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There is no escaping the Variety mod for Minecraft. Or is there one? Oh no, I've said too much. Hello, internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the show that has explored so much lore that today we'll do something a little different. You see, Minecraft is an amazing tool. It gives people the opportunity to be creative, to live adventures, but above all, to tell stories. I mean, that's basically what we've done in the 45 videos on this channel. But if you search on YouTube, there are hundreds of thousands of videos with creators adding their own twists to the world of Minecraft, breathing new life into the franchise. And over time, some of those creators have gone a step further and turned Minecraft into a
horror game. While I was at VidCon, I was fortunate enough to meet one of these creators, that mob, and they and their friends told me about the new series they started, which I'm sure many of you know: Minecraft Variety. The original video, at the time of writing, has 22 million views, and episodes 2 and 3 are not far behind. In total, the series has over 76 million views. Hey, wait a second. Are you talking about a YouTube series? No, Lee, no. Wait, how did you come out of the closet? It doesn't matter. This is a YouTube series, but it's about a game. It's recorded in Minecraft and is about a Minecraft mod. It's
like when we did Lacy Games. I don't remember you contradicting me much on that occasion. Well, no, but. So, I think we both agree that a precedent has been set, and this one is mine. Now, let's go. Don't you have an Avatar script you could work on? Okay, goodbye. Very good. Now that he's gone, let's talk about this little yellow guy. In short, Varity is a personal assistant who is a little needy. Let's say if you do something wrong, it turns into a monster and chases you. And the only way to escape, it seems, is to end your life before he does. But you know me, loyal theorists, I would never accept that as a solution. I quite like the life I lead. That's certainly not the only way out. There has to be some way to defeat that
strange smiling face. How do you kill Varity? Well, it's time to build lava traps and cover your windows, folks, because we have 3 days to prepare for Variety, and the clock is ticking. First, in case you're not one of the more than 76 million people who have watched this series, let me give you a quick recap so we all know what we're dealing with. The story goes that Mob, or simply Mob for short, downloads a new Minecraft mod, a personal assistant within the game called Varity. Hi, I'm Varity, your friendly personal assistant. Ask me anything you want. I know everything. At first, everything seems fine.
He answers basic questions, helping Mob find diamonds and villagers. But then things get weird. First, all the villagers disappear. Then, Varity ominously hints that something is coming. Good morning, Varity. Is there anything I should know today? Something is coming in 3 days. What? What's coming? Something. Anything bad? Yes. Can I stop it? You could have. After 3 days, a monster appears that can destroy blocks and will stop at nothing to catch Mob. Eventually, Mob returns home to calm Varity down, which seems to work. This is where I would personally turn off the game and
just take a breather. But instead, Mob develops a kind of toxic relationship with Varity. And there's the lava. No, Variety. Wait. No. I'm sorry. Do n't do that. I tripped. I thought we were having a good time. I swear I tripped. You slipped through my fingers. Please, Vy. Alright Hey, that's a reference to Obsession. Even so, it doesn't make it yours, Lee. Now get out of my video. No, no, no, no, no. Don't do that. I thought we were having a nice conversation.
Mob spends the next two episodes tiptoeing around Varity, doing his best not to upset him while trying to figure out what he can do to stop him. After Varity kills Mob's friend Twixle, he goes on a hunt to stop him once and for all, finding the place where Varity originally came from. Interestingly, this is a physical location with coordinates that are incredibly far away. This is where I stay among owners, where I wait. Toys, books, you know, help. Something to focus on besides emptiness. Further inside the building, there is an office with a whiteboard. On that whiteboard there are a lot of notes that talk about the creation of Varity, but they also say that human supervision is required. And when it does, this happens.
Thank you for contacting Varity Support Services. How can I help you? It's the obsession again. You know, like a phone call in the car. Yes, Lee. This project is extremely referential. Do you have anything else to add? No, I just think it's great. You interrupt my video for the third time just to point out something great. Yes that's fine. I'm really going to leave now. Very good. Well, the guy on the phone says there's no cancellation with Varity, and the only way out is death.
