I've had other people bring this up and they framed it in this wavering "Well maybe he cheated, maybe he didn't, but it was suspicious" kind of way.
The idea that Dream was NOT playing on a rigged version of Minecraft is so astronomically unlikely as to be ludicrous.
People go to prison based on far far less reasonable doubt, if be consider dream innocent we may as well let everybody out of jail, since they could be innocent too. The most likely way I can imagine he was innocent is if a third party broke into his computer, manipulated the RNG, and never told him, but regardless his speedrun record cannot stand.
I'm not really concerned with the cheating at Minecraft. I'm more concerned at how easy it is to convince people of reasonable doubt where none exists.
I can only imagine the reaction of all prisoners in large Federal corrections institutions if one sunny morning they are lined up and processing for the release of every single inmate starts to take place.
"What's going on, officer?"
"Supreme court just ruled on the Minecraft speedrun case."
"What's that?"
"This Youtube asshole got sued for playing a video game or something. I don't know. Hughes, what was it?"
"He mined a diamond on his second try."
"This asshole mined a diamond on his second try. Now all youse are getting released."
"So what's going on, we're gonna get a retrial or something?"
"Nah. Everyone here is going home."
The release of all incarcerated felons in the United States passes off almost without incident, although police leave in Chicago is cancelled after several homicides in the downtown area on a single night. These are believed to involve released prisoners, but this was never confirmed. Pawnshops and liquor stores in several areas of the country hire extra security for the following week after viral WhatsApp messages warn of a crime wave, but the expected spike in criminal behavior never takes place.
On the afternoon of the second day of releases two Marshalls and a adjunct professor of mathematics get out of a rented car outside FCI Marion, having flown to Chicago from the nation's capital. They are too late to stop the release of the man convicted of ripping off the 'McDonald's Monopoly' lottery game. A numerate intern at the DoJ noticed late on the first 'release day' that the chance of every single large award in the fast food prize draw between 1995 and 2000 being won by one person's associates or family members, technically exceeded the new probabilistic standard for reasonable doubt. They are ten minutes too late, the fraudster having departed by Uber. For the first time in its history the FBI Most Wanted list consists of a single name, for nine days until his recapture at Canadian border. The email alerting prison staff to his upheld conviction had been sent to the email address of a recently retired prison officer, a fact cited in his retrial as evidence that "he's just a lucky guy, you know?"
It's troubling when individuals do this, but I find it especially brutal that "double down and never admit guilt" is the go-to strategy for most nation states and corporations.
I wouldn't limit this to nation states, seems a general approach by politicians all over the world. A certain one made it much more popular over the past four years.
The rest of the world makes a useful distinction between a 'country' (such as France), a 'state' (the public institutions which run France), and a 'government' (the political entity which controls the French state).
However in the US the word 'state' is overloaded, so 'nation state' is used. It's confusing, because 'nation' is sometimes used to mean 'country' (which is how it's intended in 'nation state') and more traditionally used to mean a people with a shared language and history.
As a friend in the State Department exlained, it's because of the French and the British. Generally,"nation" is used to refer to an autonomous political unit, but "nation-state" refers specifically to a sovereign nation.
And the French and the Brits have/had a lot of "nations" which are part of their "nation" and which thus are not "nation states" of their own. For example, Scotsland (and even technically Britain itself) are both nations that are themselves part of the nation-state that is the U.K. For the French, it gets a bit more complicated, since they have a number of territories which are nominally sovereign but are legally subordinate to the French government in Paris (like Tahiti).
"Britain" is a bit confusing. Most often it is used to refer to the UK itself, or sometimes to Great Britain the island. I doubt that's what you meant.
Yes, didn't notice the error until after window for editing had passed. I initially meant England, but "Britain" itself still works because the UK includes more than just the nations on the island itself.
Also, it's my understanding that the main island is Britain, and that "Great Britain" includes the smaller outlying islands, but not the island of Ireland.
