Queen Pwnzalot

Mark Honeychurch - 4 March 2024

I’m a bit of a fan of internet drama - at least the kind where someone is accused of wrongdoing. The to and fro of accusations, rebuttals, evidence, and eventual apology video, with a backdrop of hundreds of eager new YouTubers hoping to gain followers by creating reaction videos, giving their own commentary, or even adding to the investigation, is fascinating to watch, and its online nature means that everything is easily accessible from the comfort of my living room. I can watch half a dozen videos, then go searching for background information, piecing together my own picture of who the main players are, how they’re perceived within the online community, and just how screwed their internet “careers” are.

The latest drama that I’ve been gawking at, and which I’m going to use to talk about how people react to accusations of cheating, is that of online game streamer Queen Pwnzalot - real name Becky.

Firstly, let’s look at her internet name - Queen Pwnzalot. It appears to be a somewhat oblique reference to Sir Lancelot, while also squeezing in a pun (if it can be called that) of the phrase “pwns a lot”. For those unfamiliar with internet parlance, “pwn” means “own”, and is usually pronounced something like “pone”. This now-deliberate mis-spelling came about from an original accidental mis-typing of the word own, something that’s easy to do because P is next to O on a QWERTY keyboard. It also helps to know that to “own” someone in a game, or more broadly these days in any kind of competition or argument, is to beat them thoroughly. So, for a game streamer, the name Pwnsalot is meant to suggest that this particular player wins many of their games.

Becky makes money on the hugely popular games streaming site Twitch.tv. Although I’m old enough to struggle with the concept of people making a living out of other people watching them play a computer game, this is a fairly mature industry by now. Thousands of players stream their gaming, and as they play these games for long stretches at a time, they are usually pretty good at playing - although they also usually have to engage with their viewers, in order to make them feel connected enough to donate money to the gamer (in the form of monthly subscriptions and one-off donations, called Bits) and stick around to watch product placements and adverts.

The game that Becky mainly plays is Monster Hunter World (I’ve never played it before, but I am planning to give the new Monster Hunter game a try soon as it’s on sale on Steam). Monster Hunter, as the name suggests, is a game where your aim is to kill monsters. Becky’s specialty in this game is killing a large dragon called Alatreon, a tough boss to beat. And she’s pretty good at it, having so far killed the boss in-game a whopping 4,689 times (as of the end of her last live video stream on Twitch). Personally, I’m not sure how doing the same thing nearly five thousand times could be considered entertaining to watch - but, then again, as I already said, I’m a little too old to get my head around this gaming-as-a-career phenomenon.

Maybe it’s the cleavage that makes it worth watching?

Her experience is what makes this case a little odd. Although Becky doesn’t have a massive following (about 8,000 followers on Twitch), from what I’ve read she’s well-regarded in the community as a good player, and her fanbase is pretty loyal - so I have no problems accepting that playing this game is probably earning her enough to be considered her full-time job. But, despite this, Becky chose to go and do something that was a bit daft - she cheated. And what she cheated at wasn’t even her usual schtick, which is simply killing Alatreon over and over again - she instead decided to cheat while attempting to kill the dragon while blindfolded. Blindfolded playing is a niche challenge in the speedrunning community, and there are some amazing feats performed in classic games like Mario 64 that have to be seen to be believed. There are people who spend thousands of hours perfecting their ability to play and beat a game based on the game’s sounds alone, using some amazing tricks to locate and align their character in the game world in a way that’s repeatable and reliable, as well as memorise and track enemies’ movement patterns.

Becky’s blindfolded attempt wasn’t for a speedrunning competition, and there was nothing really for her to gain from doing this, but for some unfathomable reason she chose to do it with a blindfold that she could see through, and to do it on her live Twitch stream. Now, when I watch her playthrough, I have no idea what I’m looking at. I see someone with a blindfold on, pressing buttons on a keyboard and mouse, and kicking a dragon’s butt.

But to anyone else who has attempted to do this blindfolded, or to kill other monsters in the game or play similar games while blindfolded, they would instantly recognise the tactics that are required to play a game based solely on audio cues. And, when several of these people were made aware of Becky’s blindfolded attempt, what they saw just didn’t line up with what they would expect. For example, when on-screen messages appeared she was able to know they were there and dismiss them quickly. And she continuously adjusted the vertical axis of the camera to keep her view centred on the dragon’s vulnerable head - something that blind players both don’t need to do, and wouldn’t be able to do. The trick was simple - the blindfold was partially see-through.

Karl Jobst, a YouTube video creator who makes many fascinating videos about people who cheat in competitive game challenges, often in very inventive ways, did a good job of showing why he thought the playthrough was faked:

In response, rather than admit wrongdoing and apologise, Becky chose to double down and perform a second blindfolded run of the game, killing Altreon this time with a proper blindfold, paper covering her monitors, an app to track all of her button presses, and multiple cameras:

After this video was released, Karl promised a follow-up video showing how this attempt, too, was faked - and on Thursday last week he released his video, which showed that although it was a little more elaborate than the first time, the basic idea was the same - Becky was able to look out of the side of the blindfold at a secret third monitor that she had set up, out of view of the cameras she was streaming.

At this point, I think it’s fair to say that Queen Pwnzalot has been pwned by Karl Jobst. The big question now is what she chooses to do next.

When people are caught out like this, there are usually a few different ways they can act. The obvious choices that I’ve seen used in the past when someone is accused of cheating, are to:

1. Publicly deny they did anything wrong

2. Make lame excuses for their actions

3. Try to hide/delete the evidence

4. Ignore the accusation and carry on regardless

5. Disappear from the public eye

6. Counter-attack, often with legal threats

These are not mutually exclusive, and people will often pick two or more tactics to use in tandem. One item that I would like to be able to add to this list, but sadly I can’t because it never seems to happen, is to “apologise, fully and frankly, and offer to make amends”.

Given these popular responses to accusations of cheating, I’m interested to see how Queen Pwnzalot chooses to respond to Karl’s accusations in the coming weeks. My guess is that she’ll either try to disappear quietly, or will come out with a half-assed apology video explaining why she didn’t actually do anything wrong, or maybe saying that it was all just a big joke. For now, she’s chosen the path of going quiet - her Facebook has been made private, her Instagram, Twitter and YouTube accounts haven’t been posted to for the last couple of weeks, and she’s no longer streaming on Twitch:

One other thing I’ve been thinking about recently, as myself and other members of the committee have been working long hours on our own plagiarism exposé, is how the subject of our investigation is going to handle our claims when we go public. I’m expecting a mixture of some of the responses I’ve listed above, mainly the denial and excuses, as I think ignoring our evidence will probably be too difficult, and hiding it will also be pretty tough to do. I am a little concerned about the prospect of a counter-attack, and rest assured we’ll be seeking legal advice before we go public with any claims. If we do end up in legal hot water (probably a defamation case), I’m sure we’ll let you all know - and we might even be coming, cap in hand, asking for help with any legal bills we may incur! So, if you want to get ahead of the game, feel free to make sure your membership is up to date, and maybe consider donating to us - details are at https://skeptics.nz/donate