The Appeal of The Ridiculous Sport of Speedrunning
Speedrunning is not just a ridiculous sport, it’s hundreds upon hundreds of ridiculous sports, at least two ridiculous sports for every game that was ever made, even the horrible games that no one remembers.
Speedrunners remember. They remember because in each of these little worlds they have found new frontiers of technique to explore and conquer.
But why watch speedrunning? I’m going to try to explain why I enjoy consuming this stuff. You might come to understand.
Consider the following
- Speedruns show you a large part of the game very quickly, quicker than any other kind of playthrough. If the game has good art, just seeing so much of the game in motion is going to be a pleasure.
- There is sometimes a lot of genuine drama and tension as the runner’s plans unravel. There will be a narrative structure. Recurring elements. Unexpected events that knock the rest of the story off course. It is common for runs to be upended by by things that have never — throughout so many training sessions — happened before, it’s so common that the phrase “That’s never happened before” has become a cliche.
When the run ends, you may feel something profound. You have just witnessed the culmination of a great project. Hundreds upon hundreds of hours of planning and practising manifested before you. No words are sufficient. But we are used to this. - Imagine that there were some standard show, a story we’ve always told. It’s a story about questioning the limits of the world, studying, and growing. The protagonist eventually learns to break the laws of physics and transcend everything they thought was true. This story has been reimagined many times over the years in many mediums, because it is just such an important story that every growing human needs to hear. That’s what speedrunning is. It is an inspiring as heck story of overcoming the constants of the world, I cannot get enough of it, I will watch any number of remakes.
- I get a sort of vindictive satisfaction out of seeing games that have frustrated me being broken wide open. When a runner exploits a game’s flaws to thoroughly insult it by skipping the most tedious parts? Delicious. What could be better? You don’t have to like a game to enjoy watching it get torn apart. Sometimes disliking the game helps.
I’m a programmer and a game designer. Some of my reasons for enjoying speedrunning have a lot to do with that.
- Good speedrunners will often explain details of the programming and behaviours that I often don’t fully grasp by just playing, myself. Sometimes these behaviours shed a lot of light on how the game was made.
- Speedrunning reminds us of the difference between how insiders experience the game, and how new players experience it. We experience playing a game casually, buying into the illusion, then the speedrunner comes along and hauls aside the curtain, showing us how fake and exploitable things really were the whole time, it reminds us how thick an illusion can be when you’re subject to it. A game designer is like a magician. We show you a white sphere coupled to a perlin noise generator and a pursuit algorithm and we should rightly expect you to mistake it for a ghost. We don’t really simulate. We allude.
A game designer who hasn’t got this insight deeply internalised can’t even begin to work. We need to know how a thing that feels real can be totally fake, so that we may know how real a fake thing can seem.
AGDQ is about to start!
Awesome Games Done Quick 2019 takes place between Jan 6 and Jan 13. You’ll be able to watch it here https://www.twitch.tv/gamesdonequick
Check the schedule to see if any interesting games are screening at a convenient time for you.
Speedruns I Have Been Impressed With
A large number of well commentated speedrun vods can be found in the GDQ archives.
Minecraft
The best speedrun, for you, will be of a game you’ve played extensively, that you thought you knew really well. For a lot of people, Minecraft is such a game, so I should mention illumina1337's sgdq 2019 Minecraft run https://youtu.be/F9IrE1-F-SM?t=4
Carci’s Resident Evil 7 Run
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/217062070?t=4h27m47s
Caveman’s T.R.A.G: Tactical Rescue Assault Group run
TRAG is a gleaming weird game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVETQhBLsq4
Distro’s Halo 5 Run
Has an excellent balance of engaging with the game as it was designed to be played, and completely tearing it apart. Fans of Halo who were disappointed with the single-player may take satisfaction in seeing it desecrated.
Has at least two instances of riding enemy dropships out of bounds
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/216691612?t=8h14m14s
Mystery Tournament
There is a tournament in which players must compete to be the quickest to finish a succession of games they’ve never seen before. Not a single game I have seen in this tournament has been familiar to me. It is called Mystery Tournament for a reason and it is wonderful.
It must take a really robust kind of talent to come out on top in one of these competitions. A barrage of overwhelming variety, one session they’re competing in a mind-bending, solid puzzle game like Baba is You, the next minute they’re tasked with surviving the diabolical courses of Super Monkey’s Bouncy Day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB6t1AV21SA&t=380s
The Tutorial Session
During AGDQ 2018, similar aptitudes are being tested in the Darkman78’s Tutorial Session. Darkman78 was given a limited amount of time to teach a runner the techniques needed to get a competent time in a game they’ve never played before (Strider). The game is then run. I’ve never seen a sport that tests the coach and the athlete’s capacity to rapidly improve their game under pressure. The capacity to learn quickly is often more important, in life, than pre-existing knowledge, so there’s real merit being demonstrated here.
Aside from being a demonstration of talent, tutorial runs fully explain each trick and demonstrate how tricky they are. In speedrunning, knowing that stuff can often make the difference between appreciating the run and getting nothing out of it at all.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/217062070?t=20h28m51s
Great video stories about the development of various speedrunning categories
The history of improvements in Mario Sunshine
A classic from the Mario 64 A Button Challenge project
This video explains how Super Mario 64 tool-assisted speedrunners are able to finish a game about a being whose primary way of interacting with the world is jumping, without jumping more than like two times.
It’s mindblowingly sophisticated. This will give you a sense of just how much these techniques have been refined and developed. See here how every game’s speedrunning community is a microcosm of the Scientific Project. A collaboration in study and engineering and further study enabled by the engineering. Come for the scuttlebug levitation, stay for the parallel universes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A
If my passion for this ridiculous sport does infect you, don’t hesitate to return here and tell me off. I’ll enjoy that.
