Issue #362: The Philosophy of Video Game Speedrunning
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (2025) is a hell of a way to start a year of movie going. Den of Thieves (2018) sucked, so my expectations were low for 2. But boy did it deliver.
Other than that, I watched a bunch of the Games Done Quick charity marathon supporting the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It was awesome, so I wrote about it.
Speedrunning Gazette
Why Is There Speedrunning Rather than Nothing?
The GDQ marathons are always an occasion for me to think about something I usually don’t: speedrunning. Though the topic comes up periodically, it is worth defining. Wikipedia describes speedrunning as: “the act of playing a video game, or section of a video game, with the goal of completing it as fast as possible.” Speedrun.com has a similar definition: “Speedrunning is when an individual attempts to beat part or all of a video game as quickly as possible.” But the speedrun.com definition adds another detail, “This can include individual levels, specific objects, or unique limitations as decided by the community or the player.”
Even these ostensibly self-evident definitions can be broken down to first principles. What does it mean to “beat a game?” Typically this is clearing whatever game event is immediately before the final credits roll. Some games have “Time Attack” modes or measure how quickly one clears parts of the game for the purposes of scoring (the speedrunning community calls this In-Game Time [IGT] vs. Real-Time Attack [RTA]). But the entire premise of beating a game quickly, in most cases, requires the imposition of a criteria that doesn’t exist within the game. The game has no way to measure it, so the runner must use external tools, like the LiveSplit software, to measure their “RTA” run.
Wikipedia’s speedrunning definition also touches on the mechanics through which one accomplishes the task, “Speedrunning often involves following planned routes, which may incorporate sequence breaking and exploit glitches that allow sections to be skipped or completed more quickly than intended.” Without any restrictions, a legitimate speedrun may involve glitching to the game’s final credits roll immediately.
Speedrunning and Challenges Above and Beyond
But in these cases, there are often other speedrun categories that will restrict the use of these glitches. Some categories are “restricted,” “no major glitches,” or “glitchless” that require various limitations on the use of glitches to qualify. This brings me to a more emphatic point about speedrunning and the value system that underlies it. Really, the idea of “speed” is arbitrary. Though a RTA timer is almost always running, speedrunning is about completing the game under a restriction the game itself does not impose. At AGDQ this weekend, there were “speedruns” that involved the runner playing piano at the same time as they played the game or controlling the game itself with a saxophone. Both of these events were timed. But is their clear time really the point? Sure, perhaps there will be others who will come along and attempt these bizarre and impressive feats faster than their progenitors. But the capacity to do these things at all is what shocks and delights, rather than being able to do them and do them fast.
Dr. Doot, the player of the aforementioned saxophone run, played Elden Ring (2022) with a saxophone under another community enforced ruleset separate from yet inextricably connected to speedrunning: “hitless.” The principal custodians of this method of play are Team Hitless. They describe what they do at teamhitless.com: “A No Hit/Hitless run involves completing a game without taking a hit from an enemy or trap.” On their website, Team Hitless simply archives the successful runs without a hierarchy based on speed.
Speedrunning or speed gaming as the most popular for player-imposed challenges seems like a happy accident more than an end in itself. Speedrunning is a metonym for taking on greater challenge than the game puts upon its players. As a result, GDQ is a showcase of feats of challenge rather than just simply speedruns. This has become more and more evident as the event has evolved and expanded, with many such examples this year including using alternative control schemes, player versus player competitions, and rhythm game showcases.
The breadth of what can be showcased at GDQ puts the lie to a problematic binary that exists within speedrunning, the opposing “casual” playthrough. Playing a game “casually” has become the catch-all for non-speedrun (or other describable, community supported challenge run) gaming. But such an opposition, speedrun vs. casual playthrough, flattens both forms of play.
It’s not very reasonable to expect the speedrunning community to change their nomenclature for describing modes of play, nor do I believe they should. But collectively, it is probably worth considering what different kinds of objectives can exist for a player and how different challenges they might take on define their style. For instance, there are gamers who play relentlessly to uncover every detail and fulfill the most difficult or obscure objectives — “completionist” players. That style of play has tied itself, in recent history, to the trophy or achievement list that define challenges for the player that may not be written anywhere in the game itself, but that the game nonetheless tracks.
