Speeding through Dreams

 A song of mod folders and drop rates

I've never really been one to follow drama on the Internet that doesn't directly revolve around game creators and the consumers who feed their efforts. There's a special kind of joy I do get from following those sorts of machinations, hence why I tend to do so very often when I get the chance, but outside of that little niche my interests are far and few. But there are exceptions, of course there are, when I hear some story pop my way with but the littlest connection to my interests and I pay it a bit of mind, and then in twenty minutes I'm just glued to a saga of lies and betrayal. This- well quite honestly it's a problem and I need help. But you know the way that help works around here, don't you? Self therapy through sharing stories on the Internet; so sit back, relax, and try to help me unravel the enigma of Minecraft Speedrunning.

Even as a gaming fanatic Speedrunning eluded by tastes. I've touched on it before, but basically as someone who prioritizes playing every game to it's fullest in order to live that new adventure, I find the prospect of rushing through it to the point of unravelling it's finely crafted world often asinine. And if you think I'm being too harsh, just look up the Twilight Princess Low Percent run which requires players to stand still for several hours in front of a slightly broken open box animation in order to phase through walls and sequence break. (That's when you've gone too far.) All that being said I've had a change of heart recently, gotten into a lot of the more interesting Speedruns that don't devolve into walking around dead black screens in order to exploit programming bugs and force a load of later stages, I've actually grown to appreciate them to some degree; which is why I was actually paying attention when the whole Dream debacle happened.

So Dream is a Minecraft Youtuber who really come to prominence in the latter parts of 2020 when his uniquely engaging video style blew up for a community who's patrons had almost exclusively taken up considerably more passive styles of video creation. (They've been at this for years, let them rest) Dream became such a superstar for the Minecraft community, that over the space of about 3 months he went from a nobody that hardly anyone knew of to a seminally influential figure imbued with all of the "urg, it's that famous figure" derision that usually hangs around those with at least half a decade in the spotlight. As such, when this Dream fellow decided he would run a competitive speedrun of Minecraft, it was met with more scrutiny than it would if anyone else had done the exact same thing. He was a celebrity now and had to act with the caution of one, and not doing so would cause one of the largest scandals that the speedrunning community has had to date.

Though I was paying attention to Speedrunning at this time, Minecraft speedrunning didn't and does not interest me and so I only heard about this in backlash a little while after the run had been completed; but the backlash was loud enough that even over in the GTA speedrunning circuits trouble was stirring. Apparently, despite Dream's run not landing on a podium position (or even all that near to a podium position) he was receiving accusations of having cheated thanks to those who took to analyse his run. The evidence was anecdotal, with Enderman seeming to drop Pearls surprisingly often for Dream, but before you knew it there were amateur mathematicians crawling out the woodworks to start number crunching and spitting out probability figures for how unlikely it was that Dream did this legit.

When I was looking at this, people had started reaching out to professional mathematicians, and as odds starting erring into the billions it turned to Dream to defend himself with the assertion that nothing was an impossibility and sometimes lucky things just happened. Several times in a row. In the middle of a competition. (I didn't say it was an easy sell.) Soon even the official moderators for the Speedrunning circuit were calling Dream into doubts, which the Minecraft creator was less than happy with. It was this point which I would call his biggest mistake, as Dream took to airing a lot of his dirty laundry with the Speedrunning moderators publicly and thus denigrated the entire speedrunning community through proxxy of doing so. It was inelegant, dirty, and turned pretty much everyone who wasn't his fan against him as they turned around and said "He's kind of acting really guilty right now."

Investigations dove so far as to start analysing his folders, whereupon a mod folder was discovered and Dream had to defend that. He said that these were mods he'd use for videos and that it was completely inactive at the time of the speedrun. But this was all happening inbetween examples of Dream being less than cordial with some folk as he, perhaps understandably, grew frustrated at this whole situation. Unfortunately the heightened scrutiny imbued by fame amplified everything and made him look like a worse and worse villain each and every time he lost his temper. There was actually no single incident that resolved all of this either, just a winding down of hostilities naturally as time went by and people lost interest with their unrelenting pursuit. Dream saw the way he was acting and apologised, but those who he wronged mostly chose to cut ties with him, pretty much cementing the rough relationship between the current biggest Minecraft Youtuber and the Speedrunning community.

But it's been months after the fact, so why am I bringing all of this up now? Why indeed, dear reader, because Dream himself provided an update just the other day in which he rocked up and revealed that, unbeknownst to him at the time, he had installed some subvert plugin which improved mob drop rates for the purposes of videos that he forgot to turn off. That's right, all of this chaos and back and forth was pointless because the clumsy fool had done the crime and neglected to perform his own due diligence! Of course, Dream took the time to apologise, but during his long post Dream still couldn't help but try and shift blame for his own actions on the Speedrunning moderators for their being "unprofessional". (hint for apologies: it doesn't matter if you still feel that way, your apology shouldn't be about them) And all of this begs the question of how we ended up here and what is the truth of the situation.

I emphasise 'truth' because to be honest with you all it's been several months and I, for one, cannot remember a single game I've actively played (with modding capabilities) that has retained the same file structure for over half a year. There's no way that Dream was just hopping through files and just noticed this, no he knew about this for a while. So I see one of two possibilities here: either Dream knew right away that he screwed up and had his mod on (I don't think he did it intentionally; they'd be no point for such a low leaderboard placing anyway) but chose to fight against accusations out of embarrassment, or secondly that his mod folder wasn't actually active and he's just confessing to it after all of this time in order to try and bookend this whole issue for those that still held quiet reservations about his truthfulness. Eitherway, it's a mercy for the man to provide closure to a story that was so twisting like this one as all too often we are left without such in life. So now that it's over, where do you fall on the whole conversation, if indeed you are or were invested at all. And whatsmore; what do you think should be the recourse after such a revelation? Lifetime bans are so easy to dish out, but when we're talking about the biggest Minecraft content creator in the world right now that seems a little short sighted- so what would be appropriate and beneficial to the speedrunning world as a whole? My suggestion is to have him redo his run properly as an event piece, but I'm curious of other suggestions.