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A philosophical discussion of speedrunning

DJOGamer PT

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Speedruns are about skipping everything and getting to the finish line as quickly as possible. Meh. Not fun.

Depends on the game and perhaps more importantly genre
RPG's aren't very fun to speedrun, but platformers are obviously a much more appropriate choice for that challenge


Speed running is very dumb. Primarily because it is not what is advertised.

A person hearing of speed running for the first time would be led to believe that it is skillfully playing a game to beat the game in the shortest amount of time. But that is not what it is.

It is people skillfully using bugs and glitches to break the game in ways that are clearly neither intended by the game developers nor within the realm of gameplay.

You're being purposedly disingenuous
You know there are various categories to speedruns, including glitchless where the players cannot use those game breaking exploits
 

Hag

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I think there are two different games inside speedrunning, at least for classical, without tools or glitches.
First one is to prepare the run, get intimate with the game, learn its mechanisms, its structure, experiment, so that you can choose your route.
Then you play and repeat until you get your best time. There is fun in polishing a perfect play, I guess it is not that different from quake 3 defrag or even race games, where you do your best times by learning each and every turns of the track.

For example the legendary Morrowind speedrun, with the guy finding the exact number of ingredients to do the exact number of potions needed to hop straight for the Red Mountain, retrieve Sunder and Keening, and rush Lorkan's heart bare handed. It is nice to watch because there is no trick - he is using the game mechanisms to win, although not the way expected by devs.

There was a one hour Deus Ex one that was good also, as well as some of Portal. I like a clever speedrun made by someone who loves and know the game very well. On the opposite, tool assisted speedruns where the game itself doesn't matter as much as breaking it bores me to no end. There is nothing to obtain from them when you are not in the scene.
 

DJOGamer PT

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The most active categorie depends on the game's community
Even what constitutes Any% changes from game to game, as there are plenty of games with sub-categories or special conditions
For example, in Hollow Knight the most active challenge is the 'No Major Glitches', which exists on every category
For Mirror's Edge, Any% and Glitchless are about the same
 

smaug

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There's this Frenchie Catholic cultural critic/tech critic/art critic/phenomenologist Paul Virilio who wrote fair bit about impact of speed on society. To simplify it to the extreme, speed as a value unto itself abolishes all values, flattens difference, devalues time and space. It's inimical to content, to quality. He'd write of the stuff like the lived experience of driving car across vast distances, how it destroys your bodily conception of space, ultimately turns the heterogenous spaces you travel thru into homogenous flatness. Now think about the phenomenon of "fly-over' states in teh Murrica, and the perception by the coastal urban denizens of those spaces and their inhabitants, for the more extreme version of it.
It ties to the rationalist drive for efficiency for efficiency's sake, it's own homogenizing effects and inherent imperialism, obviously. The means become the end, become the absolute.
schru
 
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Caring about what a random person might think of a term at first glance is how we ended up with "Halo is a RPG because you play the role of Master Chief". People who are not invested in something should not be determining anything about it.

You can't seriously attempt a speedrun until you played the game to exhaustion
Or just use a hack and hope no one ever finds out.
Ironically you'd have to be very experienced with the game in order to disguise it properly. That Minecraft runner with the bee skin that was caught a while ago for example would ignore routes that were less than optimal, even though he couldn't know since it was supposed to be a RNG seed.
 
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J1M

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Speed running is very dumb. Primarily because it is not what is advertised.

A person hearing of speed running for the first time would be led to believe that it is skillfully playing a game to beat the game in the shortest amount of time. But that is not what it is.

It is people skillfully using bugs and glitches to break the game in ways that are clearly neither intended by the game developers nor within the realm of gameplay.

And that is just not interesting, is dumb, and is not what a person expects when they hear of speed running.


Now, when people first started speed running this was a constant debate. As most people involved understood instinctively that the goal was to skillfully play the game to beat it in the shortest amount of time and utilizing bugs and glitches were not a part of this. But the endless debate over which individual actions were considered glitches or bugs and which were legitimate gameplay (as many can be edge cases and debatable) wore the community down. They eventually gave up trying to adhere to the original idea and adopted the stance that anything goes as far as bugs and glitches.

Much to the detriment of speed running.
"The fastest way to speed run this game is to save, quit, and modify the location id in the save file. I've overclocked my system to get the best boot and load time..."
 
