I really don't like Game Theory, or MatPat. Whether he's shamelessly jumping on every bandwagon that rolls under his nose, deliberately misleading viewers with clickbait titles and thumbnails, spewing SJW bullshit to an impressionable audience, nakedly selling lies to please his sponsors, or just wasting people's precious attention spans with verbal diarrhea, he's not exactly a model youtuber.

But it's the way he conducts his research that I hate the most. Rather than going in any logical direction, he just spins a wheel and picks one completely at random. While I have neither the time nor the expertise to debunk his videos about physics or medicine, there's an especially low-hanging fruit in his library that should serve as the perfect example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln342caKBHs

For someone who claims to know Fallout, I've never seen anybody get so much about the series wrong. Only a minute and 30 seconds into this video, he cocks up the most basic premise of series lore by claiming that "World War II never really ended." Of course, since he later identifies the point of divergence (incorrectly) as 1961, this leads me to question whether MatPat knows as much about real history as he does Fallout history.

No, World War II ended right on time in the Fallout universe. 1945; Allies won. It's the Cold War that never ended, though the Soviet Union gradually declined and was replaced by Maoist China over the next century. America, meanwhile, grew into a much stronger stereotype of 1950s exceptionalism, and was dragged into war when the world's resources began to dwindle. For a better explanation, here's a good youtube channel.

I'm not even going to get into how Mat refers to ghouls as "zombies" to appeal to his 13 year old fanbase, because by then I'd have exhausted my will to write and there's still so much bullshit to comb through.

The premise of Mat's video is already stupid, since Pre-War Money is an item that exists in the newer games, and at the time the video was made, it was always valued at 10 caps. The wiki page even points out that the blue strap indicates that each stack is worth exactly $100; so 100 dollars divided by 10 caps means that each cap is worth 10 dollars. Wow, now wasn't that a much easier calculation than whatever MatPat cooked up? Now obviously, since the US government no longer exists in the year 2277, and the dollar is no longer legal tender, that's going to skew the equation a little, but that's still the most direct comparison you can make.

So, how does Game Theory try to answer this question? In two incredibly stupid ways, the first of which is considerably stupider.

Mat decides that the best barometer for value in this situation would be the price of gold, which would be great, if there was any way to determine the value of gold in the alternate, post-apocalyptic year of 2282. In lieu of that, here's some mental gymnastics. As previously discussed, Mat comes to the dumbfounding conclusion that Fallout's timeline diverged from our own in the year 1961. A conclusion he supports with one release date of one song in one radio station in one game. Once.

The exact date of Fallout's divergence is left purposely vague in the lore, but there are several dead giveaways that point to a far earlier date. If you want to go really far back, you could say it diverged in the early 17th century when a samurai was abducted by aliens, but even if you stick to the events following World War II, there's still much more to consider. The most obvious example, and the one most commonly referenced as the reason why technology took such a drastically different turn in the Fallout timeline, is that the transistor was not invented until 2067; 120 years after its historical invention.

If it's that easy to find a major divergence as far back as 1947, why did MatPat go through all the trouble just to find a song from 1961? I honestly have no idea, but it speaks volumes about how nonsensical the logic in his videos is. He'll go the longer path to find a less accurate conclusion rather than just sticking to the truth.

Anywho, once Mat was sold on 1961, what was his next step? How exactly does the point of divergence help him calculate the price of gold in the alternate year 2282? He assumes, point blank, that the price of gold froze in place at the exact moment of divergence, and remained exactly the same for more than three centuries.

Three centuries. Matpat actually believes that the price of gold stayed at exactly the same rate through not only time itself, but also resource crises, wars, societal collapse, nuclear Armageddon, and countless failed attempts to restore a functional society.

Even if you buy into the misconception that American culture in Fallout froze in place following divergence (it didn't; some things advanced as normal, such as the civil rights movement), that still has next to no effect on the price of gold. That's dictated more by... y'no... economics. But fuck it, let's expand the misconception. Let's say that after 1961, not only did culture inexplicably freeze in place, but so did the economy, as well as the price of gold. Fine. That still leaves the issue of the atomic fucking holocaust that devastated the world in 2077. I have my doubts that the price of gold would remain comparable after an event like that.

And that's how Mat arrives at his first figure of $1.67. It's ridiculous, obviously, but at least there he began in the right place. If there was a way to determine the dollar value of gold in the alternate year 2282, then he would have gotten a much better answer. He screwed the whole thing up royally, but at least he had a foundation. Another solid foundation that he had was much earlier in the video, when he mentioned that caps were backed by water. This is actually true (at least in Fallout 1), but for some reason, Mat just abandoned it and moved on to the gold method. Again, this all goes to show just how random and illogical this whole train of thought was. Why ignore or brush aside perfectly good avenues of inquiry to focus on utter bullshit?

Anyway, his second method is much more forward and to the point. He wants to know what the raw materials themselves are worth, and then assumes that to be the price of a bottle cap. Because that's how currency works, right?

Obviously not. In the US, for instance, our coins are never worth exactly what we paid to mint them. Pennies, infamously, are actually worth about 2/3rds the cost of the materials needed to mint them. Bottlecaps, should they become currency, would be no different. A currency's value in trade has next to nothing to do with its raw materials.

Mat then goes through extra trouble to call the offices of a real life cap manufacturer to get an exact composition. I guess this is meant to impress me, but when he's still using the ridiculous 1961 year as his basis in all this, it still feels awful pathetic. Mat goes through all of this trouble just to come to a number even more ridiculous than his last one: about $0.0000175 per cap, or less than 2 cents for a minigun. Suffice to say, it's not that.

And that's basically the end of this stupid video. After that, he goes right to whoring out his sponsor (which is a health food service, for some reason), and finishes with a few vaguely Fallout-related jokes and memes. Not something I can really debunk, but it did make it hard to take the shotgun out of my mouth.

I know this is just one video, but this should be indicative of how bad Mat's research is. If he was too lazy or stubborn to actually learn the first thing about Fallout lore before making this video, then I don't even want to think about how many times he's potentially fucked up on more difficult, more sensitive topics.

MatPat probably isn't going to read this. I understand that, and I don't care. I'm not the only one talking about how bad his videos are, and I don't expect him to read and respond to some nobody who posted mean things on a brony website. This is meant for the people who still take his crap seriously. Maybe they can look at Game Theory for what it truly is: the Nickelback of YouTube gaming channels.