Game Theory - Your Memories Are Corrupted (Ranboo Generation Loss)

Episode Date: July 9, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he talks about the meaning behind Ranboo's Generation Loss project! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick, Zach Stewart and Tom Robinson Editors: AbsolutePixel, Daniel Zemke, and Tyler Mascola Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Welcome to Game Theory, the only show that can make a 15-minute video from 28 seconds of content. And you know what? That's not an exaggeration either. Today's topic has only 28 seconds of content currently available as I write this. That's got to be a new record for us, right? Theory on the least information possible. But remember, it's quality over quantity, and you can do a lot in 28 seconds, which is exactly what we're about to find out. But first, a bit of backstory. As you're all well aware of by now, there have been a lot of content creators both big and small, that have been inspired to make their own ARGs over the years.

And recently, a new challenger appeared, someone that you may be familiar with. Let me give you a hint. He's a Minecrafter. He's one of the massive creators from the Dream SMP. He wears glasses, and he's rocking an iconic Gen Z haircut. I'm talking, of course, about... No, no, Wilburd, no!

Bad Wilbur! No! It's not about you. Get out of here, Wilbur, get! Not every Minecrafter-led ARG is about you. And your weird acoustic guitar songs. Get out of here! No, today's theory is about Ranbu. Hi, I'm Rambu.

Ronbu. Glad I decided to look that one up. And his new series Generation Loss. Now, seeing Ronbu take on an ARG shouldn't be that big of a surprise to anyone familiar with his work over on the Dream SMP. Once he joined the server, he quickly became a fan favorite thanks to his clever backstory involving memory loss, memory journals, and his immediately

iconic Ender Walks, where his Enderman half takes over his body temporarily. He even launched an entire ARG focusing around Ender walking back in early 2021. Looking back on it, you guys actually hit me up a fair bit on Twitter to cover it. Follow me at Matt Pat GT, by the way, if you want to do that. Needless to say, Ronbu is well-versed in cryptic storytelling and ARGs.

Right now, there's only one video available released about a month ago. For once, we are on the cutting edge. So strap in theorists, because we're about to go down a rabbit hole of government conspiracy, media control, and manipulation of the mind. All in 28 seconds. Although the first video of Generation Loss was just posted on May 1st of 2022, it was first announced by Ron Bu all the way back in July of 2021 with 2. potential names. As he said on his Discord, quote, currently thinking about two titles,

Generation Loss or the Lost Field Incident Number One. Obviously, he went with the first option, but remember the second one? That's going to come into play later. Now, why would the title be important? What exactly is meant by Generation Loss? Well, basically, Generation Loss is the loss of quality that happens each time something gets copied. Think about it like making Xerox copies at a copy machine. The first one is pretty clear, but if you make a copy of the copy, the quality devolz. If you continue to make more and more copies, more and more details get lost and things start to degrade. And this seems to be the exact definition that Ronbu intended,

as he clarified again on his Discord, quote, basically you know how VHS tapes never record the original footage super correctly? There are always slight impurities in each recording and copy. What generation loss is is when each imperfection is exaggerated with each new copy until you get some really cool distortion effects. End quote. For a great example, here's a Nesquit commercial in its first generation copy. And here it is nine generations later.

Nothing changed. it was just a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. But you see how information gets lost and distorted over time. Also, it was today o'clock when I realized that I am truly the granddad of YouTube. I bet so many of you are only familiar with VHS tape effects in YouTube videos or indie horror games at this point. Man, I'm old! Anyway, based on the name alone, we know that this series is going to focus on the idea of degradation of information over time. The more something is copied and passed on, the more distorted and messed up it gets.

Gotta say, we're already off to an intriguing start, and we haven't even watched the video yet, which, uh, means it's probably time to do just that. As the video begins, we see an old CRT TV displaying static until words begin to flash. Don't hide, don't escape. Don't talk. Don't conform. Don't hesitate.

We then get five censored images that flashed past the screen multiple times in rapid succession before devolving back into static with the final lines, learn the history, find the founder. The word kill flashes up briefly over the word find to give us the alternate text of kill the founder. It's short, but it's dense, which is exactly the way to kick off something like this. So let's figure out what's going on, start with the five mysterious images. In the second image, we can see a large room with the generation loss symbol in red on the back wall.

