Game Theory: The Dark Future of the Dream SMP (Minecraft)

Foreign [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] hello internet welcome to game theory the show that’s like a baby zombie small and unassuming but persistent and dangerous today i’m here to talk about the dream smp and now that i’ve said that i’m sure that all of my viewers probably fall into one of two camps those yelling

At last our prayers are answered and those that are wondering what the heck i’m talking about so at this point if you care at all about minecraft or youtube or minecraft youtubers you’ve probably heard of a guy named dream he’s become famous for a lot of things including manhunt videos

Unsolved mystery videos as well as an appearance on one of this channel’s very own minecraft lore videos excuse me why is there a big neon green block creature in my video but one of the things that’s really blown up over the course of the last year is the dream

Smp or survival multiplayer server so you might be thinking survival multiplayer server so it’s just dream playing minecraft with a lot of his friends and well yeah sort of the truth is that the dream smp is to minecraft survival multiplayer what professional wrestling is to well the sport of wrestling which is to

Say it’s structured improv there’s a story here made by a team of writers yeah writers plural it’s not to say that everyone’s reading from a script while the broad strokes of the plot are planned out all of the connective tissue between those major plot beats is improvised and of course there’s room

For plenty of unexpected gameplay moments no no no no no i see that wasn’t in the script i wasn’t in the script ladies and gentlemen in the world of professional wrestling that is what we call a shoot or a moment in professional wrestling that’s unplanned unscripted or just an actual real life

Occurrence am i ruining this for anyone in the audience we all know that professional wrestling is scripted right trying to summarize the timeline of the dream smp is like trying to summarize the timeline of the 20th century if i tried to start i’d have to cover the

Birth of a nation in no fewer than four separate wars and that’s not me making a joke or trying to make an analogy here a lot of the story here is political in nature with ongoing narrative being one of a nation in turmoil with warring political factions trying to gain power

Over the populist by any means necessary and all of it is taking place within live streams lots and lots of very long live streams there have been over 30 people involved in this thing with the narrative playing out over hundreds of hours of live streaming actually just saying hundreds of hours

Is understating it because totaling up all the live streams across multiple channels to see the pov of multiple participants already gives you close to a hundred videos to watch and any one of those could be upwards of six to eight hours in length it feels almost impossible to catch up

With this thing too considering how often new live streams are happening seriously i feel like i have to put a disclaimer here that the script for this video is being written right before christmas which almost guarantees that by the time it comes out the things i’m predicting have either been proven right

Or horribly horribly wrong at the same time i could not talk about this thing it was without question the biggest thing happening in gaming in 2020 just behind among us a group of friends blowing up together on twitch because they’re using minecraft to create an ongoing improv narrative is incredible

And absolutely worthy of attention plus plus i was getting a lot of requests on twitter to do a theory about this and i didn’t want to ignore you guys at matpat gt by the way plus plus plus i’m a musical theater nerd i hear a hamilton reference

I like it i practice law wilbur work next door even though he started at the very same time tommy in it began to climb how to account for his rise to the top man the hamilton references are non-stop and since we are on the subject of hamilton hamilton the musical actually

Provides a really good framework for how to approach telling a story with the scope of everything that’s happening in the dream smp much like hamilton took a series of history defining events spanning several decades and condensed it down into a three-hour musical character study this theory is gonna be taking a series

Of events spanning several months of six plus hour long live streams and condense it down into well something kind of resembling a character study centering on one specific hero and spoilers for those of you who don’t know the ending of hamilton but uh this story also ends in tragedy in short today’s

Video is all about who history has had its eyes on and who you should have your eyes on going forward in the dream smp and spoiler alert he’s already dead and with that intro allow me to tell you the tragic tale of the rise and fall of a tyrant and why might be

Poised to rise once again this time from beyond the grave for a bit of background there are several major factions that exist within the dream smp the largest of which is confusingly enough named dream smp for the sake of clarity most have taken to referring to this faction as

The greater dream smp and i’m gonna follow their lead it’s the closest thing to being a neutral faction almost a sort of default faction for the characters who haven’t split off to do their own thing as you might guess it’s led by its founder dream dream also gets executive

Veto over who’s allowed in the server for instance back in july when jay schlatt joined the server for the first time he was banned very shortly after since dream didn’t know him when it’s your party you get to decide who’s on the guest list i suppose the first major faction to declare its

