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Play Hearthstone collectively with Hearthmind
Filed under "where did the last 30 minutes go?" is Hearthmind, which applies the collective gaming concept behind Twitch Plays Pokemon to Hearthstone. To make things work with the time-sensitive nature of Hearthstone, the Hearthmind interface polls users for moves once every five seconds -- just click on the screen to suggest the next move -- and once the five seconds are up, the most popular move is made. Though this makes for some clunky gameplay, Hearthmind does manage to win some matches. The most frustrating feature of this collective gameplay, however, has to be the time between matches. There's nothing to do while waiting for another matchup, but the five second action timer is still running -- and with nothing to click on that does anything, plenty of players hit the cancel button while you're waiting to be matched, meaning you have to go back and queue up for another round, hoping there's not too many clicking the cancel button this time. Though it's not exactly good gameplay, it's inexplicably engrossing to watch a group of a hundred people all trying to play a round of Hearthstone together ... to varying results.
Hearthmind brings the 'Twitch Plays' phenomenon to Hearthstone
Ever since Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft launched on PC and Mac in March, we've been asking ourselves one question: How would this strategic card game behave if a democratic octopus were in control? That question is now partially answered thanks to Hearthmind, a website that blends Blizzard's CCG with the livestreamed, crowd-play-style of control popularized by Twitch Plays Pokemon. Hearthmind isn't quite controlled the same way Twitch Plays Pokemon is though, as players vote on actions in the game by dragging their mouse cursor over the playing field as opposed to entering commands in the stream's chat. An action is picked by the game every five seconds, so it retains a somewhat brisk pace compared to its Pokemon-based counterpart. As of this writing, the stream, powered by Hitbox as opposed to Twitch, is hovering around 100 participants. Hearthstone just launched on iOS for free this month after Blizzard detailed the game's single player campaign. An Android port of the game is still in the works. [Image: Blizzard Entertainment]
