I found myself procrastinating yesterday by looking at speedrunning videos of classic nintendo games. In case you’re not sure what speedrunning is, here’s the wiki overview of the practice:
A speedrun is a play-through, or recording thereof, of a whole video game or a selected part of it (such as a single level) performed with the intent of completing it as fast as possible, optionally under certain prerequisites, mainly for the purposes of entertainment and competition. The term is a compound of the words speed and run (as in “running” through a game, referring to the playing of a game).
Commonly, speedruns are recorded on either media such as DVDs (predominantly when games on consoles are concerned), or as digital files, by the people (“players”) who make them, for entertainment, time refinement, or verifiability purposes.[1]
Entertainment has traditionally been the reason for the creation of speedruns, as the phenomenon was originally devised by enthusiasts who began comparing each other’s playing skills via movies exchanged over the Internet, while verifiability stems from the necessity to provide evidence that one’s playthrough went by the typical or game-specific speedrun rules and thus counts as a valid attempt to beat the record.[2]
In order to attain the highest possible quality of play in a speedrun, the author usually has to look at and think about the game differently from the way that most casual gamers would. It is usually required that speedruns be planned out carefully before they are attempted; this need stems from the complexity of the separate areas in which the gameplay takes place. Additionally, games and their physics engines are not flawless and will allow the runner to do unexpected things that could save time. Despite their inherent differences, they seem to share a lot of common traits in this context, such as the ability to disjunct the common sequence of events in a game and thus skip entire parts of it—the act of sequence breaking—and the ability to use programming errors, or glitches, to one’s advantage.
Some games are considered to be ideal specimen for fast completion purposes and have online communities dedicated to them, which provide (or have provided) a highly active platform for discussing the speedrunning of one or more of these particular games.
I find these interesting on a number of levels. Firstly, there’s the curiosity value in watching someone do something in under an hour which took you days and weeks. Secondly, there’s the question of the motivation for this activity and the distributed forms of competitive behaviour which the internet facilitates. Thirdly, I was intrigued by my own ambivalent reactions to these videos. I seemingly had two contradictory reactions, one which thinks this is pretty fantastic and the other which thinks it’s pretty pathetic, given the weeks and months which must be necessary to perfect the performance to quite this degree. But once I started reflecting on it, the latter reaction seemed really problematic. Surely this is doing something well for its own sake? It represents a (jarring) form of human excellence, painstakingly developed and publicly proclaimed for the world to see. It may not be a particularly consequential example of craft but the impulse underlying these videos is one of the most valuable orientations which human beings possess in relation to their environments.
Mark Carrigan 