The Emergence of Speedrun Studies (2006–2021)
Speedrunning history is at once well-documented and difficult to trace back to its origins. While it’s highly likely that many players in the 1980’s and before attempted to beat games as quickly as they could, it wasn’t until the release of Doom (1993) and the ability to share recordings in the form of “demo files” over the internet that speedrunning emerged as a playculture. In the 1990’s and early aughts speedrunning grew out of game-specific communities, such as those surrounding Mario Kart 64 (1996), GoldenEye 007 (1997), Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! (1987) and the Metroid series (1986–2021). One such communal hub was Speed Demos Archive, founded in 1998 and originally dedicated to Quake (1996) speedruns, but which eventually expanded to encompass runs of over 1300 videogames. And it was Quake speedrunning videos like Quake done Quick (1997–2020) which would be the first interest of academic writing and research on the subject.
EARLY SPEEDRUN STUDIES (2006–2012)
In 2006 Henry Lowood refers to these segmented speedrun videos as both “high-performance play” (26) and “transformative play” (34)–borrowing the latter term from Katie Salen Tekinbas–and situates them as the historical beginnings of Machinima practice. Two years later speedrunning would make its first appearance in an academic book, James Newman’s Playing with Videogames, which introduced its own term “superplay” to describe the phenomenon (around the same time Felan Parker also coined yet another play term–“expansive gameplay”–and applied it to speedrunning). Playing with Videogames has an entire chapter dedicated to superplay which includes adjacent concepts like pacifist runs and high score competition, yet it is speedrunning which Newman says “represents the ultimate expression of gamers’ mastery of[…]videogames” (129). For Newman, the documentation and public exhibition of speedrunning is a crucial difference from high score superplay.
Even in speedrun studies’ nascent form Newman is attentive to threads of inquiry that permeate speedrunning discourse to this day, noting for instance how the lack of random number generation (RNG) in Ikaruga (2001) led to highly optimized high score runs. Newman also highlights the collective nature of speedrunning, stating that “the gameplay performance is always situated within the context of the group.” (130) An observation Newman has returned to in subsequent scholarship is how superplay and speedrunning in particular were built into the game design of Super Mario Galaxy (2007) via the Prankster Comets that alter the parameters of play, although I do think there is a subtle difference between a timer counting down in Galaxy versus up in speedrunning. I also think Newman is somewhat quick to dismiss racing game speedruns, as series like Mario Kart (1994–2020) and TrackMania (2003–2020) have become staples of the practice, though there is a historical counterargument that time trial communities didn’t always see themselves as speedrunners per se. After discussing the infamous “rocket-jump” technique from Quake, Newman states “it is clear that what is often termed ‘emergent gameplay’ in the game development community[…]is at the very heart of speedrunning” (135). This is followed by a brief analysis of sequence-breaking in Metroid Prime (2002), after which Newman gives the first mention of tool-assisted speedruns (TAS) in games studies.
In 2009 Seb Franklin wrote an article that positioned speedrunning as a radical form of gameplay, drawing from Alexander Galloway’s concept of “countergaming”. Franklin analyzes TASes of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991) and Mega Man (1987), noting for example that the former makes use of button combinations that are impossible on standard SNES hardware. Franklin states that TASes “manifest ‘technical virtuosity’ but not necessarily ‘talent.’” (173), something Tia Kalla directly challenges in her piece “Tool Assisted Speedruns Are a Display of Skill”. Franklin also argues that “Watching[…]speedruns makes it clear that the practice is based around a potentially central concept in contemporary avant-garde practice, that of nonexistence in relation to software”, noting how “[speedrunners] pass through walls that are coded to be impassable.” (176) While I agree with the spirit of Franklin’s observation I think his formulation is backwards; it isn’t that the player becomes nonexistent to the in-game walls but that the walls never existed in the first place. His example–“zips” in Mega Man–are a direct consequence of this fact, as the game-makers were well aware that getting Mega Man inside walls was possible and thus provided the functionality to avoid softlocking. Franklin then ends his article with a positive take on Portal (2007), arguing that its core concept of thinking with portals entrains players to act as speedrunners and decode the logic behind the game’s virtual environs, something which Portal’s illustrious speedrunning history would certainly bear out.
