Issue #440: The Meaning of Competition in Video Game Speedrunning
The Summer Games Done Quick charity video game speedrunning marathon is over. I watched a lot of it. I wrote about it this week. In fact, it’s a very video game heavy edition this week. Any competition calls to mind for me the question of what it means to compete.
Social Goods and Social Ills in Charity Speedrunning Marathons
I am a competitive person. Whether by accident or by virtue of other personality traits and attitudes I value, I am not often surrounded with people who can appreciate that competitiveness. My experience with Slay the Spire 2 (2026) is a great recent example. Reviewing my own runs, analyzing my card choices, tracking various factors that contribute to my (50%, including A10) win rate. If I can play as well as I possibly can, I’m satisfied. But I want to raise that ceiling.
It’s the same with anything. I care about the newsletter being written well, my work output being thoughtful. If another game commands my attention like STS2 has, I think about the design principles and how understanding them can help me play better.
People around me tend not to care about this stuff, or they at least say they don’t. But society at large places a premium on being good at things, even if that thing is trivial. Chris Sacca, a venture capitalist, used to tell a story about Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick. According to Sacca, Kalanick described himself as “actually tied for second in the global rankings in Wii Tennis.” What did Sacca take from this?
I don’t what the day was when Travis decided he wanted to become one of the best Wii Tennis players in the world while founding what’s gone on to become the biggest transportation company in history, etcetera etectera, but it was in that moment that I saw his true obsession with obtaining a goal. Once he sets something out as a goal for himself, he’ll absolutely accomplish it–at probably any cost.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the fact that this story is somewhere between a good-natured misunderstanding and complete bullshit. I don’t know if Sacca or Kalanick is the liar here, but there are no “global rankings in Wii Tennis.” That doesn’t change the underlying ideology here, however. Being good at a meaningless activity like Wii Tennis or Slay the Spire 2 is interesting or laudable to people because it demonstrates the capacity to be good at things, especially those things that might be seen as more productive or monetarily enriching. At minimum, accomplishment in even a single arena implies certain desirable social traits.
Jack Black interrogates the idea of the traits one infers from another’s performance in “Revisiting the sport ethic,” (2025) with a focus on (following the title) sports. Black writes:
Valorising dedication, sacrifice, and the prioritization of athletic achievement, above all other considerations, the sport ethic describes a widely accepted expectation that athletes will internalize and enact a set of required values in the pursuit of sporting excellence. This includes striving for distinction, accepting risk and pain, subordinating personal interests for the sake of performance, and refusing to quit in the face of adversity. While adhering to these values is celebrated as a marker of discipline and excellence, the sport ethic simultaneously functions as a disciplinary regime, with Hughes and Coakley (1991, 309–310) outlining a number of interrelated values and expectations that shape how athletic identity is governed. This includes 1) a sacrificial commitment to sport, 2) a relentless pursuit of distinction, 3) the normalization of pain and risk, and 4) a refusal to acknowledge limitation.
Taken together, these principles constitute a powerful ideological framework that legitimates not only particular forms of behaviour but also a broader cultural mythology about what it means to be an athlete (Coakley 2015, 2017). (1-2)
These traits are conferred onto the, in this case, athlete regardless of their path to achievement. Just being an accomplished basketball player, for instance, means that generally people will conclude you persevere through adversity, have a drive for recognition, and take action toward your goal at the expense of your personal comfort.
