this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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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.
Speedrunners tend to be superfans, and I'm sure their first playthrough of a game is done in the intended manner. Also consider that beloved games tend to have more active speedrun scenes - People speedrun Majora's Mask precisely because of its wonderful atmosphere.
But yeah actually watching speedruns isn't for everyone
Speedrunners are the people who are the most dedicated to a game, having analysed it for hundreds of hours, they deeply understand every corner of it and appreciate everything that the game has to offer.
And then they break it over their knee.
It's more like they made an optimization puzzle out of a game they really likes.
Also before you speedrun you gotta understand the game and it's capabilities first and well.
I agree but I don't come to the same conclusion. It's akin to saying cubism is weird and paintings should be naturalistic.
Beside the artistic value, though, it leans more toward obsessively abusing rather than loving a videogame, as far as his intended purpose was.
To an extent is an act of rebellion and vandalism.