Still Running (Vol. 1): Speedrun Studies in 2022
Support my writing on Patreon or Ko-fi!
A little under three years have passed since I published my speedrunning literature review “The Emergence of Speedrun Studies (2006–2021)”, and to no surprise scholarship about speedrunning has continued to be published. However, in that review I characterized speedrun studies as a subfield of game studies, something I have come to view as a somewhat limiting gesture. For as speedrunning has increased in notoriety it has drawn attention from scholars in a variety of disciplines, including science (Tunkel), computer science (Franušić et al.; Forward et al.; Bikas et al.; Weatherton), mathematics (Arteche; Erdil and Sevilla; Lami; Case), law (De Cooman; Fasciana), finance (Curry), web archivism (Reid et al.), translation (Listen) and human-computer interaction (George et al.; Pfau and El-Nasr; Sher and Su).
Of course, this does not mean that there has been a complete absence of “mainline” speedrun studies. On the contrary, 2022 saw the first PhD dissertation about speedrunning by Madison Schmalzer entitled “Transition Games: Speedrunning Gender”. [1] The following quotation sums up Schmalzer’s thesis nicely:
“For me, speedrunning is a particularly trans temporal mode. The temporalities of the reset that are so central to speedrunning have helped me reflect on the temporalities of my own life. On another level transitioning changes our relationship to gendered technologies while speedrunning changes our relationships to videogame technologies. But it’s even more complicated than that. Speedrunning and transitioning are a part of the same assemblages that make up our lives. We cannot neatly segment elements of ourselves. So, speedrunning can alter our connections with gender, and so too can transitioning inflect on videogames.” (143–144)
While past studies have given a first-hand account of learning to speedrun (Cook and Duncan) or been conducted by those who dabbled in speedrunning (Scully-Blaker), Schmalzer’s detailed description of what it’s like to “grind” a speedgame is both theoretically and narratively compelling. [2] Though her project is more about centering trans subjectivity than interfacing with past speedrun studies, one of my favourite lines of the dissertation comes from a critique of Scully-Blaker, quote: “Speedrunning is not a violent destruction. It is a creative celebration.” (92) Along similar lines she writes that “[t]he glitch does not break gameplay, it transforms it.” (69) Until reading Transition Games I hadn’t considered how little speedrun studies has dealt with the broader corpus on glitches (and glitch art), despite glitches being integral to the practice.
I also think Schmalzer’s line of thinking around desire gives a much cleaner answer to some scholars with whom I disagreed, namely Hemmingsen and Ricksand, rather than going to Boluk and LeMieux for an ontological argument. Why do speedrunners not use cheat codes? Because they don’t want to. What belongs in a glitchless speedrun? Whatever runners feel like doing. Speaking of Boluk and LeMieux, Schmalzer’s ideas put some productive pressure on a few of their claims from Metagaming, while acknowledging her indebtedness to their thinking. For example, where Boluk and LeMieux say that rules are merely social contracts that we opt into or out of, Schmalzer would say that rules can be coercive, despite their mutability. Where Boluk and LeMieux say that “there are no glitches”, Schmalzer is keen to point out that glitches are not merely technical artifacts but are socially mediated phenomena, and ultimately what makes a glitch a glitch is that it is legible as a glitch within a cultural context.
Another PhD dissertation, Oscar Moralde’s “The Protopolitics of Play”, addresses speedrunning in its final chapter. Moralde’s project uses phenomenology to explore the relationship between gameplay experience and its effects on players in the public sphere. To this end he critiques the instrumentalization of gamification and suggests an alternative mode of engagement in participation, of which speedrunning practice is one example. A shortcoming of Moralde’s analysis is that his citational apparatus regarding speedrunning is somewhat out of date (your average speedrunner in 2022 is not going to be posting on the Speed Demos Archive forums, for instance). There are also very noticeable omissions, such as Ruberg’s work (especially on Gone Home which is briefly mentioned) and Scully-Blaker’s work on both speedrunning as curation and its sometimes contentious relationship with eSports. Also, because Moralde’s other prime example of participation is Internet-mediated games criticism and its discourse, it feels as though there was a missed opportunity to discuss the Bismuths and Summoning Salts of the world.