The English language is horribly ambiguous and confused around words like nation, state, nation state, country, nationality, citizenship, ethnicity, race etc.
Yes, but I've not seen an explanation of which useful cases are covered by "nation state" but not by "country" or even better "government". I don't think it even solves the problem of countries which cause other people to get mad if you acknowledge their existence (Taiwan, Palestine)
Meanwhile, does "nation state" apply to the Plurinational State of Bolivia?
Government is also a murky concept. In the US it seems to cover all of the state apparatus, while in other cultures it only refers to the executive branch or even the "cabinet" specifically.
"Nation state" seems to be a thing because state alone could be confused with the 50 US states.
With nation state the focus is on the institutions and leadership, with country the focus is on land and ordinary people it seems.
"Nation state" is used colloquially just to mean "country", but it has a connotation of formality or even oppression. Where "country" just sounds like a place where people live, "nation state" has a kind of academic, officious sound.
So it's used in a context like this to imply something nefarious, treating a country a bit like a dystopian sci-fi megacorp.
That doesn't make the assertion wrong. It would have been equally valid with the term "country". Just explaining (over-explaining, probably) why the OP chose that particular phrase: it has a particular emotional impact.
A nation is a body of people that believe they are similar (usually ethnicity or language.) "An imagined community".
A state is the entity that taxes people, builds roads, maintains a military. It has a "monopoly on violence" in a particular territory.
A nation can be stateless - like the Kurds or Uyghurs. They have a cohesive self-identity, but lack their own state. Colloquially, "nation" can also mean "country" - think "national champion", but this more specific meaning exists as well.
It's rarely necessary to use the term "nation-state". Just using "state" is fine. I suspect people like using it because it has a nice ring to it and sounds serious.
The USA has 50 states, none of which are nations (and thus not nation-states), but which together comprise the whole nation-state union. So the US government and US institutions tend to use "nation-state" more often than others do, because it's a useful disambiguation for them.
That’s a pessimistic way to put it, but you have a point.
This depends on the target audience though. Some people seem unable to be convinced by hard evidence and reason. If you’re able to pick your audience — which is the case for content creators and politicians — you will always be able to address those people.
In most professional settings, you’re more dependent on the goodwill of someone specific, and I think there the strategy is less effective.
In this case it wasn't so much that Dream chose his audience, but that his audience is primarily impressionable young kids.
I looked through the Reddit threads that got posted around the time this happened and there were clearly a lot of young people who either chose to believe Dream because they didn't understand the statistics well enough to know it was BS, or were trying to rationalize that Dream was innocent based on some weird logic.
That’s mostly my point though, if “doubling down” works best with impressionable, unreasonable (in this case, young) people, then the strategy limits you to that audience.
Yeah, it's a game of numbers. When you have 22 million subscribers and half of them don't trust you anymore, then you still have 11 million subscribers.
our society is also not structured anymore to allowing one to admit guilt, and be absolved by some sort of community process after which you can return to a normal life; if you are guilty now you are forever cursed.
I think that's because, thanks to the internet, "now" never truly ends. You're often just one Google search away from reanimating any significant event in someone else's life.
When was it structured that way? Serious question - I generally believe the same thing, but looking at it from the outside I’m finding it hard to reach a worthwhile example.
As chaorace above you suggested, it was so structured by the arrival of the technology to keep track of everything you ever did that was bad and put it online for future reference.
The tendency to do it was already in place, it is likely that you see someone from high school that was a jerk and you think that jerk once did this, even if it was 15 years ago. That's a sort of normal human tendency.
Some people are so notorious for rather innocuous things that they are outcast - Monica Lewinsky is an obvious example - I believe she was ostracized for a little more than a decade.
Legally there is already the habit of judging people unfit for crimes, even if they have served their time. American society is structured to make people with felony convictions harder to employ.
Now add in technology and imagine being able to treat anyone you have never met like that jerk in High School forever.