Likewise, among speedrunners it is well understood that the all-encompassing “casual” playthrough does not carry with it the pejorative connotations of defining someone as a “casual”. But the choice of “casual” as the description for non-speed play is no accident.
The Solitary Path of the Speedrunner
Speedruns share their DNA with any feat one engineers for themselves above and beyond what the game demands. These sorts of challenges and their display in events like GDQ show how this group views challenge as meaningful. Doing something hard is worth doing, simply because it is hard. The harder it is, the more worth doing.
As a result, speedrunning is insular almost by definition. Many people do not have the capacity or desire to expend the effort to run even the most simple speed game at a high level. Typically, it’s an individual endeavor. One undertakes a speedrun alone and will have an outcome based only on themselves and the game: their preparation, their execution, the game’s RNG (or, their luck).
For something so solitary, it is marvelous but not totally surprising to see the sociality that has emerged around it. The shorthand to describe speedrunners of a given game is to call them the “community.” One game series may have a wide range of mostly separate communities, the Ocarina of Time (1998) community, the Wind Waker (2002) community. But others are so closely related they are sometimes inextricable, with runners crossing over among turn based RPGs and 2D platformers. There’s a certain quid pro quo. Speedrunning has become a spectator sport. For runs to be validated, they should be recorded under certain conditions. A livestream makes validation all the easier. A random so-and-so may not care about a Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) speedrun (although plenty of random so-and-sos actually do care, no small part due to the charisma and informative voice over of the people who run the game day after day) but someone who speedruns Mario may be more likely to be interested or at least have the shared vernacular to talk about and understand such a speedrun even if the “communities” are only tenuously connected or the skillset to run each game is entirely distinct.
If only so many people have the will or skill to take on a ridiculously difficult and circuitously assessed challenge, then one must look to others who take on similar sorts of challenges for community. This is what GDQ events showcase so well. Not simply where communities that play similar games interlink, but also how players with very different interests can come together to share something with a wider audience. So often, the “couch” (commentators) of a game will follow the familiar model of sports commentary, with an expert “color” commentator and a less accomplished but still knowledgable “play by play” commentator. But there is also a third kind of commentator, one who is utterly clueless. This is important for this kind of unique spectator event where a wide variety of the audience will share in that confusion. Having an audience surrogate to ask the questions the audience might have is crucial.
Speedrunning and Social Exclusion
Over the past decade or so, GDQ has served as the site of an ongoing culture war that is far ahead of the curve of wider pop culture. The event has been accused of “going woke” for its overtures toward inclusion. However, it’s no surprise that marginal forms of play with a high barrier to entry would attract those who are otherwise marginalized and face commensurately high barriers in other dimensions of social life. The wide variety of speed and challenge gamers include many queer, trans, and neurodivergent players. I say this with earnest love and admiration: one must look at the profound difficulty of these challenges and the extreme dedication required to surmount them and conclude, simply, that none who undertake them are “normal” as defined by a hegemonic social order (as is true of many niche subcultures and hobbies). Speedrunners are exceptional, and such exception can emerge as defiance of established norms regarding gender and neurotypicality — norms that are contingent and subject to overturning. The mostly unassuming way representation functions at GDQ contributes to such a shift.
There is an indisputable coherence between celebrating niche communities of various video games and underrepresented communities of those whose identities are made marginal by wider society. That leads me to another of GDQ and speedrunning’s important undercurrents. If difficulty has value, so too does something being undiscovered. If a game or style of playing a game hasn’t “caught on,” isn’t widely understood, doesn’t have streamers who play the game or style semi-professionally, GDQ is open to spotlighting it. This year’s event included a tournament of ridiculously obscure PlayStation games chosen at random and also included another installment of a tournament for the game Evil Zone (1999). Evil Zone tournaments are synonymous with GDQ not because the game is particularly difficult, but because it is extremely minor among the fighting game community. Instead, it finds its place at GDQ, where small groups of players come together to make a larger one.