While Moralde’s treatment of speedrunning is far more cursory than Schmalzer’s, they both ultimately land in similar places when it comes to the efficacy of speedrunning culture. Just as Moralde contends that “communities based on aesthetics are themselves politically indeterminate” (260), Schmalzer observes that “[g]litches are not inherently radical and are often subsumed into dominant structures.” (76) Yet, “[a]t the same time there are many people putting in a lot of work to make speedrunning a safe and diverse space and making blanket statements about speedrunning feels like a dismissal of the labor they put in (and the results they have achieved)” (Schmalzer 20), or as Moralde says, “people are willing to fight for these communities because they see value in them and they see urgency in the conflict over defining their values and who can share in the community.” (261)
In a paper for the DiGRA 2022 conference, Lawrence May and Fraser McKissack continue their application of ideas from Deleuze and Guattari to speedrunning, specifically that of the assemblage. They write that “in recognizing videogames as assemblage we must also understand their rhizomatic nature[…]This is to say that they and their textual meanings are multiple, heterogeneous and constantly seeking to recreate themselves” (1, emphasis in original). The authors take on as case studies a series of developer reaction videos produced by IGN and Games Done Quick respectively. For May and McKissack “[t]his video dataset also bears witness to an ongoing process of negotiation and reconfiguration that takes place as developers themselves work to define, once more, the aesthetic, programmatic and textual territories of their games.” (2) Similar to Schmalzer, the authors see speedruns as operating “within a complex arrangement of desires that challenge assumptions of how videogames ought to be enjoyed and consumed.[…]At stake in speedruns are the mechanisms through which the videogame assemblage can be arranged, and desires fulfilled.” (Ibid.)
Emilie Reed revisited their 2016 paper on the aesthetics of speedrunning to produce a journal article. Here Reed walks a fine line between staking their claim to originality and incorporating scholarship from the intervening years, such as Janik and McKissack and May. Reed’s primary theoretical approach however is Angela Ndalianis’ concept of the Neo-Baroque, which draws parallels between new media and post-Renaissance art of the 16th and 17th centuries. Reed begins by unpacking the particularities of speedruns performed in marathons as compared to more serious solitary attempts. They then turn to Scully-Blaker’s finesse and deconstructive run dichotomy, however their 1-to-1 mapping of these onto the 100% and Any% genera of category is frankly mistaken, as a given 100% run could easily contain as many if not more glitches than its Any% companion.
Reed says “it is useful to read the aesthetically engaged and discerning culture around speedrunning as a sort of ‘art world,’ the term used by H.S. Becker to describe the network of roles and activities involved not just in the production of individual artworks, but the social contexts in which the work is received, and the development of critical and aesthetic innovation that comes out of this process.” (96) The Neo-Baroque aesthetic which becomes most valorized by Reed is the “breaking of the frame”, and while I have been critical of the language of breakage in the past, this specific formulation is agreeable if one puts the “frame” in question in terms of Boluk and LeMieux’s standard metagame. In summation Reed writes “[s]peedrunning practices[…]give the player a toolbox of fragments from which to construct a new aesthetic experience[…]players use these new tools to collaboratively manipulate and rearrange fragments to perfect a sequence of maneuvers that finishes the game in record time.” (102)
Taking up Reed’s call to consider speedrunning’s reception, Fanny Barnabé and Sacha Bernard gave a conference presentation that considered the performances and production of spectacle in livestreamed speedrunning marathons, specifically France’s SpeeDons 2022. The authors write that “[t]he charity marathon event represents a moment of crystallization of collective intelligence, during which the spectacle intertwines with the objective of transmitting informational expertise to the audience” (n.p.). This research was later synthesized into a book chapter entitled “From Home to Stage: How Speedrunners Negotiate Performance, Relation to the Audience, and Spectacle in Live-Streaming Speedrun Marathons”, which I hope to cover in a future installment.
Using speedrunning as a case study, Pablo Abend and Max Kanderske explored how “technologies used in quantified gaming serve as mediators between individual performance careers and a broader culture of the professionalization of gaming.” (92) Of particular interest to the authors are the concepts of timing and sequencing, which they describe as “the anchoring practices around which other strands of the bundle, such as streaming, maintaining leaderboards and performing speedrun historiography and forensics, coalesce.” (95) They discuss how input displays on livestreamed speedrun attempts act as both a form of proof and a means of “communicat[ing…]game knowledge to the community”. (97) While the authors are quite astute in their analysis of “playful metadata” in competitive gaming (such as heart-rate monitoring and eye-tracking software), they have less to say about speedrunning’s imbrication in “potentially exploitative structures of data aggregation” because of its transformative or transgressive nature, coming off as a bit overly optimistic (110).
Lastly in 2022, Noel Arteche independently published a paper which “draws an analogy between mathematics and speedrunning, supporting the view of mathematics as a constrained cultural practice.” (2) According to Arteche these two practices share “(i) a fixed object of study built around hardcoded rules that cannot be violated[…](ii) a looser set of soft rules that can be partially violated, modified or broken (a set of socio-cognitive constraints) and (iii) a community of people who study the objects in question to get new collective insights.” (4) Drawing from Boluk and LeMieux’s distinction between mechanics and rules, Arteche writes of mechanics: “Though unbreakable, there is nothing Platonic about this first layer of constraints.” (5) He also makes an interesting observation that despite the fixity of mechanics inscribed via code, there is some grey area as code will run differently on different hardware.