The final step of structuring is then provided by people who can see ways to profit off of the fact that people who have done non felonious things might still have done things that society will find objectionable, and that the technology exists to keep this in people's eyes.
I agree with you, but that’s a subtly different claim than that we used to have a community process (or ritual, but that’s adding some baggage) for forgiveness/reintegration that has since been lost.
Not having the technology that creates a social record is different than actively forgiving and forgetting.
well the community process thing is sort of a more complicated thing - some argue that the old process of putting people in the stocks / public humiliation was a more humane way of treating people because they then paid their debt and could be reintegrated. Not saying I agree but the argument at any rate is there was a community process. I am at any rate open to the possibility that this was a good aspect of a system that in many other ways was bad.
If so that community process was destroyed and replaced with a system that would never forgive you for your transgressions.
However the system was imperfect and thus people could move, reinvent themselves and reintegrate themselves by exploiting the imperfections.
Technology is now working to remove this capability.
So it was not that the community process was removed by the arrival of technology, it was removed and later the technology arrived to strengthen what had been put in its place - creating a system in which transgressions and punishments are eternal.
Yep. Even before technology made checking easy it was common for employers to ask about criminal convictions. Felons have had difficulty getting jobs since long before the Internet came around. In theory they'd paid their debt to society, but in practice society kept punishing them indefinitely. The internet (and background check databases, etc) just makes this cheaper for employers to do, but didn't cause the problem.
There are great benefits for the society, and dare I say species.
Conscience, after all, is not an accident. Its a product of our evolution. We lived in small groups for most of our existence, and the very survival of the group was tied pretty directly to how well the group members worked together. Lying had consequences for a group that would not make lying have consequences for an individual.
The problems is that we now live in groups much larger than anything we experienced before.
> Conscience, after all, is not an accident. Its a product of our evolution. We lived in small groups for most of our existence, and the very survival of the group was tied pretty directly to how well the group members worked together. Lying had consequences for a group that would not make lying have consequences for an individual.
Be careful making assumptions like this. I mean, you're right, having a conscience is a product of our evolution... but so is the ability to lie. You make it sound like disadvantageous qualities would be filtered out by evolution but that is clearly not the case.
It's a balance between the (evolutionary) advantage for of the group vs the advantage for the individual. Some lying may be beneficial for the individual as long as it doesn't harm the group too much. Lie too much though, and the group gets less likely to survive as a whole, meaning individuals within the group are less likely to survive as well.
In this case, Dream planned to deceive people by tweaking game randomness. It is impossible to justify when hundreds of people are following the rules.
This is why people double down. You mostly see apologies when opportunity got the best of judgement.
Perhaps politicians lying is business as usual, and it only seems to have increased because society gradually forgets things as they recede into history.
Just in the past the lie was "Iraq was behind 9/11 and has WMDs" or "The war in Vietnam is important to fight and easy to win"
Anyone who even remotely looked at the numbers and followed the situation can tell Dream cheated. The only people I see claiming otherwise are either infatuated with his cult of personality or otherwise just don't give a shit, "It's just a kids game who cares"? I care.
I am heavily invested in speedrunning culture, but myself am mostly involved in the Halo community. I have a couple of world records of my own, and I also do routing and other technical things for the community.
Halo has its own long history of cheaters, many of whom were also pivotal founders of the community. In the wider speedrunning scene there are many examples of similar situations. I do not think that speedrunning necessarily has a higher percentage of cheaters, if you compare against other competitive sports and activities the rates would likely be comparable. But that number is far from zero.
I am working on developing TAS (Tool-Assisted Speedrun) tools for the Halo games. With the tools you can create frame-perfect recreations of gameplay that are indistinguishable from actual play.