The brunt of Black’s argument, however, is that these supposedly laudable characteristics are valorized only through their enmeshment in an ideological frame. Black gives some real examples that show how these traits are certainly part of the psychic reality of many athletes, but also how they lead to deleterious outcomes:
A powerful illustration of overconformity to the sport ethic, and its harmful consequences, can be seen in the case of former NFL linebacker, Junior Seau, whose career and tragic death are emblematic of overconforming to the dominant norms of elite sport. Seau played for two decades in the NFL, often competing through serious injuries and embodying the hypermasculine ideals of toughness, stoicism, and bodily sacrifice (Acee 2016). These behaviours aligned closely with a valorisation of enduring pain, ignoring vulnerability, and privileging the team or game above personal well-being (Hughes and Coakley 1991). Following his suicide in 2012, Seau’s brain was found to exhibit signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative condition linked to repeated head trauma, particularly prevalent among American football players (Fainaru-Wada and Fainaru 2013). Seau’s case exemplifies how the internalisation of sport’s core values, such as the expectation to ‘play through pain’ and never show weakness, contributed to longterm psychological and neurological harm.
…
a contrasting, but equally telling, example can be found in the case of Mary Cain, a former teenage track star who trained under Alberto Salazar at the Nike Oregon Project. Cain was encouraged to lose an extreme amount of weight to optimise performance, a decision framed within the sport’s logic of discipline, sacrifice, and self-denial (Li 2021). (2-3)
Generally, then, while society may be (generally) correct about the characteristics it assigns to individuals who demonstrate proficiency in a given arena, the meaning of those characteristics, what it means to be such a person, is what I want to call into question. Black provides the conventional qualitative evaluation of traits like these, “Discipline, teamwork, perseverance, and fair play, while largely positive values, are subsequently associated with a moral incentive in which children, marginalised youth, and citizens, in need of integration or social cohesion, can be reformed and uplifted.” (3). However, he also argues that these socially enriching or morally upright and admirable traits do not, in fact, enrich one socially or adjudicate one’s moral orientation:
Athletes, spectators, and institutions do not invest in sport because it is useful, in any narrow sense; rather, they are drawn to its apparent inutility, such as, its detachment from necessity and the forms of sacrifice that it demands. In the case of the latter, the sport ethic constructs a framework in which athletes give up rest, health, social relationships, or even long-term physical integrity in pursuit of goals that, while dressed in the language of professionalism or sporting legacy, are often excessive and unnecessary. (9)
If sports’ very appeal is in its “apparently inuitility,” as Black claims, the critics of my endeavoring to aspire to the good of Slay the Spire 2 are more right than they know. Such an aspiration comes at the expense of the good as such, and the good of anything else.
Such an understanding hardly ameliorates my interest or compels me to change my behavior. This is the function of desire that Black explicates in the context of sports and that many Lacanian interlocutors have theorized more broadly. Being generous, I would argue that the aspiration to be good at pointless, non-productive activity is anti-social, but also perhaps indicative of some of the supposedly positive characteristics when transposed into the realm of productivity or economic enrichment. The argument that economic enrichment is anti-social is an argument for another piece. The next step in this argument is one that relates to yet another enterprise of interest: speedrunning. Just as I have written that it is a solitary activity around which one must organize an artifice of community, it is structurally identical to any other aspiration toward exceptional proficiency. It’s an anti-social act that can spawn a social tie.
One need look no further than the GDQ speedrunning marathons I write about twice a year. Each solitary sojourner on their quest for faster PBs finds camaraderie among other Sisyphean video gamers. Whether they play the same game or different ones, somehow these people have found each other, created cross-game coalitions, and decided to broadcast their undertaking to the world. It’s all right in front of us. And these are my favorite examples from the past week:
Devil May Cry 5: Special Edition (2019) has all the ingredients for a great, watchable speedrun. Decomsic plays superlatively, Maxylobes gives the color commentary while Bobbeigh fills the role of play-by-play announcer. Bryonato is a special addition to GDQ commentary in addition to the normal color commentary/play-by-play dyad, he is a clueless audience proxy.
I’ve played this game from beginning to end, which I find typically does enhance my enjoyment of a run. But even if you haven’t played, I think it’ll still look cool.
I didn’t realize when staying up late for this run that it is the first Suda51 game to ever appear on a GDQ main stage. This fact gave things a little bit of a historic quality. There’s extra excitement for the “community representatives” when they finally get that main stage GDQ recognition. Sonic9jct, the commentator, also recommended El Topo (1970) to the crowd. This was GDQ after dark.
