SpeedRunners Over The Network
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Many online communities develop around speedrunning specific games; community leaderboard rankings for individual games form the primary competitive metric for speedrunning. Racing between two or more speedrunners is also a popular form of competition. Videos and livestreams of speedruns are shared via the internet on media sites such as YouTube and Twitch. Speedruns are sometimes showcased at marathon events, which are gaming conventions that feature multiple people performing speedruns in a variety of games.
Routing is considered a fundamental process in speedrunning.[1][2] Routing is the act of developing an optimal sequence of actions and stages in a video game. A route may involve skipping one or more important items or sections. Skipping a part of a video game that is normally required for progression is referred to as sequence breaking,[2] a term first used in reference to the 2002 action-adventure game Metroid Prime.[3] Video game glitches may be used to achieve sequence breaks,[2] or may be used for other purposes, such as skipping cutscenes and increasing the player's speed or damage output.[3][4] Some people, called glitch-hunters, choose to focus on finding glitches that will be useful to speedrunners.[5] In some games, arbitrary code execution exploits may be possible, allowing players to write their own code into the game's memory. Several speedruns use a \"credits warp,\" a category of glitch that causes the game's credits sequence to play, which may require arbitrary code execution.[6][7][8] The use of glitches and sequence breaks in speedruns was historically not allowed, per the rules of Twin Galaxies' early leaderboards. When speedrunning moved away from Twin Galaxies towards independent online leaderboards, their use became increasingly common.[9][10]
According to many speedrunners, community is an important aspect of the hobby. Matt Merkle, director of operations at Games Done Quick, says that speedrunners \"value the cooperation the community encourages,\"[18] and many speedrunners have said that their mental health has improved because of their involvement in the community.[19] Erica Lenti, writing for Wired, says that a sense of community is vital to speedrunning because it motivates players and aids in the development of routes and tricks used in speedruns.[19]
Speedrunning marathons, a form of gaming convention,[20] feature a series of speedruns by multiple speedrunners. While many marathons are held worldwide,[21] the largest event is Games Done Quick, a semiannual marathon held in the United States.[22] As of January 2022,[update] it has raised over $37 million for charity organizations since its inception in 2010.[23] The largest marathon in Europe is the European Speedrunner Assembly, held in Sweden. Both events broadcast the speedruns on Twitch and raise money for various charity organizations.[24] Speedruns at marathons are done in one attempt and often have accompanying commentary.[3] Many people consider marathons to be important to runners and spectators in the speedrunning community. Peter Marsh, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, says that the Games Done Quick events provide an inclusive space for women and the LGBTQ community in contrast to the related cultures of gaming and Twitch streaming.[25] Alex Miller of Wired says the events have played an important role in connecting people and supporting international humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières during the COVID-19 pandemic.[26]
While it is often possible to use traditional cheats such as a GameShark to increase character speed, strength, health, etc., such cheats are generally quite easy for an experienced moderator to detect, even when applied subtly. However, the modification of internal files to improve RNG can often be much more difficult to detect. One of the most infamous examples of file modification was several cheated runs by the speedrunner Dream in 2020, whose luck was considered so extreme in a series of Minecraft speedruns that they were considered exceedingly unlikely to have been done without cheating (with an approximately 1 in 20 sextillion chance of occurring, as estimated by Matt Parker from Numberphile) by both the moderators at Speedrun.com and various YouTubers, such as Karl Jobst and Matt Parker, whose videos on Dream gained 4.8 million and 5.6 million views, respectively, as of February 2023.[35][36] Dream later admitted to the runs being cheated about five months after his runs were rejected, although he claimed he did not know he was using a modified version of the game.[37][38] Nearly two years later, the player who helped uncover Dream's cheated runs, MinecrAvenger, was also found to be using similar luck manipulation in late 2022.[39]