I am honestly at a stand-still on whether I should ever publicly release a working version of the tools. The main worry is that the tools will be used to submit "fake" runs passed off as human gameplay. I have built in basic safeguards to deter the most basic cheaters, little things that you would never see as a casual player but if you know what to look for would stand out in a video. But there is always the chance a sophisticated user could reverse those changes and fly under the radar.
On the one hand it could open a floodgate of awesome content, tricks, and discoveries. On the other it could potentially completely ruin the integrity of the leaderboards. I am quite conflicted on how to continue with this project if anyone has any insight that might be helpful.
Isn't this true of basically all tools developed for TAS? They are cheats by the normal definition.
It would be a shame to hold back on finding out what is possible in Halo because of cheaters, cheaters will find a way with or without your help. If people continue to care about these runs then someone eventually will develop a tool like yours and they may not care as much about people cheating.
I would suggest putting some effort into making your tools detectable somehow so that you can at least have a clear conscious about it but don't let the fact that people will always cheat stop you from providing useful tools.
I can already do this for most popular speed games, and it’s not a big problem. The TAS tools will help the community much more than they will hurt integrity.
People have tried to pass TAS runs off as RTA before, and often it's really obvious (especially to someone experienced at speedrunning the game) because TAS runs don't at all look like a human playing them.
I wonder if you could add steganography to the visual output to watermark runs in a way to prevent your tool from being used to pass off live gameplay.
Disclaimer: I am not part of the community (for example: I wouldn't even have known about the Dream scandal if it weren't for the video by Matt Parker), so feel free to take my opinion with a bucket of salt.
It might be an idea to decide as a community that the time of completely unassisted speedrun leaderboards has passed, and shift the competitive element of your community to technological advancements in TAS tools.
Sorry if I did not explain it well, TAS does not mean just small helpful enhancements.
In a TAS, the game is being played by the computer using a series of pre-programmed inputs. The fun in TASing is creating the most optimized set of inputs that completes the game in the shortest amount of time. There are often precise one-frame tricks or inputs that would not be possible for a human to perform but can be done easily when you can fully control what happens on each individual frame of gameplay.
Mixing TAS and non-TAS runs doesn't make much sense as humans would never be able to compete.
No, I meant more like... I don't know if it's possible to verify if a run submitted for non-TAS leaderboard isn't secretly a TAS run and if not, the era of any integrity of non-TAS leaderboards would be over. So all non-TAS speedrunning would be non-competitive in the future, if there's such a thing as non-competitive speedrunning.
Frame perfect tricks are often fairly easy to spot, and heavy usage of then are pretty indicative of TAS runs.
Of course, there are folks who can do those frame perfect tricks, but if it ever does come to contention, then asking them to perform said trick live seems like a pretty easy way to confirm.
You just end up with a situation where there's intense competition to make cheatbots as good as possible, within the parameters of plausible deniability. People start meta-hacking to find tricks which don't improve the speedrun but keep it impossibly fast while making it look more convincingly human. People spend time obsessively training not to get good at the game, but to make it seem as though they would have been good enough to do a speedrun which was actually automated. Eventually you start to get false positives as the bar for cheating catches the most skilled and dedicated non-cheating players.
Then again some people still enjoy watching professional cycling so maybe it will be fine.
Some communities have required that you have recordings of inputs and recordings of your hands making those inputs as well. I don't know that it's perfect, but it does give potential to spot violations
It brings up the immensely boring tarpit of "What is sport?"; I don't care that e-bikes with enough power to climb Alpe d'Huez exist; It doesn't invalidate the cyclist's achievements (but doping does, and why is that?)
Sure, maybe this will be the case when the Halo speedrunning community starts paying millions of dollars in prizes... it's just not an issue. Speedrunning is a niche hobby, you don't get anything out of cheating, other than some temporary, minor clout.
He is a very experienced speedrunner who has done a lot of videos about both speedrunning records and cheating, and as such, has a great section in his Dream video better explaining the thought process behind why top speedrunners cheat.
