Speedrun

Speedruns aren't exactly an overly popular thing, even among the only group of people that the concept of is applicable to - gamers - but it's something that many people get into once they learn about it. Whether it's just watching speedruns or attempting to complete them, there's just something about the idea of completing a video game as fast as humanly possible that, when you love games, it's just hard not to love the idea of.

Personally, I learned about speedruns a few years ago, and I've been watching them avidly ever since. I love seeing the way people intentionally play the game wrong, trying to find the ways that the game world is broken, where its seams just don't meet up properly, and where its mechanics let them do unintentional things. The way they take what they learn and apply it to weird and unexpected places that lets them just shatter the reality of the game. And then seeing the consequences of those actions. And some games even get to the point where they become so fast, and so uninteresting in how fast they are, that people will intentionally slow them down so as to actually experience the game while going through it as fast as possible.

Personally, I've never attempted to speedrun a game. If I did, I'm not sure what game I would even want to start with. The games that I normally like to play have extensively long speedruns - still shorter than playing the game normally, granted, but given that you're going to be sitting in one spot for the entire run, I want to avoid my inevitable need to go to the bathroom from stopping me halfway through a five hour run. Plus, I'm not much of one to intake something more than once, and when speedrunning, you're going to be playing through the game likely hundreds of times within the span of a month, and I just don't know that I can stand the same content that many times.

And yet some people out there will run the same fifteen hour run over and over and over for months on end until they have it perfected. And I love those people, because I love watching those kinds of runs and seeing how crazy stuff can get. I love that people can know the game so well that they know when they can afford to walk away, to eat, to go to the bathroom. The amount of practice, knowledge, and muscle memory that these runners possess is staggering, and it's easy to be jealous of that.

And the coolest part is that most of them aren't even doing it just to be the best in the world. They just want to see what the best in the world can be. So they're not mad when someone beats their record. They're excited. They're inspired. It's such a community effort, rather than the effort of a single person, and that's such a unique thing to have in, realistically, a competitive setting. It doesn't make sense, but it's there, and you're gonna be hard pressed to find that anywhere else.