A number of people with blacked-out faces sit at desks around the room, and one person has a red square blocking their face. The fact that both the square and the symbol are in red when everything else we see is in black and white is telling us that there's a connection between these two things. It seems to suggest that the person with their face covered in red is working for whatever generation loss is. In which case, I needed to see who is behind that big red block. So, I started reverse image searching and found that this is a photo from the universe of Leipzig in Germany. More specifically, it's the very first dedicated psychology

founded in 1879 by the father of experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt. I have to admit, I wasn't able to figure out who exactly the man with his face blocked out in red was, but that's not really surprising. It's a university lab. Wunt would have had many students come and go through the years. Some of his students did go on to become psychologists in their own right, but couldn't trace any of them back to the specific image. The good news is, though, I'm not exactly sure it matters who the person is, it's actually about the fact that this person is studying under Wilhelm Wund in the first place. One of Wund's big studies was on the idea of generation effects on memory Hmm, something tells me it might be on the right track. Generation effects are quote the advantage in memory for

information that's produced, i.e. Generated by the participant as opposed to another person Basically the idea that if you form your own idea or memory, you're more likely to remember it accurately as opposed to a memory made by someone else and then told to you Lines up pretty darn nicely with the theme of the series generation loss the distortion of memory across It also begins to connect the dots when it comes to the text at the end of the video. Learn the history. Maybe people are forgetting the real history of this world. Instead, only remembering what they've been told, a distorted version of the truth. Generation over generation, history is being forgotten.

Therefore, generation loss. That may seem like I'm clutching at straws for an answer, but the fourth picture ties into the narrative too. It's a picture of a classroom from the 1940s with the generation loss symbol on the chalkboard, and the teacher's face blocked out in red, similar to the last image. I reverse image searched again, and it led me to Getty images, and Getty wasn't giving me a whole lot of information about this photo other than it's a London classroom from 1947. So I kept digging around for uses of the image. Not a whole lot. I actually struggled to find this image anywhere across the internet, except for one article from a liberal news site in the United Kingdom called the Independent. But what's more important is the subject of the article,

parents complaining about a new curriculum being implemented into UK schools. One specifically focused on wrote memorization of facts rather than critical thinking and problem solving. To quote from the article, the new methodology was going to focus on memorizing, quote, endless lists of spelling facts and rules, which will not develop children's ability to think, including problem-solving, critical understanding, and creativity. In short, the problem with this new proposed curriculum was that people were being told what they should learn, what they should remember, and not thinking for themselves, the idea that memory is being dictated by someone else, an external force. So again, just like with the previous photo, we see the recurring theme of memory and control,

how memories get inserted into our heads, and how they stick. there. And this may be me interpreting the picture a bit too literally, but in the edited version of the photo, the chalkboard has the generation-loss symbol on it. They're teaching the children about this regime, whatever this altered history and facts are. These kids are being raised to believe that truth, not develop critical thinking for themselves to find the facts on their own. The Independent isn't the only newspaper that seems to have importance in this mystery either. The second one comes from this image, an old painting with a face once again censored by a red square. This was a painting of Richard Potter, a British businessman turned politician and writer for one of Britain's big biggest newspapers, The Guardian. The Guardian newspaper was actually born out of a desire to push the liberal ideas of a group called the Little Circle, a group with good old Richard Potter as a founding member.

This group's main objective was to get fair representation in government, which at the time was controlled by an elite feud due to corruption in the English Parliament. In fact, government corruption was such a big issue in this era that on August 16th, 1819, a crowd gathered in St. Peter's Field in Manchester, England, to protest for parliamentary reform. To stop the protesters, the Royal Cavalry charged into the crowd and ultimately, killed 15 people. This horrible event would come to be known as the Peterloo Massacre. Making matters worse after this event the government passed the six acts, a move that was aimed at suppressing any meeting about radical reform. Now, why would any of this matter? Well, the place where that massacre happened, St. Peter's Field, it doesn't exist anymore. It's now paved over and has been rebranded as St. Peter's Square. Remember that other title Ronbu was

considering for the ARG? Lost Field Incident number one? Considering that St. Peter's Field where the whole Peterloo massacre occurred is now gone, I suppose you could call that a lost field incident. But even more interesting, when the people of the UK wanted recognition of what happened on the site, the first plaque that the government issued read as follows, quote, An assembly of around 60,000 people. Their subsequent dispersal by the military is remembered as Peterloo. They called charging at protesters and killing 15 of them a dispersal. Are you seeing the connections now?

Another image referencing the manipulation of people's memories of events that have happened The plaque is exactly that. And the fact that the government changed the laws to stop people like Richard Potter from gathering the masses to their cause seems to match the ideas that we've been seeing so far throughout this entire video. This then starts to explain the first major image that we see. A man with his mouth being covered by a hand with the generation loss symbol on it. Someone being silenced by whatever generation loss is. Who this person is is clearly important, as we're specifically given the initials from his pocket handkerchief.