Unfortunately Arteche wraps himself in a knot when attempting to define glitches, which according to him are “something the programmers left unprogrammed[…]either a bug or some limit case they forgot to specify”, suggesting that for Arteche the glitch is more of an absence than a presence. However, I do find his observation that glitches are discovered while strategies and routes are invented, creating a “combination of accidental discovery and meticulous crafting”, very compelling (6). He then moves on to a series of case studies of “glitch hunting” in mathematics that I cannot readily speak to as I am not a mathematician. Then, asking why it is that speedrunners run at all, Arteche concludes (citing interviews from Snyder) that it is because it is fun. While I would never say that speedrunning isn’t fun, I believe valuing fun above all else is a pretty tired argument in the gaming sphere, and again much prefer Schmalzer’s framing of a speedrun category as an index of desires. Arteche then makes an odd claim that tool-assisted speedrunning (TAS) is not considered fun and only exists as a way to understand the game better (to presumably then perform faster live speedruns), essentially the opposite of what Nathan Altice claims in I AM ERROR via his notion of choreographic play.
A reminder that all the sources discussed here and more can be found at The Speedrunning Reader.
[1] In my previous literature review I refrained from covering Master’s theses and individual dissertation chapters, not because I don’t think they are legitimate scholarship but because I lacked the time and space to cover them (or in some cases was unaware of their existence).
[2] In the interest of saving space, citations that have already been included in the previous literature review will not be repeated at the end of this one.
CITATIONS
Abend, Pablo, and Max Kanderske. “Playful Metadata. Between Performance Careers and Affect Modulation.” Spiel| Formen 2 (2022): 87–115.
Arteche, Noel. “Between Invention and Discovery: What Video Game Speedrunning Can Teach Us about Mathematical Practice.” (2022).
Barnabé, Fanny, and Sacha Bernard. “Spectacularization of Play in Live-Streaming Speedrun Marathons: From Performance to Mediation.” Live Performance and Video Games: Appropriations, Inspirations and Mutual Transfers. 2022.
Bernard, Sacha, and Fanny Barnabé. “From Home to Stage: How Speedrunners Negotiate Performance, Relation to the Audience, and Spectacle in Live-Streaming Speedrun Marathons.” Live Performance and Video Games: Inspirations, Appropriations and Mutual Transfers 165 (2024): 195.
Bikas, Ioannis, et al. “Low Latency Feedback: Contrasting Training Outcomes of Immediate versus Delayed Feedback in Speedrunning Super Mario Bros.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 8.CHI PLAY (2024): 1–14.
Case, Joshua P. Theorizing Mathematical Proof as Becoming: A Deleuzio-Guattarian Investigation. West Virginia University, 2024.
De Cooman, Jerome. “When art becomes a lemon: The economics of machine-enabled artworks and the need for a rule of origin.” Law, Technology and Humans 5.1 (2023): 24–39.
Curry, Derek. “Speedrunning the Financial Markets: A Comparison of Gaming Culture and High Frequency Trading.” Digital Culture & Society 7.1 (2021): 75–90.
Erdil, Ege, and Jaime Sevilla. “Power Law Trends in Speedrunning and Machine Learning.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.10004 (2023).
Fasciana, Salvatore. “The Gaming Theatre Company: players, gameplay, performance and the law.” Interactive Entertainment Law Review 5.2 (2022): 80–100.
Forward, Llewellyn, et al. “Super Mario in the Pernicious Kingdoms: Classifying glitches in old games.” Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 8th International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering. 2024.
Franušić, Joël, Kathleen Tuite, and Adam Smith. “Playable Quotes for Game Boy Games.” Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. 2023.
George, Leya, et al. “Jamming-as-exploration: Creating and playing games to explore gender identity.” Proceedings of the 2023 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 2023.
Lami, Gabriele. “Speedrunning and path integrals.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.13008 (2024).
Listen, Benjamin W. “Speedrunning terminology for translation and interpreting.” Replaying Japan 5 (2023): 37–47.
May, Lawrence, and Fraser McKissack. “Speedruns as assemblage: Witnessing reterritorialization through developer reaction videos.” Abstract Proceedings of DiGRA 2022 Conference: Bringing Worlds Together 2022. 2022.
Moralde, Oscar John Arellano. The Protopolitics of Play: From Gameworlds to Playing-in-the-World. University of California, Los Angeles, 2022.
Pfau, Johannes, and Magy Seif El-Nasr. “Player-driven game analytics: The case of guild wars 2.” Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2023.
Reed, Emilie. “The aesthetics of speedrunning: Performances in neo-baroque space.” (2022).
Reid, Travis, Michael L. Nelson, and Michele C. Weigle. “Web Archiving as entertainment.” International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022.
Schmalzer, Madison. Transition games: Speedrunning gender. North Carolina State University, 2022.
Sher, Stephen Tsung-Han, and Norman Makoto Su. “From screens to projector, wall, and TVs: Conceptualizing livestreams as design material for direct and indirect viewership experiences.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 7.CSCW1 (2023): 1–22.
Tunkel, Min. AMATEUR SCIENCE: COMMUNITIES AND CONNECTIONS IN THE EVERYDAY LIFE. 2024.
Weatherton, Andrew V. Detecting Tool-Assisted Cheating in Competitive Video Gaming Using Machine Learning. The George Washington University, 2025.
