From Pseudorandom Play to Auditable Esports Competition: A Layered Randomness Infrastructure for Competitive Games

In video games, randomness is produced by invisible mechanisms — a seed, a pseudo-random generator, a probability table, a server call — whereas in physical games the draw has a visible, contestable “stage”. As soon as a game becomes a competition, and in esports in particular, this opacity ceases to be a mere design question and becomes a question of integrity: who generated the randomness, when, from which source, under which transformation, and with which verifiable guarantees? This paper argues that competitive games and cyber-physical competitions need an explicit randomness infrastructure, distinct from the statistical quality of the entropy source alone. Using the case study Quantum Tetris — a Tetris written in Rust/Bevy/WebAssembly whose stochastic decisions are delegated to simulated quantum circuits — we show that a good entropy source does not guarantee fairness: the bias of the “T” tetromino, induced by a 3-bit-to 7-piece mapping table, arises in the transformation layer and not in the source. We then decompose competitive randomness into six layers (entropy source, extraction, distribution policy, mapping function, cryptographic receipt, audit journal) and discuss the realistic contributions of quantum randomness (QRNG, certification via Bell-inequality violation) as well as the cryptographic tools of auditability (verifiable random functions, randomness beacons, verifiable delay functions, signed journals). We finally propose an architecture applicable to esports, competitive online games and cyber-physical games such as autonomous drone racing, and we implement its auditability layers in Quantum Tetris — hash-chained receipts and a commit-reveal journal — whose overhead we measure: on the order of a microsecond per draw, i.e. practically free auditability for a game of this class.