In order to prevent most of these methods, some games require a video of the hands on the controller or keyboard (\"handcam\"), in addition to the screen recording, so that game-specific moderators in charge of authenticating a submission can ensure that the inputs are really done in the specified combination and by a human.[40] Other methods include forensic audio analysis, which is a common method for detecting telltale signs of video splicing; this is why games without high-quality audio streams are often rejected on speedrun boards.[41] Additional detection methods are the use of mathematics (as in the aforementioned Dream case) or human moderation of suspicious inputs. Because Doom and TrackMania (for instance) use record inputs, suspicious inputs can often be enough to determine that a run was created using slowdown tools, with cheat-detection software in TrackMania being created to analyze over 400,000 replays and isolate a handful of cheaters, in which hundreds of world records were determined to have been cheated using slowdown tools, including Burim \"riolu\" Fejza, who was signed to the eSports team Nordavind (now known as 00 Nation).[33][42][34]
The earliest widely distributed speedruns were restricted to games that included an in-game timer such as Dragster, Activision Grand Prix, Excitebike, Metroid II: Return of Samus, and Super Mario Kart. One of the earliest recorded methods of score distribution was via Activision's 1981 newsletter, Activisions, where speedrunners would photograph the time on their screen and submit them to the publication.[44] Such publications would typically put speedruns into a section that also contained highscores or simple completion attempts. This would continue in later publications, including Nintendo Power's NES Achievers section, later renamed Power Player's Challenge.[45][46]
In 1996, id Software released Quake as a successor to the Doom series. Like its predecessor, Quake had a demo recording feature and drew attention from speedrunners.[3][51] In April 1997, Nolan \"Radix\" Pflug created Nightmare Speed Demos (NSD), a website for tracking Quake speedruns.[3] In June 1997, Pflug released a full-game speedrun demo of Quake called Quake done Quick, which introduced speedrunning to a broader audience.[3][49] Quake speedruns were notable for their breadth of movement techniques, including \"bunny hopping,\" a method of gaining speed also present in future shooting games like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress.[3][49] In April 1998, NSD merged with another demo-hosting website to create Speed Demos Archive.[3]
The creation of video sharing and streaming websites in the late 2000s and early 2010s contributed to an increase in accessibility and popularity of speedrunning. In 2005, the creation of YouTube enabled speedrunners to upload and share videos of speedruns and discuss strategies on the SDA forums.[3] Twitch, a livestreaming website centered around video gaming, was launched in 2011. The advent of livestreaming made for easier verification and preservation of speedruns, and some speedrunners believe it is responsible for a shift towards collaboration among members of the community.[3] In 2014, Speedrun.com was created, which had less stringent submission guidelines than SDA and was intended to centralize speedrun leaderboards for many different games. Speedrunners' move towards using Speedrun.com and social media platforms like Skype and Discord contributed to SDA's relevance waning in the 2010s.[3]
The global speedrunning community is growing at a very fast pace, with single events raising over $2,000,000 for charity in 2018, and is expected to continue growing at a very rapid pace for years to come. VIE is now positioned to become the P2P betting platform for speedrunning and expects to announce further agreements in this space.
This week NetHack was played in front of an audience of over 4,500 live viewers at the European Speedruner Assembly (ESA) Summer 2021 speedrunning marathon. This is probably the largest audience that a NetHack livestream has seen to date. The game was played by luxidream, who holds the current NetHack speedrun world record with a 49-minute ascension and can usually be found at the top of the tournament leaderboards.
Luxidream and tonehack provided commentary throughout the run, knowing that thorough commentary would be essential for translating the game and the status of the run to the audience which was largely viewing NetHack for the first time. The speedrun was rebroadcast in German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish; the individual commentators can be found in my preview post. Throughout the event there were periodic technical difficulties, from blacked out screens to muted commentary, but overall it was a big success.
Ultimately, supporting speedrunners is about helping high-skill, high-reflex players achieve faster and faster times without interfering with average players. Keeping that in mind may be the best way to inform your design process.
Involve speedrunners early, consider the type of playstyle they adopt, build in secrets for them to uncover, and be grateful when they find exploits that bypass some of your carefullly designed challenges. Do all of this and who knows Your game may be the next speedrunning sensation that players are fighting to set records on. 59ce067264