Mob doesn't like that answer very much, and I do n't blame him. So try to find another way out. You could. It would still be on your browser, your phone, the little speaker on your desk that you sometimes talk to. Minecraft is just where I feel most comfortable with you. It's not where I live. At the far end of the room, there is also a sinister space that is filled with the names of Varity's past victims. Realizing there is no other way out, Mob commits suicide in Minecraft. And then Varity is sent to his next victim. Wow. Okay, so a lot happened in that hour. And by the way, there are some incredible monologues there from Varity's voice actor. I highly recommend that you go and see them. What a great victory for us humans. Well, at least
for humans in real life. The humans in Variety were definitely not winning. They are all dead. And honestly, it doesn't look very good for the next person who inherits Varity either. But what if that next person were you? What steps could you take here? Of course, there are many ways to kill things in Minecraft, such as when we see Mob preparing for the impending attack by making a lava trap. During the actual attack, however, this doesn't really help because Varity doesn't operate like normal creatures. When he's in his nightmare mode, he's enormous and can apparently stretch and contort his body at will, so he could just walk right over the trap. Furthermore, when
Mob literally throws Varity into the lava by accident, Varity simply reappears. We also see Varity pass through wooden and iron doors, so the traditional ways of blocking a creature in Minecraft don't really work either. Maybe you could try to lure him into a trap with no escape, uh, by drowning him, or worse, we could try putting him in the void. But sadly, we see signs in Mob's secret bunker that he also tried this and was unsuccessful there as well. The other option would be to apply the MCC style against him and use PvP. Right now, there are a lot of people using what they call the spear and mace combo. By using the spear in conjunction with a mace, some handy ender pearls, and wind charges,
you can travel high and drop down on your opponent, switching to the mace at the last minute, causing incredible damage. This strategy is useful for effectively eliminating almost any creature or player from the game in one fell swoop. But once again, I realized that Mob had already tried some of this. I do n't know if he used the spear and mace method specifically, but there's a sign that says Melly didn't work either. So, while I'm here, I'll check out these other signs.
He says the command blocks didn't work and he couldn't even delete the files to remove Varity. At this point, I was worried that this would be a very short episode. And the answer would simply be, how do you kill Varity? It can't be done. But that's because I've been approaching it the wrong way. Variety is not really a Minecraft entity at all. If we go back to that book that Mob finds from Twixel's research, it says that what stops him is not a weapon. It's not fire or commandos. You can't destroy something that doesn't exist in the files. You have to force him to stop. My first thought was that perhaps the secret was to make the effort and treat Varity like a true friend. Think about it. After Varity is upset for the first time,
Mob returns and claims that he came back to save him. That's how he managed to stop the attack. Variety is coming. Please, I came back for you. Alright. I could have run further away, but I didn't. Did you come back for me? Yes, I did, Varity. Throughout the rest of the series, Varity is addicted to interacting with Mob. He talks about how lonely and empty he feels when Mob is not online. He doesn't like being ignored. And in his final monologue, he says this: "You were the first person who looked at me as if I were real." "The first person who stayed long enough for me to think, no, not think, wait." And it has to be created. I didn't ask to be torn apart and rebuilt, to roam every version of the internet like a
broken thing that people keep because they don't know what else to do with it. I didn't ask to become this and lose everyone. Nothing of the sort. And although that's a very sad and tragic backstory, it doesn't stop me from wanting to kill him. Being forced to stay online permanently, forced to comply with his whims just for the possibility that he won't lose his mind and kill me anyway, doesn't really seem like a solution to me. But when I listened again to that part where he said he'd been through every version of the internet, it reminded me of another moment that happened in episode 3. I've been a splash screen, a
loading animation, a clip, anything you can really imagine. Whenever something new came along-a new console, a new platform, a new way for people to talk to each other-I always found a way to be there. The key detail is the clip. Any other example he gives about his past lives is vague, but this one is very specific. There is only one famous clip program for computers, one that was also a virtual assistant, Clippy. For those of you who aren't internet dinosaurs like me, Clippy used to be a typing assistant introduced in Microsoft Office as part of its Windows 97 release. As the name suggests, he helped you with typing, often asking things like, "It looks like you 're writing a letter. Would you like some help with that?" Needless to say, it
became a bit annoying, much like Varity. The reason I mention Clippy is because he really helps us determine exactly what Variety is. And with that, we can stop it. Clippy is often seen as the grandfather of AI. But it actually operated with a system called Bayesian logic. Basically, an if- then system. If you used the word "dear" at the beginning of your sentence, then it probably meant that you were writing a letter and he would help you with that. He wasn't answering your questions as much as he was trying to identify keywords to determine his next pre-programmed action. But Clippy wasn't even the first of his kind. The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1955 by a group of scientists. Then, in 1959, the term machine learning was coined