The high difficulty ‘kaizo’ Super Mario World (1990) hacks are always one of my favorite parts of GDQ. This year’s marathon had a multiplayer theme, another overture to my thesis related to the social possibility of the anti-social. Two teams had to progress cooperatively through the challenging levels.
There’s a little bit of an issue with GDQ calling this a speedrun. It should have been called a pinball showcase. Am I even supposed to italicize the name of pinball machines? Do they represent stand-alone ‘games’ as such? For now, I denigrate them by leaving the name in ‘normal’ text: Total Nuclear Annihilation is a 2017 pinball machine and the first ever demonstration of pinball on the GDQ stage. Nomenclature be damned, it was pretty cool.
Competitive Elden Ring (2022) runs are more my speed, but the GDQ team really upped their production quality with this one.
There is not a single four-player co-op A10 Any% run uploaded to speedrun.com. While the category exists on the leaderboards, it is empty. Runs are a little less entertaining to me when they are outside of the context of a competitive speedrun.com leaderboard in a contested run category.
If I were going to tackle four-player co-op A10 Any%, a Necrobinder No Escape build feels like a reasonable method. It certainly works out, more or less, for our runners here. Four Ironclads spamming Dominate might be faster, though.
This is the one. Adef brings in a ringer with Balatro (2024) streamer Roffle on commentary. There are some liberties taken with the legitimacy of the category, as with Slay the Spire 2, but this is a tense, exciting run with a lot hanging in the balance despite the minor advantages Adef gains by using a set seed.
So much cooperative hand-holding at this GDQ, it’s good to see some old fashioned bloodlust with Meme and Huff facing off in yet another installment of a long-running rivalry.
Unlike kaizo Mario games, the levels CarlSagan42 (what a name) and Juzcook make their way through are designed to frustrate, deceive, and kill them at every turn. Pretty funny.
Tool-assisted speedruns, or TASes, are a genre unto themselves at GDQ. The cooperative quality of this run involves a large number of people asynchronously — really asynchronously, like over a decade and a half — collaborating to figure out the fastest way to complete a level at the maximum speed a game can process inputs. The TAS always demonstrates feats that are humanly impossible and can only be achieved by perfect, deterministic commands to a game with a frequency beyond the capability of even the seasoned speedrunner.
The movements and gameplay here is unnatural and bizarre even by speedrun standards. It’s marvelous.
This run of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991) is in the All Dungeons (Restricted) category. It is so full of game breaking glitches, you would think whatever restrictions the Restricted designation entails must be minor. However, unrestricted Any% categories for LTTP involve a technique called arbitrary code execution to warp you to the credits screen in like a minute. This category makes for something a lot more watchable.
This year’s SGDQ culminated in a bonus game of Super Dram World 3 (2025), another kaizo Mario run. Revolug’s virtuosity is unquestionable.
SGDQ wrapped up with seven days of games played, several world records set, and 2.4 million dollars made for Médecins Sans Frontières. And no disrespect to GDQ’s outstanding charitable achievement. But, like the sport ethic, charity is the alibi to legitimize a pursuit that many people would dismiss as a waste of time; even if, at the same time, those same people believe this level of achievement means that one could succeed in other supposedly productive endeavors. Making money for charity is great. But these speedrunners run because they can and they must. None of them need the cause of charity to motivate them to their expeditious and repetitive completion of a video game.
What one strives to achieve may be pointless, or require artifice and sublimation to be given meaning, but even without such pretense, all that matters is its fun.
Weekly Reading List
Watch if you want to learn how Slay the Spire 2 was made.
Watch if you want to learn how to be good at Slay the Spire 2.
Event Calendar: There’s Enough Stuff On Here Already
No updates this week. Book your transit to the Hitchcock at Brattle in mid-August.
Until next time.