Franklin also wrote a similar article that year which covers some of the same territory but is still worth noting. He writes that “[t]he speedrunner sees the game as coded space, not only seeking every conventional diegetic possibility, but every exploit that is achievable through the game’s standard control interface and that can redefine the possibilities of gameplay.” He goes on to describe TAS as “an extension of the intended use of the game[…]that both exposes this procedural makeup and exploits its shortcomings.” Unfortunately Franklin falls into a common fallacy when he claims that “older games[…]generally contain a higher amount of obvious bugs and exploits”, to which I point to the now commonplace practice of first-day patches to illustrate that this is not the case. For Franklin, part of the power of speedrunning is that “manipulation is attained through no actual programming whatsoever at the conventional, code-based level”, however the eventual discovery of arbitrary code execution (ACE) in certain games would complicate this account.
In 2011 Parker returned with a chapter in the edited volume Halo and Philosophy: Intellect Evolved, which looked at expansive gameplay practices within the Halo series (2001–2021) in relation to the work of Michel Foucault, specifically his concept of “aesthetic self-fashioning”. Parker offers three possible applications of aesthetic self-fashioning to expansive gameplay: as metaphor, as practice and as simulation. Parker says of expansive gameplay, “the player doesn’t ‘break’ the rule-based system, he or she expands it from within”, which is particularly pertinent to the ways speedrunning is popularly perceived (180, emphasis original). The next year would see the last of what I’m calling “early speedrun studies”, with Newman returning to discuss TAS once again, using the practice as a pillar of a larger argument advocating for the use of emulation as games preservation (a topic explored further in his book Best Before: Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence also from 2012).
MIDDLE ERA–A SUBFIELD FINDS ITS FOOTING (2013–2018)
In 2013 and particularly 2014 we start to see two distinct strains of speedrun studies emerge, one which like Parker’s work is grounded in a theoretical/philosophical mode of examination and another which situates speedrunning in the broader internet video ecology that includes livestreaming (see for example Smith et al). Writing from the position of the latter, Gabriel Menotti takes up the work of Lowood and Newman to discuss TAS as a form of video-recording gameplay. Again contrary to Franklin, Menotti asserts that “tool-assisted movies involve a very specific kind of performing skills.” (87)
Turning to the philosophical, Rainforest Scully-Blaker uses concepts from Michel de Certeau on space and Paul Virilio on speed to describe speedrunning as a “spatial practice within a spatial practice”. After laying out what was then the most comprehensive literature review of speedrunning in game studies, Scully-Blaker describes the distinction between “implicit rules” and “explicit rules”, as well as “finesse runs” and “deconstructive runs”, along with case studies for each. Although I think these dichotomies are overall useful, the latter does carry with it certain subtexts which I think are potentially reductive, such as the idea that glitched speedruns don’t require finesse or that some games are simply coded “better” than others and are thus more ideal candidates for finesse runs. Scully-Blaker also argues that speedrunning should not be considered cheating because runners cannot break a game’s explicit rules, only its implicit rules.
Also in 2014 Patrick LeMieux looked at speedrunning the Super Mario (1985–2021) series, specifically Morimoto’s infamous Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988) TAS, using the concept of “seriality”. He draws this primarily from Jean-Paul Sartre, but also puts specific emphasis on the technological aspect of speedrunning, including an in-depth analysis of the hardware specifications and functionality of the Nintendo Entertainment System, quote: “[t]he phenomenology, materiality, and physicality of play must be sampled, serialized, and stored as bits before it can impact the operation of the videogame.” (10) LeMieux is also quite keen in the way he pulls in internet forum posts to show the cultural context surrounding the dissemination of TAS in the early aughts, stressing the racist speculation that occurred around Morimoto’s TAS. For LeMieux the power of TAS is that it “offers[…]a supplementary interface between technical circuits and human experience.” (21) Finally he demonstrates how TAS and RTA speedrunning have co-evolved together, with TAS times representing a horizon for real-time runs.
