" thing, though, so (to some degree) I suppose I was also almost on the right track. 141.101.99.145 17:31, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
Hah, ditto. 108.162.215.7 05:44, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

Anyone else notice that between panels 2 and 3, Cueball drinks most of his wine? 141.101.99.145 17:51, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I was intrigued by that! At least, his glass gets emptier — it seems plausible that Megan might have drunk or spilled it too. 108.162.218.23 18:48, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
Seems like the amount of wine in his glass is constantly decreasing from panel 1-4. Also, the helix will guide us! 173.245.53.185 12:48, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
Praise the Helix! 108.162.254.106 16:21, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

I took my 4-year-old out to lunch at a restaurant last week. Randall, was that you, sitting at the next booth, taking notes? 173.245.55.62 18:42, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

This guy says: It's been 1.5 and now this is an old dead meme. 162.158.2.158 09:36, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

Should we add a table explaining each of the phrases that Megan speaks? 625571b7-aa66-4f98-ac5c-92464cfb4ed8 (talk) 01:24, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

SHAMELESS ADVERTISEMENT FOLLOWS [1] is a place where the dev hooked up a switch to a PC and now you can play using your keyboard or USB controller, and we have a TON of games. (Take this down if it breaks any rules please) SilverMagpie (talk) 01:33, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

Why is the character being named "Red" ironic? Because he's in a game also called "Red"? That is not irony. Nitpicking (talk) 03:54, 29 November 2021 (UTC)