The Q&A Team’s Nightmare
If obscurity is a correlative value to difficulty in the speedrunning community, speedrunning an obscure game is the apotheosis of these values. Speedrunners also have to cultivate an encyclopedic knowledge of small details about a game. They have to know what angles to jump, what collision can be subverted, sometimes they even manipulate the game to change the lines of code it runs (as is the case with most “credits warps”). One of the most interesting cultural curiosities for speedrunners is their shared reverence for the game developers whose games they play.
Game developers engineer a working system and speedrunners try to break that system. It would be easy to read this relationship as adversarial. Perhaps it is the shared awareness of this relationship that has made speedrunners so predisposed to be reverent and appreciative of developers. They might be able to rattle off the entire body of work of a minor developer who only handles porting games from one console to another. They might even know specific coders by name. They study game devs like I study film auteurs. It is functional, too. Knowing the quirks of a dev team or specific engineer might lead to finding repeated glitches to exploit.
Developers are actively trying to eliminate the glitches that are speedrunners stock and trade. Often with modern games, speedrunners might need to “patch down” their games to complete a specific route or type of run using a glitch that has since been fixed. But some of these glitches are so narrow and difficult to reproduce, there is no expectation they should have, or even could have, been fixed through a normal development process. With the contemporary routine of game patches and updates, some developers, such as Videocult, turn glitches into toggles so speedrunning communities can maintain the continuity of their runs while other more exigent glitches are resolved.
What is it about a developer that the speedrunner appreciates if the speedrunner is both actively hoping to find exploitable glitches and experience the smallest segment possible of the developer’s efforts? Posing the question in this way, it emphasizes the ways the speedrunner and developer’s incentives are exactly at odds. A developer, generally, wants its player base to experience every bit of their game system without unexpected disruptions caused by the game itself. However, while a speedrunner might not livestream that experience, they have probably played a game “casually” for many hours more than the average player. They also then repeat and refine their speedruns ad nauseam. Though a speedrunner might highlight what is broken about a game, they will also highlight the way it functions. Some of the most popular speedruns emphasize the genius of a game’s design rather than its glitches, as is the case with the acrobatic Kaizo Mario speedruns. A speedrunner knows the function of a game better than any other player, and perhaps sometimes better than the developers themselves.
Having such an intimate relationship with a game would certainly lead to appreciating its many facets and the work undertaken to bring the game into existence — even as the speedrunner ostensibly “breaks” the game. This attitude of speedrunners toward developers provides insight into both interpretation and quality assessment. A developer might not have expected their game to be appreciated in this way, but as is the case with art, an author can’t control how a work of art will be received. Such is the case with a game that ascends to the height of speedrunning challenge. Likewise, speedrunners show how the flaw occasions one’s love more than perfection. This is a Lacanian point, one I have dwelled on and written about as incessantly as the speedrunner repeats their expedited playthrough of a game. The mechanically perfect, totally coherent game system could never endear speedrunners to it like a game with the right flaws to dazzle audiences and open up routing breakthroughs.
Speedruns for All Seasons
Will I ever speedrun a game myself? Probably not. But I consider myself a lifetime spectator and enthusiastic witness to speedrunning culture. There are lessons to be gleaned by the unique relationship between the speedrunner and their game of choice. And the fixity of the practice along with the depth of knowledge that accompanies such an undertaking is something I admire. The bi-annual GDQ events make me feel a sense of connection and community even if I am only watching a livestream. This is a credit to how they have approached growing the activity of speedrunning for participants and viewers. It is a challenging, insular, and sometimes confusing activity that they have transformed into an entertaining and (mostly) legible display of skill.
This leads me to the event itself, during which there were many runs deserving of attention. This year was characterized by a lot of “runs” that were not strictly speedruns. These are often my favorite, especially because they usually involve games I actually play. GDQ showcased Tetris: The Absolute — The Grand Master 2 (2000) and Tetris: The Grand Master 3 — Terror Instinct (2005), the latter of which I played for the first time in Japan last year and fell in love with. They also included two rhythm game showcases, one for CHUNITHM LUMINOUS PLUS (2024) and one for jubeat copius APPEND (2012).