The final chapter of Nathan Altice’s I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer / Entertainment System Platform from 2015 also explores TAS in the broader context of the history of emulation, beginning by likewise comparing TAS and real-time speedrunning, noting how TAS in particular “emphasizes entertainment” (292). Like Newman before, Altice observes how the concept of speedrunning has become part of game design, citing achievements in Grand Theft Auto 4 (2008) and Braid (2008) for completing each game within a set time limit. He concludes the chapter by meditating on the artistic potential of TAS, which he dubs “choreographic play”, stating that “[a TAS] is all at once a text file, a performance, a dance, an animation, a procedural event, sport, entertainment, a social act, an ethics, an archive, and yet still a videogame.” (323–324)
In 2016 Lucas Cook and Sean Duncan present a case study in speedrunning Final Fantasy VI (1994), situating the practice as an example of what T.L. Taylor calls “serious leisure” (174). Cook and Duncan observe that “[s]peedrunning[…]gives a window into the practices of a group of players that value competition and collaboration equally.” (Ibid.) This article is significant because unlike others it provides a first-hand account of learning to speedrun a game (despite not being able to complete a single run). As Cook writes, “I have failed close to a hundred times, with each failure teaching me something new.” (178) Like Scully-Blaker, Cook and Duncan turn to the work of Mia Consalvo to argue that speedrunning is not cheating the game but rather “[speedrunners] compress time for the express purpose of compressing time in a “secondary game” of sorts (the speedrun)” (184, emphasis original). Cook and Duncan go on to describe how the act of livestreaming speedruns is reciprocal in nature, as audience members may themselves opt to learn the speedrun being performed, or otherwise call attention to aspects of the game the runner has overlooked.
Also in 2016 Emilie Reed presented a paper to the 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG, however only the abstract is currently available online. Reed argues that “the culture of speedrunning, and the gameplay aesthetics of the runs produced reveal an extension[…]of the Neo-Baroque” that “shatters the frame imposed by the game, presenting the gameplay mechanics, narrative, and simulated space as fragmentary and rearrangeable.” Before going further into the late 2010’s I would be remiss not to mention the popularity of speedrunning content on YouTube, with the years 2016 and 2017 being particularly fruitful with the viral success of pannenkoek2012’s “Watch For Rolling Rocks 0.5x A-Presses” commentated TAS video and the advent of Summoning Salt’s “World Record Progression/History” docu-series.
2017 would see the publishing of two key texts: Speedrunning: Interviews with the Quickest Gamers by David Snyder–which serves as both an overview of speedrunning and an extensive series of interviews with various runners–and Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames by Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux. Instead of one specific chapter dedicated to speedrunning Boluk and LeMieux interweave it throughout their book, as it constitutes one such “metagame”, arguing that “the speedrunning community not only changes the way games are played but also questions the very ontology of videogames.” (43) While not exhaustive in mainly sticking to Mario and Zelda speedruns, the book looks to a wide variety of speedrunning practices from livestreaming to multigame TAS to blindfolded speedruns. Speaking of livestreaming, that same year Emma Witkowski and James Manning used Lowood’s high performance play to discuss the negotiations of power in co-creative practice, with one of their case studies being speedrunner GrandPOOBear’s struggles with Nintendo’s Super Mario Maker (2015) policies and moderation system. Concepts from this article were later revisited by Witkowski and Manning in 2019.
In a presentation to Nordic DiGRA in 2018, Dom Ford builds off of Scully-Blaker and Espen Aarseth to compare the “transgressive” nature of speedrunning to parkour. Scully-Blaker then returned to synthesize part of his 2016 Master’s thesis into an article exploring speedrunning via Paul Virilio’s “Museum of Accidents”. Here Scully-Blaker moves partly away from his deconstructive language and towards speedrunning as an act of “(re)curatorial play”; in essence “speedrunning is a[…]re-curating of a game through play according to its explicit rules” or “a collaborative project to exhibit the accident”. If I may self-indulge, I find a particular resonance here with my own writing where I argue that speedrunning is a reparative force and not a destructive one.