Is a bugged game ruled out here? There's no way this is luck, of course, but something in the technology stack not functioning properly and leading to this result sounds at least possible.
Of course, cheating is still the far more likely explanation.
That was my thought as well. He's known for trying out lots of wacky random mods, so one could imagine a case where he believes the runs were legit, but actually he had left a mod enabled by mistake, or similar.
Or (much less plausibly), it's at least superficially possible that there could be some minecraft bug related to mod handling, such that his game client wasn't in a vanilla state even though he really had removed all non-standard mods.
The buried lede here is the 1960s game-show scandal; The fascinating story linked[1] within is far more interesting than the drama of Dream's cheating minecraft server.
Let's say that this person did cheat. We can generally agree that cheating is not ethical. But what happens when their celebrity sits upon a foundation of lies and because of their celebrity they amassed some serious wealth. If they built such a large viewer base from cheating, is there any legal recourse here? Or will they be allowed to walk away with their bags of money and the mark of shame?
Probably the biggest thing is he became famous from creating completely different videos. He didn't get his viewer base from cheating, he most likely cheated because he felt his skills deserved a good time but he didn't want to put in the grind which an RNG-heavy speedrun requires to get a good time. I recommend Karl Jobst's video on it, where he points out that skilled speedrunners don't cheat to get a better time, they cheat to get a good time faster.
Why not share the seed of the map? This in combination with the coordinates visible on screen would make it possible to check if there is cheating involved. It would be even better if the seed was generated and handed out by a trusted party. Do all the speed runs live and it would be quite hard to cheat.
Loot rates are not related to the world seed. The problem here was that he modified loot rate tables.
The world seed only matters for the world generation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SasazfBr5_Y there are speedruns of Diablo 1 like this, and most people wouldn't consider this a fair speedrun because the maps generated are always optimal and have the stairs down right next to the stairs up.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SasazfBr5_Y there are speedruns of Diablo 1 like this, and most people wouldn't consider this a fair speedrun because the maps generated are always optimal and have the stairs down right next to the stairs up.
While there are definitely different speedrunning categories where glitching and modding are allowed, the category Dream was speedrunning was v1.16 Random Seed Glitchless, so there's not much ambiguity about what would and wouldn't disqualify a run.
Youtube should ban cheating channels altogether. You can make over a million, get caught cheating, face no punishment, and can continue to rake it in. Fix the incentive.
But why though? If I make a YouTube channel where I break world records in various sports by using some banned equipment and people want to watch it, who says that’s bad?
I agree it’s not honest if I tell people that I’m not using equipment but YouTube can’t be verifying everything a video says. I actually do thinking they should do more manual quality control but that’s for actually harmful content.
If Microsoft and YouTube had an agreement that this sort of thing is not allowed then fine, but that’s not practical I think.
A few hot takes of mine:
- Something small is throwing off someone's calculations ... Perhaps some small fact about the RNGs that is not common knowledge
- I'm a 31 year old and followed the events and was thoroughly on Dreams side, and accepted his (handwavey despite hiring a math person) explanation, mostly on character and verisimilitude
- The consensus of most people seems to be that he cheated and is a convincing liar, sort of a magician in a way
- The fact his cheating is the crowd consensus among adults made me question my initial beliefs
- I don't have time to go down the rabithole but I also don't really care if he cheated as his achievments as an entertainer stand alone. If he did cheat, he's just loveable scum
Lets put it this way. The RNG in Dream's version of Minecraft was acting so astronomically far outside of the norm, that we can't consider Dream's world record run as being valid. He was essentially playing a different game, and it would be absurd to give somebody a world record for the good fortune of playing on a busted version of Minecraft. The linked video is a response to the anonymous statistician associated with Dream.
Now, I think there's one explanation that's more likely than others as to how Dream ended up playing on a rigged version of Minecraft.
I'm not going to invest 40m watching the new video because I couldn't care less - but Dream hired a statistician to debunk the numbers in the first video.