Independence from the greater dream smp was lemanberg back in late july with the war for independence between le mansburg and the dream team faction finally settling in early august lumamberg started as an autocratic nation state with self-appointed dictator uh president wilbur suit presiding with tommy in it as his right-hand man

However that dictator for life thing didn’t really pan out long term after all a ruler only rules by the consent of the governed and despite the fact that wilbur suit had declared himself supreme leader the citizens weren’t taking his orders all that seriously so what do you do if you want to shore

Up legitimacy as a ruler you hold a democratic election i’m running for president the reason i’m running for president is because well i felt like it was unfair of me to decide myself to be a dictator okay so maybe if you want to believe the man himself it was because

He grew a conscience anyway wilverson joined by tommy anderson’s running mate ran as the politicians of gaming or pog for short the problem with democratic elections is that well people can run against you quackity who’d been up to that point a lumanburg outsider decided to run against him

Because well you’ve got to have yourself an opposition party my name is quackety and i’m running for president simply because i didn’t think it was fair for wilbur suit to run a one-party democratic election or so democratic as he wants to call it it’s very unfair to will

For wilbur and all the people in le mansburg to vote for just one party quackity ran under the party banner of so we are gamers or swag for short choosing george not found as his running mate who probably lived up to his name by failing to show up to the presidential

Debates way to have a brand and stick to it man oh and you heard me right presidential debate the parties of swag 2020 and pog 2020 ran full-on campaigns including key endorsements quackity was at an immediate disadvantage here as his one key alleged endorsement ksi never actually showed up my one endorsement

Is ksi he just hasn’t happened to responded yet to my endorsement plead he’s my one endorsement ksi more like ksi not found him and george not found playing yahtzee in the corner wilbur and tommy in it wanting to assure the voters that they were the party that

Best represented the will of the people touted several key endorsements the most notable of them came from jay schlatt now you might be asking yourself wait jay schlatt didn’t i just say that he was banned back in july several months before the election took place and that was what the crowd

Said too but apparently a server ban wasn’t about to stop wilbur and tommy from bringing him in to deliver the key endorsement now after doing a lot of negotiations here i’ve got my endorsement here he comes the one the only town except jay schlatt’s endorsement speech went very

Quickly off the rails democracy is overrated do you think you need a president i’ll be my own president of the script police off the stage anyway with this wild card entering the race things had thoroughly gone to chaos with jay schlatt actually challenging him wilbur and tommy decided to resort to political

Horse trading in order to avoid the possibility of a j schlapp presidency why not invite swag 2020 to join pog 2020 to form a giant super party swag a fusion event so great that it would be guaranteed to beat jay schlatt unfortunately it backfired the good news was that quackity who didn’t actually

Want to be president and was only running as a challenger to wilbur was willing to give his party’s votes to another party the bad news was that he chose jay schlatt i was enticed by your swog idea until you immediately admitted to me that you would only use me for votes

You guys have clearly tried been trying to use me this entire time so it’s [ __ ] 20 20 it’s the kind of thing that makes you think maybe from the start that this was all a ruse by jay schlatt promising to endorse pog 2020 only to get himself unbanned and then

Enter the fray and take over for himself the man over here is executing some epic big brain maneuvers in the end pog 2020 won 45 percent of the vote swag 2020 won 30 percent of the vote jay schlatt won 16 percent of the vote with swag giving its votes to jay

Schlatt jay schlatt wins the election with a combined total of 46 barely beating out pogs 45 and that is where the reign of terror begins jay schlatt having effectively hijacked the democratic process decided that it was time to run the old party out of town my first decree as the president of la

Exiled the pog 2020 campaign was no more but it lived on in spirit within the nation of pogtopia building their own secret base of operations and working with a few members of the administration who managed to avoid exile that’s right they had a spy on the inside of jay schlatt’s operation

And that spy’s name was tubbo despite winning the election jay schlapp wasn’t really winning over the people you know calling democracy a lie immediately exiling half the population ain’t gonna win you too many friends so to get a few popularity points he began planning the manburg festival as a celebration of

Democracy with tubbo to plan the events and deliver the keynote speech tubo and the old guard seized the opportunity to upstage the festival by placing tnt under the event stage all tubbo had to do was to give his speech and run away before the tnt went off but

Jay schlatt had other plans our people have been beaten down by royals and dictators for so long now we are finally free free to elect who we want free to live how we want i’d like to thank everyone for coming to this wonderful event what’s wrong

No it’s just i was just thinking about it nothing sinister at all about that laugh by the end of the speech jay schlatt had encased the undercover spy tubbo in yellow concrete sensing him to immediate execution help me do something real quick okay what are you doing

