Too fast for Minecraft?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The impressive speed records of a well-known gamer called Dream for the video game Minecraft have come under scrutiny. Many say that Dream has completed speed runs in such a fast time that it doesn’t seem possible. Are these suspicions correct? We speak to stand-up mathematician Matt Parker who has looked at the probabilities on the elements of chance in the game to see if these records seem plausible.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, with a program that explores |
| 0:05.6 | the numbers in the news and in the never. I'm Tim Halford. |
| 0:11.6 | On more or less, we firmly believe that maths can help us understand everything, but |
| 0:19.4 | until now we've never applied our statistical skills to the world of Minecraft, and that's |
| 0:25.1 | probably a bit of an omission. The computer gaming industry is worth over $100 billion, more |
| 0:32.1 | than the music and the movie businesses put together, and the most successful computer |
| 0:37.0 | gaming history is Minecraft, with over 200 million copies sold. So today we're looking |
| 0:43.3 | at the maths behind a computer game scandal in the world of Minecraft. Now, if you aren't |
| 0:48.6 | to Minecraft aficionado, don't worry, I'm not either, but my daughter, Africa, is. So, |
| 0:57.8 | question number one, what in brief is Minecraft? |
| 1:02.6 | Minecraft is a video game. It's a world made out of blocks. You can mine things and craft |
| 1:09.4 | things and attack animals and monsters to get tools and food. There are two different |
| 1:15.9 | alternate realities in Minecraft. The never, which is a fiery landscape and the end, |
| 1:21.6 | which is a load of cities floating over a void. To beat Minecraft, you need to defeat the |
| 1:27.6 | end dragon, which is in the end. |
| 1:32.8 | And what's a speed run? Speed running is present in most video games, |
| 1:38.8 | talented gamers, try to complete the game as fast as possible. Most video games have lots |
| 1:44.3 | of different categories to speed run. The main one in Minecraft is to defeat the end |
| 1:48.3 | of dragon as quickly as you can. And whose dream? |
| 1:52.0 | Dream is a Minecraft YouTuber. He plays Minecraft, he messes around with mods and hacks, and |
| 1:58.4 | he does do speed running, and he commentates on it and uploads the videos to YouTube. |
| 2:04.2 | And why is dream and speed running controversial? |
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