Remember Twitch Plays Pokémon? That bizarre experiment to play through the Pokémon games using only Twitch chat, which turned into a surprisingly insightful take on anarchy, democracy, and religious iconography? Oh and it actually beat all the games? Well now there's one of those, but for Pokémon Go.

Players can enter commands in chat like "move n," "scroll up," "spin left," or even tap on a specific coordinate of the screen using a Battleship-like notation like "tap d 12." For movement, the player's GPS coordinates are spoofed, but at what the creators call a "realistic" speed. Touch events are also simulated. The whole setup is automatic, just like the original Twitch Plays Pokémon — although it has enslaved one of the creators' jailbroken iPhones.

Here's what the actual setup looks like:

Everything seems to work pretty smoothly, outside of the occasional Pokémon Go server crash — just like real life, basically.

The virtual player started out in New York's Central Park, and at the time of my writing this, is still wandering that area — we recently visited the Ladies Pavilion and caught a Pinsir.

The project was built by current and ex fellows of HackNY, a New York non-profit which "aims to federate the next generation of hackers for the New York innovation community" through hackathons and a fellowship program. I spoke with Aditya Balwani, who worked on the project (and shared that sweet pic of the setup), and he credited Matt Condon with the project's conception (and who is currently running the stream, with the game running directly on his iPhone). Emily Pries, Andy Wang, Dan Gorelick, and Biggie Emmanuel also worked on the project.

Since it's kind of "cheating" to spoof GPS in an AR game, a note on the Twitch page says that Niantic is "more than welcome to" ban the account they're using, "but we assume that they understand that this is all in good fun."

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