I've seen enough Summoning Salt videos to know that it's never dead
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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Congratulations to Suigi getting the quadfecta! After watching Karl's videos on Suigi's 120 and 70 star records, I knew it only had to be a matter of time until he'd conquer them all.
Now we can all focus on the A-press challenge.
Do such efforts bring value to gaming or are they more of an academic exercise?
Neither? Speedrunning is entirely nihilistic. It rejects the rules of society to the point of rejecting the rules of games themselves in favor of meaningless tantric repetition. It's the eternal pointless chase for a meaning that was never there and never will.
I find it fun and dreadful at the same time, as a concept, I would never do it myself in a million years.
In short, it's an artistic performance.
I can't fully articulate the reasons why, but I dislike the entire speed-running culture. I've always been someone who sinks as deeply as I possibly can into the environments that games provide, placing a lot of value on carefully crafted details, flora, object clutter and ambience.
Speed-running is essentially the exact opposite of this, and it takes what was intended to be an enjoyable escape and gamifies it beyond recognition. It becomes a sweaty, disgusting mess of button mashing, sprinting, wall-glitching, exploitation, and a bastardization of mechanics. I definitely get why some people find this interesting, but I just can't find the off-switch for how much I hate watching it. It's in a similar ballpark as extreme min-maxing in modern MMOs, where people get so addicted to arbitrarily raising numbers by the smallest margin that the game itself just evaporates into the background.
To me, it's like someone took art, sucked the creative soul out of it, and turned it into a math game.
i don't get the nihilism angle. it seems to be all about selffulfilment and pushing oneself to see what one is capable of. simmiliar to triathlets, race car drivers or climbers.
Speedrunning is competitive QA.
Prove me wrong.
Their action do not assure any quality, they actually advocate for keeping bugs in, the opposite of what any QA wants.
Meh, debatable. QA finds the bugs, what to do with them is more a development/production call.
But I can compromise: Speedrunning is competitive QA testing. How about that?
If a bug makes the run take longer they don't investigate it.
Actual counterexample, plenty of optimization came from random guys popping up in the community explaining something they found about the code, that was overlooked for years.
More? A huge emphasis is put on mechanically pulling the run off, which is pointless from a QA point of view, now we can maybe make an argument for TAS in that regard.
Nah, I'd say you're mostly making my point. Optimizing getting through the game fast is absolutely part of the skillset, and random people noticing something obvious everybody had been ignoring is bread-and-butter for testers.
I mean, for testers that care and are going hard, which is where the "competitive" part comes in.
I'm glad you've never done QA in a bank, but in jest, sure, there's a surprising amount of overlapping.
Well... They're not paid to do so, so. Yeah.
I've seriously learned a bit about computer architecture from OoT speedruns.
Making your own valorial framework is a close cousin to accepting there is no inherent one.
This is true for many things (all things?), but I think we can agree that as pointless or challenging being fast driving a car, it still welcomes the intended use of the car, is surrounded by a broadly shared and accepted economical advantage.
Esports would be the equivalent, pushing to be the best at a game, the way it's meant to be played.
Speedrun is getting into a racing car and mastering with an iron will getting in and out as fast as possible.
Making your own valorial framework is a close cousin to accepting there is no inherent one.
That's absurdism rather nihilism, isn't it? "One must imagine Sisyphus happy"
That's how Nietzsche answers those that blame him for bringing forward relativism, and I don't think speedrunning is absurd, just egregiously arbitrary.
Do such efforts bring value to gaming or are they more of an academic exercise?
I'll go with neither as well. They are an interesting sidestepping of how most games "should be played" that often discovers interesting new glitches, bugs and exploits. Using a TAS to execute arbitrary code is interesting, having that transformed into a possibility for human players (SNES Code Injection -- Flappy Bird in SMW, by SethBling) is amazing beyond belief.
From an imaginary point of view, one could view it as a rendition of Ender's game and transform these runs into models of potential attack vectors.
For example, a very specific silly scenario would be rearranging microbial growth in the shape of a Super Mario level and then using miniature robots to deliver a compound into a pinpoint location to be released after regular activities resume.
Think of it as having prearranged templates that reduce the risk of errors to a minimum.