There have been a fair few scandals surrounding gambling and gaming, but sometimes it's not as bad as it first seems. Hundreds of players are betting on Final Fantasy Tactics games at the Twitch channel FFTBattleground in a crazy mash-up of the best and worst of gaming trends.
As Rock Paper Shotgun reports, an automated stream has popped up on Twitch and uses some pretty neat technical wizardry to integrate Final Fantasy Tactics with an external plugin. The game runs on autopilot with eight teams battling it out in successive battles that end all too quickly. Adding to the fun is the ability to bet on the outcome of the games.
Before you write your Congressman, worry not — there's no real money in play here. Players are using a points-based system (thematically named "Gil" after the franchise's currency) and absolutely no real money is involved in the gambling bits of this project.
What is involved is a heck of a lot of fun. At the time of writing — that's about 6:30 AM on a Monday (albeit a holiday) — nearly 500 concurrent viewers were watching the stream. Many of them were participating, too, keeping chat lively with commentary, Twitch emotes, and more.
How to Bet for Fun at FFTBattleground
Getting into the groove and betting your fake bankroll of Gil is pretty easy. Everyone starts with 1,000 Gil and they can never fall below 100 Gil, so there's no need to worry about going bust.
You'll start things off by typing !allegiance in chat and choosing one of the color-based teams. From there, you can type !bet to wager some of your fake money or shoot for the moon with the !allin command which bets pretty much everything you have.
That's the basics, but there's much more to this impressive project. You can see it for yourself in action by heading on over to twitch.tv/fftbattleground.
What do you think of FFTBattleground and the AI-driven Final Fantasy Tactics games? What's your favorite AI-driven or player-driven silly Twitch experiment? Let us know in the comments below!
