this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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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 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.
Debatable by dudes with ponytails who use the word "fallacy" 200 times a day, not by people with common sense.
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.
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.
Some people just like getting better at stuff.
The lucky ones want to get better at stuff that puts food on the table.
Speedrunners are basically Neo in the Matrix. They have such a vast understanding of the world they are in and its rules that they're able to break them.
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 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.
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
I get where you're coming from, but understand that your way of enjoying things isn't necessarily the right way to enjoy them. Some would say that ignorance of the technical aspects of a game's design betrays a shallow appreciation of the work based entirely on its aesthetic value.
This is a bit like telling athletes that they should appreciate the human body for what it is, rather than try and lift the heaviest weight or run the fastest. Part of a holistic appreciation for the human body/a work of art/a video game is an understanding of what makes it tick, what its limitations are, and how far you can push the limits.
I also don't much like watching speedruns, but I can understand that while some speedrunners are only in it for the numbers, the vast majority of them appreciate the games on a deeper level than I ever could.
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.
So.... Life.