I was kind of hoping the whole thing would settle down, I was probably very foolish to go on a long rant and make this the "anti-speedrunning" thread when the OP is just looking for some help, but since it got a reply, I guess I should answer in kind. So here's my response to the response.
Speed running, from the little I know of it, has various difficult rules and classes/styles, and some of them allow you to use engine glitches, and why not, if the rules allow it and the speed runner in question admits to using glitches? That doesn't force anyone else to accept that playthrough as legitimate, if they don't want to.
Are you saying that attaching official times, and sometimes even prizes, to a certain way of playing a game doesn't legitimize it?
People can think what they want. My issue is with how many people in the gaming community consider any% glitchy speedruns to be legitimate, despite them only being slightly different from outright cheating, which nobody would consider legitimate in a speedrun. It makes no sense to me how the average person in the gaming community can be totally find with someone "bumping" through a wall to get out of bounds, but would automatically consider any speedrun that uses the noclip cheat to be invalid.
This isn't about me demanding any individual play or not play however they want. It's more that I am questioning the absurdity of the consensus within the gaming community at large. Instead of addressing it, most people provide thought-terminating clichés along the lines of "let people enjoy things how they want", as if that somehow resolves my issue or makes the absurdity go away.
Again, so what? They don't tell you how to play the game, so why shouldn't they play the game how they choose, even if to you it seems stupid or unenjoyable.
People can play games how they want. It's the smug attitude of speedrunners I can't stand. Just look
how butthurt some speedrunners get when people claim that not trivialising the game by being unvulnerable is stupid and arbitrary. I know ZylonBane and I generally only agree when hell decides to randomly freeze over every so often, but in this case he's absolutely spot on and I agree with him wholeheartedly.
The really ironic part about the linked video is that, what he produced is a speedrun that's actually mildly interesting because it's not just the same bullshit over and over again, most likely because "actually playing the game properly, but fast" isn't covered by any standard speedrunning guide, so the player has to actually adapt and think and be unique, which makes for a far more interesting speedrun overall because he's actually engaging with the game, rather than simply repeating a series of memorized steps. When people stop legitimising how speedrunners arbitrarily break games to succeed, we might actually start seeing some interesting speedruns. Unlikely, but maybe it's possible.
Disrespectful to a computer program? Do you not see how pretentious and stupid that sounds.
Are you saying video games aren't art, or that designers and developers don't spend literal years designing, balancing, and carefully pacing every encounter in a given game? Does it not shit all over that vision to have someone basically break their game apart completely and then compete to see who can break it the fastest? There are some speedruns (like the aforementioned pokemon yellow speedrun) that are literally less than 1 minute long. For a game that took hundreds of thousands of hours to make.
Hmm, doesn't sound so pretentious when you actually sit down and think about it rather than bashing out a response on your phone.
(Successful) Speed running absolutely does require a very high level of skill. The reflexes and (often) planning and testing and the sheer determination required to overcome the tedium of replaying the same thing over and over and over again must be of a very high standard. I'd argue that the return (the chance of *maybe* setting a new personal, or even a world-wide) record isn't worth even 0.01% of the effort needed to be a speed runner, but others seem to love speed running so good luck to them.
*clap clap*, you've now turned not being too bored to continue into a "skill".
Is standing in line at the DMV a skill?
I outright agreed that pressing WASD fast and in the right ways requires a degree of precision and skill. Nobody is arguing that speedrunning requires no skill. My issue was that it removes all the depth and strategy from the game. You've literally taken away all the legitimate challenge and degenerated the entire gameplay experience down to executing the right series of practiced maneuvers in quick succession. If you want to argue that's high-skill, fine, but it's also utterly fucking boring and removes all of the actual skill of the game, only to replace it with utterly mindless rote execution, which is really only skill at the most base level. The sort of thing I could program a computer to do (which, incidentally, is also why so many TAS speedruns are beating world records, to the point where speedrunners had to either ban them or make them a new category. Because a person practicing walking left 5 times on a specific pixel is considered "high skill", but a computer being programmed to do it is not, despite programming a bot arguably requiring significantly more skill, but I digress). It requires skill the same way tying your shoelaces requires skill, and nobody is stupid enough to call tying shoelaces a "high skill activity", despite requiring a reasonable amount of practice and precision. At some point skill expression needs to go beyond the mere mechanical execution and have a cerebral component, otherwise it's essentially mindless movement.
Right, so you think that speed running System Shock 2 just requires mashing the buttons as fast as possible? Speed runners need to understand the game engine's glitches and how to make use of them, memorize the level layouts and item placements, understand the movement/locations/roaming paths/etc of NPCs, the optimal route through the levels, and so on. That's a lot of things to learn, and to know well enough that any needed knowledge comes to mind immediately when the speed runner is playing.
All of that is headknowledge. Once you remember the right things, executing the speedrun is literally an exercise in mechanically performing the right series of steps. Most speedruns of most games look almost completely identical, except for when someone finds a completely new route that's the fastest, then all the speedruns change to follow that pattern instead.
Yes, there are some people in the speedrunning community who are smart enough to devise clever routes through games. But the vast majority are simply copying existing runs mindlessly, trying to perform the steps faster or repeat segments enough times that they are blessed with good enough RNG to get a microsecond advantage.
This thread is a good example. The OP has done nothing new here. They are trying to learn an established trick that has been around for years, following a standard SS2 speedrunning guide, for a route that has remained unchanged for a very long time. SS2 speedrunning at this point is entirely about executing the correct sequence slightly faster than everyone else. Speedrunners are essentially automatons following a script, that's all.
I agree, it's not fun to watch, but I'd say that about real life sports too. And the fact that "one of the largest charity events in gaming" is speed running based, shows that many people must enjoy watching it. Otherwise, the event would have single figure views, and be unknown to almost everyone.
At least real life sports requires strategy, timing, fitness, and offers a lot of opportunities for counter play. In everything from Cricket to Soccer to Football, there's always a back and forth. A team will try a new strategy and will use it to win games, then new teams will develop counters to their strategy. In some cases one team will simply just be better than the others. Sports may be boring but surely you agree that sport at least has some level of dynamic gameplay to it, strategy, and depth as a result. It's not simply practicing the same thing over and over again ad nauseum trying to be a few microseconds faster than everyone else.
And you're right, speedrunning is popular. There's no accounting for taste, I guess. Millions of people watch cricket every year too, it doesn't mean it's good.
I'm not trying to argue that "Speedrunning is something I personally find boring, therefore it sucks", I'm arguing that it's boring BECAUSE it sucks, and it sucks by it's very core design. Is it possible for speedrunning to theoretically be a very deep, strategic experience? Yeah probably, with the right set of rules in place and games that are dynamic enough to remain interesting. But for a game like SS2 where all the optimal routes have already been found, and 99.99% of speedruns are just people performing the same basic sequence of glitches to finish the game fast, there's nothing interesting or unique. It's simply a bunch of nearly identical robots executing the same sequence to varying degrees of success.
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