Looks to be TZ or JZ. Not a JZ international rap superstar. though, that would be an unexpected twist. Now, instead, after digging through a bunch of United Kingdom-based newspaper history, I think it might be referencing journalist Tony Z-Z. Tony has been a contributor to the Guardian in the past, but was mostly known as a photographer. In fact, his pictures of former President John F. Kennedy taken four days before the JFK assassination were important pieces of evidence in that investigation.

Considering that that's an event that also has its fair share of crazy theories, I wouldn't be surprised if TZ and that event were all wrapped up into this ARG. Admittedly, it's a huge stab and a half in the dark. The initials are really the only thing that I had to go off of, but honestly, it's the best I could come up with that also fit within the existing themes that I'm getting from this mystery. Regardless of who he is, though, the fact that the Generation Loss symbol is the one covering TZ's mouth is telling us that Generation Loss are the ones trying to control the narrative, and not in a good way. But importantly, the tape is telling us, don't conform,

like a rebel group trying to communicate with its members. Learn the history would imply that the history that people of this world know isn't the real history, but a history that's been altered. We even see this at the very end of the tape. As I mentioned before, we have the phrase, find the founder, which is temporarily replaced with a new phrase, kill the founder. The word kill appearing in a different red font.

Someone has sabotaged the tape, and the color red connects it back to the red logo of Generation Loss. In short, this seems like it's a battle between two groups. Generation Loss, an organization or entity that's trying to silence free thinkers and control the narrative of history, and another group that stands for remembering the truth. One group seeking the truth,

and another one trying to silence it or bury it with misinformation. However, that still leaves us with one final image. This one. Of course, I did a reverse image search only to find that this picture is of the one and only Mitt Romney, a Republican US senator who ran for president twice, first in 2008 and again in 2012. This picture is actually from his high school yearbook. Super random, right? We have five photos that are supposed to represent this mystery. Four of them are much older and have to do with psychology, uprisings around reform, education. What on earth does any of this have to do with the modern politician Mitt Romney. I wasn't particularly sure until I looked at the Generation Lost Twitter account that is. On the 14th of May it posted an image on a static screen with the number two on it. The caption says to the inauguration and that's when it hit me. This high school photo of Mitt Romney was used widely during his run for president back in 2012. The story that broke around this was that he was a rather nasty piece of work back during his high school years,

bullying a fellow student relentlessly. This, along with a number of other things, became a huge smear to his presidential campaign. But on this VHS tape, the image is once again obscured by red bars, trying to stop people recognizing the face and learning where the photo came from and why. It seems to me to be another attempt to control the narrative, to distort the history, allowing Generation Loss to continue with their plans. Romney was running as the Republican candidate against Barack Obama in 2012, and we've been talking a lot about the silencing of liberal figures throughout this ARG thus far. The fact that Part 2 is called the inauguration makes me wonder if this is an alternate reality situation, one where Romney's past actions are buried by generation loss, And he is actually the one elected president in this reality. What would be the larger goal in doing this?

Honestly, not sure. Might need more than 28 seconds of video to figure it out. But there is one last piece of information that I wanted to mention. Whatever's happening with generation loss in the VHS tape, it's not the present day. Before Ronbu even released the first video on his Discord, he released an audio teaser. It's a recording of a phone call where someone has found a box of old VHS tapes. It looks pretty new, actually. So it looks like it was just put in here like, what, like five years ago?

I'd give it. Well, yeah, of course I'm going to play them. I just have to figure out how to use a cassette tape. Once again, making me feel old as heck. Oh, you poor zoomers in your streaming services. Never having to know the phrase, please be kind, rewind. But this teaser actually reminds me of an image that appears over on Twitter, a VHS tape on the desk. Someone is investigating generation loss, trying to figure out what's going on, just like we are now. The story is actually following their journey. We're essentially being put in their shoes while we watch and break down these videos. On that desk, we also have the date November 4th, 1990, along with a comic strip from Malcolm Hancock's The Lumpets. Clearly, these are going to be important for the investigation, but I couldn't find any relevant information about the date or

the comic. Maybe we'll find out more in future episodes. So there you have it, friends, a story of a rebel group trying to rise up to take on the generation lost conspiracy. Rising from the same ideals of Richard Potter in the Little Circle determined to teach people the truth, to open their eyes to what the government is really doing. The rise to power of this controlling organization, their alteration of history, and manipulation of society. And all of it tied up in an investigation from the modern day, where maybe generation loss is still in control. All of that from a 28 second video. A really solid start to what I expect to be a really exciting ARG. Your move, Ron Boo. Regardless of whether I'm right or wrong, I seriously cannot wait to see what you do next.

But remember, it's all just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.