The Crowd Watching Jono Is the Game

You probably assume a game needs a big multiplayer hook to pull a crowd. Think battle royale, a famous streamer, or a shooter everyone already plays. Jono has none of that. It's a pixel platformer where one character is shared by the whole world.

So how does a game like that keep hundreds of strangers around? And why would anyone sit through another person's turn?

Only one person controls Jono at a time. Each turn lasts one minute, and then the next person in the queue picks up exactly where the last one stopped. Everyone else watches the stream and chats while they wait.

The shared progress is the other half of it. A cleared room stays cleared for everyone, and deaths leave gravestones as warnings for the next player. The developer, Tuomas Erikoinen, says the goal is one million levels in total. At the pace he reports, about 5,000 a day, that's an April finish.

The chat is where it gets interesting. The developer reports more than 540 people have chatted, with about 85,000 messages so far. Players cheer when someone clears a hard room and joke about everything else.

Other shared experiments worked the same way. In 2014, Twitch Plays Pokémon let everyone on a stream type commands into one game of Pokémon Red Version. TechRaptor reported about 120,000 viewers at one point, and a finish after about 16 days. In 2017, r/place gave every Reddit user one pixel on a shared canvas, with a timer of five to twenty minutes between placements, and it ran about 72 hours. Both were built out of strangers sharing one experience. Jono adds a queue and a chat, so the wait is part of the game.

I think that's the answer to the question at the top. Most people don't want to win a game alone. They want to be somewhere with other people who care how it turns out. The person cheering for you in chat has no following and no channel. They're a stranger who wanted to be there.

I added Jono to my Want to Play list in Efohvee. The developer says level 100,000 is this weekend, and players are already planning to stay up for it. Are you going to queue for it, or watch from the chat?