Tetris is such a fun and deep game and the TGM series adds a great deal to the familiar gameplay. This is a run that really, really could have benefitted with an outside commentator, however. It’s not really fair to expect these high-level players to describe what they are doing mid-game.
The CHUNITHM showcase was remote, from Singapore, but the team over there did a great job. Runs like this should be the gold standard for remote GDQ events. They maintained great commentary and kept up the in-person excitement having their own spectators.
jubeat is a game I actually play whenever I get the chance, although I didn’t realize they have a machine at my semi-local arcade: Game Underground in Waltham. One of the commentators for this event, Catastrophe573, is from here. I was incredibly impressed with his deep knowledge of Bemani artists that he shared through the course of the run.
Astro Bot (2024) was one of the newer games on display at the event and it looked like a lot of fun. The run itself was exciting, easy to follow, and full of great PlayStation easter eggs.
The G-Saviour (2000) run was plagued with technical difficulties. This is fitting, of course, for a game based on a horrendous live action Gundam movie. But the game itself looks like a surprisingly competent mecha shooter and the runner, pmcTRILOGY, was a delight.
After finishing Alan Wake II (2023) last year, I didn’t have the energy to revisit the game for its DLC. The game’s expanded content makes a surprisingly great speedrun, though.
Technically a “Checkpoint” segment, GDQ staffer adef did an impromptu run of Block Dude (2001), a game for Texas Instruments calculators. Part bit, part experiment for dynamic camera angles for future GDQ productions, it ended up being one of the more exciting and unique runs of the entire event.
Another less conventional run, also involving adef, this competition between two runners in Elden Ring in what they called “lock out bingo” had it all. Using a randomly generated bingo card, adef and CaptainDomo had to race to complete the in-game objectives listed on the card and score a bingo. Playing on the same card, however, meant they could block each others’ lines and force their opponent into a situation where they can only win by securing a majority of the squares. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but there were times where this contest seemed scripted.
Finally, by far my favorite event of the run, this Super Mario Bros. (1985) race was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen on the GDQ stage. The biggest edge this event had over all the other runs was the incredible production value offered by the Retro Tournaments software. It allowed the audience to view all four separate games on the same screen, placing them on a map below the gameplay itself and offering the capacity to replay exciting moments on the fly. I can only hope GDQ moves toward more and more events like this one.
Also, although I haven’t watched it yet, they apparently did GDQ Jeopardy. Gonna run this video after I sent out the newsletter.
There’s plenty more GDQ to sample where all of this came from and more events to come. This year, they raised $2.5 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation over the course of the event. SGDQ will run July 6-12, in support of Médecins Sans Frontières, when you can expect the newsletter to mention speedrunning once or twice.
Weekly Reading List
Bad Bunny has a new record, but the most important thing about it is the claymation coquí by Quique Rivera (no relation) made for the album’s promotion. This is what being Puerto Rican is all about.
https://lunaticobscurity.blogspot.com/2018/06/simple-1500-series-vol-30-1-on-1.html — Part of AGDQ’s mystery game tournament, 1 on 1 Government (1999) looks like one of the most entertaining games of all time.
https://www.propublica.org/article/connecticut-dmv-tow-companies-car-sales — Dave Altimari, Ginny Monk, and Haru Coryne get into the ugly business of car towing in Connecticut.
https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/solidarity-katherine-franke-our-former-board-chair — Law professor Katherine Franke’s departure from Columbia University is an unconscionable attack on academic freedom and First Amendment protections. The CCR writes:
In an egregious attack on both academic freedom and Palestinian rights advocacy, Columbia University has entered into an “agreement” with Katherine Franke to leave her teaching position after an esteemed 25-year career. The move – “a termination dressed up in more palatable terms,” according to Franke’s statement – stems from her advocacy for students who speak out in support of Palestinian rights.
You can read about the situation in Franke’s own words at the link.
https://thefilmstage.com/long-rare-films-from-john-woo-johnnie-to-tsui-hark-more-acquired-by-shout-studios/ — Shout Studios will be distributing a wide range of films from the Golden Princess library. Huge. I’m so excited.
Until next time.