Yeah i know what you’ve been up to with the tyrants that we kicked out of this server that we kicked out of this great country do you know what happens to uh to traders tubo tubbo was sentenced to death by rocket launcher with tubbo’s ally technoblade being the one to serve as

Executioner there was a little accidental collateral damage with jay schlatt also dying in the explosion but don’t worry he got better across all of these events one thing should be painfully clear jay schlatt is in d d terms totally lawful evil wilbur soot not the character but the out-of-character writer who’s the

Closest thing we have to a creative authority for this chapter of the s p confirmed in a reddit post quote schlatt is very lawful evil schlatt follows one creed i was elected fairly i will rule until i lose the next election he uses this power malevolently to assert dominance and punish rebellious factions

Emphasis on punishment schlatt isn’t very concerned with keeping order or even maintaining justice his priority is delivering suffering and pain to those he sees as deserving it under the law now after this failed attempt at insurgency it was only inevitable that jay schlatt’s manberg would go to war with pogtopia with jay

Schlatt’s reign of terror coming to an end in the most anti-climatic way possible running away from the fighting stumbling into the hot dog van that originally served as the nexus for wilbur suit and tommy and its drug empire getting drunk and experiencing what appeared to be a stroke or a heart attack

For those of you who don’t know smelling toast is actually a classic symptom of having a stroke anyway the much beloved leader received a massive funeral with everyone behaving with exactly the level of reverence and decorum that you’d expect them to show for jay schlapp his entire body was picked apart what

Remains weren’t taken as souvenirs were recovered by quackity as part of a plot of his own i have a plan within my possession are all five of jay schlatt’s bones i busted that grave open and i took it wait you’re going to try and bring jay schlatt back to life we bring

Jay schlapp back to life but you know what frankenstein did when he brought frankenstein 2 back to life frankenstein 2 was under his command you know what this means we can use jay schled as a as a political puppet uh quackity did you actually read the book because if your takeaway was

Frankenstein animated a monster and it was completely under his control and totally did not backfire at all you might want to read a few of those chapters again so with that level setting out of the way what follows are my predictions about the future of the dream

Smp and it all centers around one man in particular first off case it wasn’t obvious we haven’t seen the last of j schlatt and i’m not just talking about his appearance as a ghost in a live stream of questionable canonicity is this like part of the plot that you

Guys script uh it’s it’s pretty you know what it’s fine it’s fine how you doing he’s been too big a player for far too long to simply be written out of existence and more importantly the groundwork has been laid for his eventual resurrection wilbur soot mentioned on a live stream that the

Team was playing with the idea that each character gets three canon deaths before it’s considered permanent everyone gets three everyone gets three cannon deaths before they real life die yes even if we count jay schlatt’s death during the festival rocket launcher explosion is canon between that and his heart attack

Stroke he’s yet to use up all his lives besides this is too good of an opportunity for history to repeat itself in an absolutely poetic fashion because while jay schlatt is lawful evil and motivated to punish people for going against him his role as punisher is much more central than

That jay schlatt is almost like a karmic force of the universe who punishes people for their hubris remember the entire reason he was able to rejoin the server in the first place was because the pog 2020 party thought it would be politically advantageous for them to receive his endorsement

They looked to use jay schlatt as a tool to achieve their own political ends and it backfired horribly leading to them not only losing the election but being forced into exile by the monster they had helped to create ultimately leading to an all-out war against the faction that he usurped from

Them and now we have ourselves a cackling quackity saying that he plans to use the powers of necromancy to reanimate schlatt as a political puppet so now he can seize control of man bird quackity have you learned nothing based on the comment about frankenstein’s monster the answer seems

To be yes it’s my view that jay schlatt more than being a mere villain here is really more like a force of nature something that people have and will continue to try and harness for their own end with predictable results every time any time someone starts thinking of

Seizing power for themselves like wilbur did in the early days of manberg and like quackity’s done more recently it’ll end predictably with jay schlatt conniving some scheme that results in him returning to the game and him eventually sitting on the throne with the people around him being forced to do battle

Against the very monster they helped to create much like the joker in the dark knight his real power hinges on his ability to bring out the worst in others and the only way for him to lose is for the people around him to allow their better selves to take over

Until then jay schlatt will continue to be a relentless force delivering karmic irony upon those who think they can use him as a puppet but hey that’s just a theory a game theory thanks for watching you