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J1M

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Caring about what a random person might think of a term at first glance is how we ended up with "Halo is a RPG because you play the role of Master Chief". People who are not invested in something should not be determining anything about it.
Correct, but truth isn't determined by popular opinion either. A fixation on glitches is a local maximum in terms of the speedrunning audience. Watching someone explain bugs and exploits can be interesting, but it doesn't overlap with masterful play very much. As others have said, calling it speedrunning instead of quality assurance is false advertising.

The reason sports have enduring popularity is because of two factors: the audience understands the constraints of the game that the players are free to express creativity in and there is direct competition between two sides.

Only a small subset of the sports viewership wants to watch training camp. The speedrun community needs to embrace head-to-head competition that showcases masterful play to increase its appeal.
 
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minakami

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Most of the video games are not designed for speedrunning. Finding the speedrunning strategy is kinda fun but executing it is really tedious which requires lots of grinding.
 

JarlFrank

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Only a small subset of the sports viewership wants to watch training camp. The speedrun community needs to embrace head-to-head competition that showcases masterful play to increase its appeal.

I find watching Age of Empires matches much more interesting to watch than any solo speedrun for that reason.
 

J1M

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Only a small subset of the sports viewership wants to watch training camp. The speedrun community needs to embrace head-to-head competition that showcases masterful play to increase its appeal.

I find watching Age of Empires matches much more interesting to watch than any solo speedrun for that reason.
If you're a speedrunner in the equivalent of the NFL finals and it's 3rd down with 10 yards to go, the optimal play is to... push the reset button on your N64.
 

Lyric Suite

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I'm an 100% playthrougher.

That said, i always assumed speed runners were dude bros, not low T leftards. After all, the point is the competition.
 

mondblut

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Only a small subset of the sports viewership wants to watch training camp. The speedrun community needs to embrace head-to-head competition that showcases masterful play to increase its appeal.

The point of any competition is to get laid. Speedrunning is out. Hard.
 

J1M

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Only a small subset of the sports viewership wants to watch training camp. The speedrun community needs to embrace head-to-head competition that showcases masterful play to increase its appeal.

The point of any competition is to get laid. Speedrunning is out. Hard.
If you don't think this is true of speedrunning, then you must not be aware that ala Jurassic Park, nature found a way via hormones and dilation stations.
 

Grimlorn

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Leftists have been infiltrating every sort of hobby recently so I don't think that guy is making any sense. I don't think GDQ was even far left until they raised like $1 or 2 million for cancer one year. Then they started having problems with crazy people joining and creating drama and kicking people who weren't politically correct out. Or I remember some sort of small scandals around it.

Speed running in general is shit. You have people using glitches, or manipulating RNG to get the same result, skipping half the game, etc. What's the point of doing that? It's not like you overcame the challenge of the game by cheating past half of it or manipulating the game's RNG to get a specific result.

There have been studies on the brain done where it appears most successful people, athletes mostly IIRC, were able to repeatedly do the same things over and over day in and day out without getting bored in their brains. It appears if you're capable of that along with talent and hard work you're on track to be great at something. But speedrunning is still a waste of time.
 

jackofshadows

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Speed runs even when all bets are off might be interesting in a sense like pentesting might be quite interesting, fascinating even.
 

Deleted member 28561

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Philosophical position of speedruns can be summed up by Hermes in words of two tweets. Mercantile obsession with efficiency present in all modern ideology embodied in way to play video games. Commodification of time lead to apotheosis of speed. No matter if communist or capitalist same basis. Place of efficiency put in virtual and make-believe world then shows postmodern development and detachment of system from the real. Why praxis of speedrunners is to speedrun sexual identity change at same time.
 

Ghulgothas

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I think speedrunning is interesting just for how it lays bare a game's design and takes advantage of little-known loopholes and quirks therein that few would have thought of or noticed otherwise. That Two Worlds speedrun where the guy triggers the end by goading the the NPC who would go on to be the final boss into being mobbed to death by the start-town's villagers being prime example.

Doing it for fun? Utterly unfathomable, I cannot imagine how much of an unhinged lunatic you would have to be to play the same game over-and-over for no other reason than seeing how fast you can put it down.
 

Zlaja

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So....what he's saying is that leftist males have more problems with premature ejaculation?

That being said, can someone explain to me what's the appeal of Instagram as it exists today?

For sluts to post hot pictures and advertise themselves, and lure dudes to start giving them money on onlyfans/patreon, where they show more skin. Duh!
 

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