Speedrunning Culture/ the Future of Single-Player Gaming
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! Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! Speedrunning Culture: The Future of Single-Player Gaming Written by Joel Lee Published June 2015. Read the original article here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/speedrunning-culture-future- single-player-gaming/ This ebook is the intellectual property of MakeUseOf. It must only be published in its original form. Using parts or republishing altered parts of this ebook is prohibited without permission from MakeUseOf.com. Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! Table of contents Speedrunning: A Humble Start 4 The Drive of a Speedrunner 6 What Makes a Good Speedrunning Game? 9 The Boom in Speedrunning Culture 13 Speedrunners on Twitch to Follow 17 What’s In Store for Speedrunners? 20 Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! The beauty of video games is that they’re interactive, meaning you can play them however you wish. This may not be as true in an online multiplayer setting, but is certainly true for single player games. The culture of speedrunning is a perfect example. Some people play games for the story and characters. Others play to relax, to take it slow, or to kill time when they’re bored. And then there are those who want to challenge themselves to the extreme. In a lot of ways, the challenge is the heart of gaming. This can manifest in a few ways. Of these challenge-seekers, many prefer to test their mettle against other players — either in a heads-up or a team-vs-team environment. The rest prefer to compete against themselves. That latter group is where speedrunning truly shines. Speedrunning: A Humble Start In simplest of terms, speedrunning is the completion of a certain level or stage in a game, or the entire game itself, as quickly as possible. If the game has a built-in completion timer, then that’s often used to determine official times. If not, third-party helper tools exist as well. As a concept, “racing against oneself” is as old as humanity itself, so in that sense speedrunning doesn’t really have a beginning. Even in the context of video games, players have undoubtedly been “self-racing” for as long as games have been around. But as a social activity? The overall consensus is that the true spirit of speedrunning officially began with Doom. Why Doom? Because it launched with two very important built-in features that made it possible to record one’s time and prove that it was legitimate. The first feature was an end-of-level clock that displayed the exact completion time. The second feature was the ability to record demos. Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! A demo, or demonstration, was a recording of the player’s exact playthrough of a particular level. This demo file could be distributed to others, loaded into their copy of Doom, then viewed from start to finish. The ability to share speedruns made it possible for players to compete through a single player game in an age where online multiplayer was rare. About a year after Doom launched, Simon Widlake opened a website called COMPET-N which was to be an online ranking of the fastest Doom playthroughs. Though the “speedrun” term wouldn’t be popularized until later, COMPET-N is widely recognized as the first speedrunning website. Thus, speedrunning was born. Over the years, the activity evolved and developed several nuances. One such nuance can be posed as a question: “Does it count if glitches are involved?” Another nuance: “How much of the game needs to be completed?” These questions, and others like them, caused schisms within the community. As a result, there are now several types of speedruns: • 100% Completion: This kind of speedrun requires the player to unlock all major gameplay items and upgrades, find all secret treasures and collectibles, defeat all bosses and stages, etc. The actual requirements depend on the game itself, but the general idea is that player must beat every aspect of the game as quickly as possible. • Low% Completion: This kind of speedrun is the opposite of the 100% Completion in that the goal is to beat the game in record time while foregoing as many items, upgrades, and other gameplay elements as possible. This is usually the most difficult kind of speedrun. • Any% Completion: This kind of speedrun puts no requirements or limitations on the player other than to beat the game as quickly as possible. As far as glitches are concerned, there are purists in the community who believe that they invalidate a speedrun. For the most part, however, glitch exploitation has come to be a normal — even expected — aspect of speedrunning. In most games, nearly all but the most game- breaking glitches are allowed. This argument about glitches is one that speed runners like myself have had to have countless times over the years. It really comes down to a few simple things that easily explain why glitches are perfectly acceptable in almost every case. The fact of the matter is that anything that’s doable within the game without external interference is fair play, because even if it wasn’t intended by the developers, it’s still part of that package. Your goal is to reach the end of that self-contained game as quickly as possible by any means necessary. If using glitches yields the fastest time, then so be it. That being said, there are of course exceptions to every rule. It’s rare, but if a particular glitch is so completely game-breaking that it makes the speed run more-or-less pointless, that game’s speed running community might largely choose to ignore runs using that glitch, or at least focus on separating runs using it and not using it into separately considered categories. HT: What’s Your Tag? Which brings us to our final nuance: the tool-assisted speedrun (TAS). This kind of speedrun uses a third-party tool to alter certain aspects of gameplay in order to compensate for limitations in player ability. For example, one tool might reduce the game to slow motion, allowing the player to exploit glitches that might otherwise be extremely difficult to pull off. But why? Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! Many non-speedrunners look at the prevalence of glitch abuse and tool assistance and wonder, “What’s the point of playing the game if you aren’t going to play it properly?” While that kind of thinking holds a lot of weight in a non-speedrun context, it turns out that speedrunners think about games in a completely different way than most people. The Drive of a Speedrunner To the speedrunner, games cease being seen as games; instead, they become puzzles. With a self-imposed goal (some % completion) and a set of constraints (e.g. no upgrades and no warps), the speedrunner must figure out the path of least resistance using whatever methods are valid within those constraints. Let’s peel back what it means to play a game for a bit. Video games, at their core, are just computer programs. When a human plays a game, they are feeding instructions to the program to act on. We perceive this as a continuous interaction where our inputs from a controller instantly affect game operation. In reality, however, the program works in stepped increments and only checks whether you are providing inputs at the beginning of each step. A single step is referred to as a “frame” in both the technical and speedrunning sense. At the core, this is what a speedrun is: an attempt to optimize the path through a game by completing it in the fewest frames possible. HT: Speed Demos Archive The mindset of the speedrunner is one of optimization. It’s all about shaving precious seconds here and there in the hopes that they’ll add up to a new record. The game no longer exists. It’s simply there to provide the speedrunner with a problem to optimize. Needless to say, not everyone is fit to be a speedrunner. Copyright © 2017 MakeUseOf. All Rights Reserved ®. ! First, the speedrunner must be familiar with the game they’re about to solve. While it’s not necessary to know everything , it’s true that the more he knows, the better equipped he’ll be for success. At the extreme, this means studying the gameplay mechanics, understanding in- game physics, memorizing tricks and glitches, etc. In a game like Super Meat Boy, timing is crucial. It’s one thing to know the movement patterns of various hazards, but the best minds will know the exact position of a given hazard at any given time. This attention to detail is what allows a skilled speedrunner to perform using nothing but muscle memory. In a game that isn’t so reliant on dexterity and execution, the key to a fast time is exploiting as many shortcuts as possible, whether that means bypassing bosses, abusing certain mechanics, etc. For example, well-known Secret of Mana speedrunner StingerPA uses a trick that allows him to deal 999 damage per hit as a way to defeat bosses without having to grind and level up. Another key component is perseverance and endurance. While certain games can be beat within a matter of minutes, many games have world record times that span several hours. The ability to maintain mental clarity for such long periods of time is a highly underestimated skill. More often than not, a speedrunner will get to the end of his five-hour speedrun and realize that he was three seconds short of beating his record. That can be a maddening experience and only the most steel-minded players can muster up the strength to keep trying.