Game Theory's thoughts on the Dream Minecraft speedrunning scandal

Game Theory has officially created a video about Dream's Minecraft speedrunning cheating scandal.

This video served not only to recap Dream's speedrunning scandal but also to delve further into Minecraft's mechanics. It further showed the differences between the speedrunning moderator's paper and Dream's astrophysicist paper.

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Game Theory's thoughts on speedrunning Minecraft 1.16.4

MatPat didn't discuss the mathematics that both papers used to disprove or approve Dream's cheating accusations. His video focused more on the idea of RNG, or Random Number Generation, in Minecraft.

The speedrunning moderator team stated that there were ten different factors to consider. In contrast, Dream's astrophysicist noted that the total number of possible factors was up to thirty-seven.

Dream's astrophysicist stated how just two of these factors, which were the Piglin trading and the Blaze Rod drop rate, would be taking increasingly small substrata.

Taking this small amount of substrata can lead to skewed results and potentially shift the probabilities considerably.

During this video, MatPat focused on the high amount of RNG that Minecraft 1.16.4 has. This led to 1.16.4 getting its own category on the speedrunning website.

This may seem like an insignificant choice by the speedrunning community, but it shows how significantly different 1.16.4 is from previous versions of Minecraft.

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Game Theory asks how much of Minecraft 1.16.4 is RNG and how much is the player's skill?

MatPat raised the idea that Minecraft 1.16.4 speedrunning increases the amount of luck that the speedrunner needs to have. This aspect takes away from the speed runner's skill, and many speedrunners just restart if they don't start in a village.

Sadly, game Theory's video doesn't have a concrete conclusion about whether Dream did or didn't cheat on his Minecraft 1.16.4 record-breaking speed run.