I can believe he's cheating but I don't consider it probable. Dream's success doesn't come from record settings, so I don't think he has any incentive to cheat.
If anything, I believe more the allegations that his manhunt videos are staged, given that's the interesting content.
He makes money by creating long and entertaining videos (about modded Minecraft and his insane reflexes). This ticks off the YouTube algorithm which measures how much of a video viewers watch and how much time they watch a channel, contributing to exponential growth.
On top of this, Minecraft fans are a niche that lives on YouTube.
Dream never became popular because of his speed records, he gained initial traction by creating content on PewDiePie (an infinitely more popular YouTuber). This is exploiting the YouTube's algorithm which recommends videos: by talking about someone famous you'll eventually end up being recommended to their huge user base.
Well you should watch the video, because it's a great video and explains very well why it's essentially impossible for dream to have achieved his results. Your opinion if it makes sense or not really doesn't matter.
To give the gist to everyone (still watch the video, it's well worth it), if all 10 billion people on earth would be playing minecraft for every second (actually playing the whole speedrun in 1s, but that's details), for 100 years. The chance of his result happening to any one human is 1/1000. Alternatively, dreams result is 10 orders of magnitude less unlikely to have happened than the next "lucky" event that happened which was in craps.
The response to the "debunking" by Dream's statistician has generally not been that favorable, and somewhat brutal.
> “Whoever wrote that is either deliberately manipulating numbers in favor of Dream or is totally clueless despite having working experience with statistics. Familiarity with the concepts is clearly there, but they are misapplied in absurd ways.”
> They also wrote that the “amateur mistakes” that appear in the document make them question the overall qualification of the (anonymous) author.”
> but Dream hired a statistician to debunk the numbers in the first video.
The video discusses this and tries to provide their own intuition besides the two papers, as both agree on the core odds of the likelyhood being around 2 x 10^22. They contrast this with the number of events if 10 billion (10^10) humans would do something for 1 century (10^2) every second (~3.15 x 10^7): ~3.15 * 10^19. So the odds of the event happening if more humans than we have today do it every second for a century is roughly 1 in 1000.
Lastly, they postulate it doesn't matter if they cheated, but the sheer unlikeliness shows that the minecraft run is not performing up to expectations.
If the chance of it happening is that small, isn't it fair to also consider the probability that we live in a universe without objective reality and/or where a god or gods intentionally interfere with random occurrences such as RNG outputs?
I would put this at better than 1/10^22. If you claimed that your religion was real and showed me an incontrovertible 'miracle' which had a chance of less than 1/10^20 of occurring by chance, I think I would accept your claim.
> Dream hired a statistician to debunk the numbers in the first video.
This is addressed in the video. The report from the anonymous statistician hired by Dream does not actually dispute the incredibly low odds.
I've never heard of Dream before and I have no horse in this race. But the probability of this actually having happened by chance on an unmodded set of runs is so low I cannot believe it. At the same time, the someone who has made a career out of running Minecraft with mods having a great run of luck with the help of mods and then claiming that it was fair does not seem very unlikely.
You are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts. The mathematical fact is that Dreams feat is so incredibly unlikely that (as illustrated in the video you refuse to watch):
*If every single human being on planet Earth each completed a Minecraft speedrun every single second for 100 years (no sleep), the chance anyone during those 100 years getting as lucky as Dream just once is less than 1:1000.*
The idea that Dream was NOT playing on a rigged version of Minecraft is so astronomically unlikely as to be ludicrous. People go to prison based on far far less reasonable doubt, if be consider dream innocent we may as well let everybody out of jail, since they could be innocent too. The most likely way I can imagine he was innocent is if a third party broke into his computer, manipulated the RNG, and never told him, but regardless his speedrun record cannot stand.
I'm not really concerned with the cheating at Minecraft. I'm more concerned at how easy it is to convince people of reasonable doubt where none exists.