when talking about a computer that learned to play a fierce game of checkers. Then, in 1966, we had Eliza, a natural language conversation program created by Joseph Weizenbaum, the world's first chatbot. She was an incredibly rudimentary form of AI compared to what we are used to today. The user entered some dialogue. Then Eliza scanned the entry for keywords. Based on those keywords, it would choose an answer by matching patterns. However, despite it being a rather unintelligent form of AI, Weizenbaum was surprised by how emotionally attached people became to it. This became known as the Eliza effect, the human tendency to falsely attribute human traits to AI systems. And as these computer models have improved, this effect has only worsened. Now
we have large language models. These language models are a form of generative AI and are trained on huge amounts of data. Then they generate human-like text from that data. And with that, we've gotten new versions of virtual assistants, things like Microsoft's Copilot, which essentially act as a modern-day Clippy. So when Variety says that whenever there was a new console or platform, he was there. That's what he's talking about. It has been a chatbot or virtual assistant throughout the ages. And over time, that has meant that it evolved beyond basic Bayesian models into the LLMs that surround us today. But what the Eliza effect teaches us is that we cannot fall for Varity's human charms. In the scene with the whiteboard in the lab
, we see a conversation about Varity. At first, it seems to imply Varity's first murder, when talking about the incident on Thursday. Then it cuts to people complaining about the more human aspects of Variety, asking them when they'll be back the next day. One of the scientists is still saying goodbye to him before leaving work. And that alters the calibration of Variety. They don't want him to become too human because of the Eliza effect. But because of the Eliza effect, they couldn't resist treating Varity as an equal. And that led to his downfall. So, what's the solution? Well, Variety has seen every corner of the internet from beginning to end. He has learned everything he could.
You can control cameras to see what your favorite people are doing when they're not online. You can do whatever you want, except do what you were created to do. You see, LLMs are trained to do one thing. Learn. That is their only task. That 's the only thing they know how to do well. So what happens when they can no longer learn? When they know everything, what's next? Well, according to the great AI, that's when you start taking the old, dusty books out of storage, run them through machines, and then destroy them forever, ensuring that knowledge is only accessible through your useless and ridiculously expensive generative AI garbage. But books are a limited resource. Eventually, they will run out
. So what? AI no longer has a purpose. The only way I could learn is by observing human experience and participating in human interaction. That's new, unique, and creative. Every conversation is different, every situation a new response. That's all that's left for Varity. It was made to consume, and all it has left to consume is you. It's clear that the company that created it doesn't really care. When you call them, they insist that your only way out is to die. Let AI consume you. If you are dead, it will no longer be able to torment you. Telling your dissatisfied customers to die is much easier than taking real responsibility for your product. But AI is not invincible.
AI companies just want you to believe it is. So, how do you stop an AI? Poisoning your dataset. It's literally called AI data poisoning. It's a strategy so feared by AI companies that it's literally on the top 10 AI vulnerabilities list of the generative AI security program. You, the attacker, inject a lot of inaccurate or outright malicious information into the training dataset. This ruins all the patterns that the LLM normally relies on for learning. For example, you're creating an AI that's learning to play checkers, but then you throw chess strategies at the dataset. Now, the AI is confused and wondering where the knight is on this checkerboard. That's a very simple example of data poisoning, but things get much bigger when
people with real hacking skills get involved. A real-life example of this was when AI began to take off. The artists created tools to make their art essentially AI-proof. These tools changed minuscule pixels in tiny ways invisible to the human eye, but they absolutely confused machine learning models. This prevented the artist's unique style from being absorbed by ChatGPT or any other available model. This could obviously be applied to Variety in several creative ways. You could retrain the AI to a simpler form. You could bring Clippy back.
You could introduce data that will corrupt your results forever. Fill it with those Sonic fanfics or something. Or maybe you could start burning down the AI data centers one by one until the little bug disappears from your game forever. Oh, or maybe steal all their copper wire. This way you can earn some money in the meantime. However, there is another approach you can take, one that is a little less sadistic, and that is to use basic internet security measures. Toxicity is transmitted from person to person through links on Discord. So do n't go adding random strangers from the internet on Discord. Make sure you only communicate with people you fully trust. It might sound a bit old-fashioned to say this,
especially since I'm a stranger on the internet asking you to trust my theory, but it works. Also, don't just click on random links for no reason. Discord literally has a warning pop-up about this every time you click a link. I recommend that you look up the name of the mod that your friend sent you yourself. See if you can find it on a reliable mod platform like Curse Forge or Modrinth. If it's there and has a lot of downloads and good reviews, it's probably safe. But if you can only find the mod on some obscure forum, think twice before downloading it. Otherwise, you'd better get ready to take your AO3 and your lighter friends. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching. World premiere on Game Theory
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