Speedrunning and community
--------------------------

I'm not a speedrunner. I almost never play video
games anymore. One of the only games where I've
learned speedrunner tech was for Celeste but
only some of the rudimentary tricks.

That being said, I love speedrunning as a
concept and a community.

Conceptually I like it because at it's heart
it's the exploitation, and sometimes down right
destruction, of the physics of a game.

I don't mean the physics engine. I mean physics
in the sense of the rules the universe of the
game operates by. Every game has a physics in
this sense and there's almost always something
that can be exploited. In old games you can take
advantage of the ways maps are stored in memory
as one contiguous thing so by moving in an
unexpected direction and triggering a screen
transition you can take a kind of wormhole from
one point in universe to the other because the
topology of the story-universe is completely
different than the topology of the
stored-universe. New games have their own
fascinating physics that gets broken. I watched
a NieR: Automata race this week that had a
really cool moment where you do a sequence break
in the story, go around an area from a direction
you normally wouldn't go and then suddenly you
see the shadows of everything in this forest
shift rapidly like you're watching time-lapse of
the sun move across the sky.

It turns out that's basically what's happening!
In the game itself it's calculating the shadows
from a simulated sun as the light source in the
scene and when you perform this sequence break
the "time of day" has to change from one extreme
to another, day to dusk, and it doesn't just
teleport the sun the game actually just moves
the sun very quickly from one position to the
other so you can watch the shadows shift as the
sun moves across the sky.

I think that's just wonderful, y'know?

But also I like speedrunning as pure community
building. I'm not going to claim things are
perfect or drama free because that's obviously
not true but on a fundamental level it always
makes me happy to see communities get built
around wanting to figure things out, wanting to
tinker and break and explore. People figure out
skips and exploits and share them with each
other. Programmers use tools to figure out
optimal paths and rng manipulations and share
those out with the community. Human runners take
the routes that TAS programs use and try to
adapt them to something a human with finite
reflexes can perform.

It makes me happy to see because it feels like
an expression of the best ideals of hacker
culture: learning, breaking, creating, exploring
just for the pleasure of it.