This Twitter bot uses your replies to play 'Doom’

Here’s an objective fact: Twitter is an absolute hellscape. Knowing this, it only seems appropriate that you can now play the FPS video game classic, Doom, via the social media platform by merely replying to a Twitter bot.

Designed by Georgi Gerganov, the aptly named Tweet2Doom project allows a “player” to string together a reply thread of command codes which the bot will execute for you, then reply to you with an in-game clip showing those decisions in action. To continue playing, players simply keep on replying in that thread with follow-up commands. What’s particularly neat about this endeavor is that anyone can reply at any time to any in-progress thread, thus creating an entirely new branch/timeline of gameplay. It’s a bit dizzying to envision properly — much less to successfully run — but it’s still a really cool social (media) experiment.

And, really, there’s no such thing as “too much Doom.”

Infinite doomed timelines — For us, the genuinely infinite iterations possibility is almost more impressive than Tweet2Doom itself (although the bot is plenty badass on its own). It also is pretty great to see how a game can get totally hijacked by a random stranger, then sent careening off to slay demons down an entirely different path.

Regardless, watching these videos of people actually completing entire levels hasn’t failed to impress us yet. It’s hard enough to survive Doom’s most difficult settings under normal circumstances — using a Twitter bot as an intermediary is an entirely different thing.

Github available for deep dives — Look, we’re gonna be honest with you, it’s still somewhat unclear to us exactly how Tweet2Doom works. Luckily, Gerganov has uploaded the entire background and process to Github, so maybe some of the more literate among you can translate it all for us. We’ll be busy searching for that BFG9000 in the meantime.