One exploration of speedrunning which has seen less representation within academic citational apparati thus far is Liam Mitchell’s Ludopolitics: Videogames Against Control, where he considers both speedrunning Super Mario Bros. and TAS across the final two chapters of the book. Mitchell likens speedrunners to Bernard Suits’ typology of the “trifler”, who abides by the rules of a game but acts toward their own goals. He then walks through SMB1’s speedrunning history, making note of the infamous 4–2 wrong warp and the flagpole glitch that allowed Darbian to break the 4:57 barrier. For Mitchell “[speedrunning] engenders an understanding of the fallible, imperfect nature of videogames” which to his larger argument is a “contravention of the usual exercise of control[…]that recognizes that ultimate mastery–total and final control–can’t be attained.” (151–152)
Turning to TAS, Mitchell says that “[i]f RTAs are feats of skill, then TASes are feats of engineering.” (178) He runs through an abridged history of TAS, including Morimoto’s SMB3 run covered by LeMieux, before jumping ahead to TAS’ history within Games Done Quick (GDQ) marathons, which dovetails into a discussion of ACE in Super Mario World. As impressive as TASes which use ACE can be, Mitchell pays close attention to the ever-present possibility of desynchronization, as well as other unpredictable glitches that can occur due to interference at the level of hardware and electrical currents or else micro-temporal miscommunication between individual console components. Mitchell concludes that “[TASing] is artistic insofar as it unsettles expectations and frames of understanding and gives form to the technological unconscious, changing our assumptions about what is possible, both within the magic circle and without[…it] expands the bounds of the magic circle itself” and further that “[the] artwork of the TAS functions as an aesthetic means of politicization” (201)
THE SPEEDRUNNING EXPLOSION BEGINS (2019–2020)
2019 would see the start of a growth spurt in scholarship surrounding speedrunning. For instance Stephen Tsung-Han Sher and Norman Makoto Su wrote an in-depth article about GDQ and the mentality of donors motivated by the conviviality of the speedrunners’ couch. C. Thi Nguyen also briefly mentions speedrunning in his analysis of “the right way to play a game”, arguing that “speedrunning is an alternate mode of encounter with the material substrate of a game, and not an encounter with the work[…]Speedrunning the software of Super Mario World is simply a different game from the original”. To self-indulge once again I make a similar argument in an essay about speedrunning where I apply Boluk and LeMieux’s “standard metagame” to the overlap of possibility and “presupposition”. In other words a videogame title as we know it only encompasses that which is presupposed, and all that lays outside that is part of another metagame entirely, potentially a speedgame.
Newman returned once again to discuss The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) Any% category, arguing that speedruns are both “creative” and “transformative” (7). He introduces three ways of looking at how speedruns operate: finding “hidden affordances”, “exploiting inconsistencies” and “manipulation and reconstruction” (14). These categorizations happen to map quite well to my model of presupposition space, expanded space and player-expanded space discussed in the aforementioned essay. Though perhaps complicating Nguyen’s comments, Newman concludes that “[t]hese [speedruns are] performances of the same and different games simultaneously.” (30)
Also in 2019 was the publishing of two more key texts: Speedrun Science by Eric “Omnigamer” Koziel and Video Games Have Always Been Queer by Bo Ruberg. The former is not an academic book so I won’t cover it in detail, however I highly recommend checking it out as it is a comprehensive look into speedrunning history as well as a great guide on how to get into the hobby. While Ruberg’s contribution to speedrun studies is shorter in length, by hooking into queer studies it takes the burgeoning subfield in an exciting new direction. Ruberg begins with a claim that queer temporality and spatiality “contrast to ‘chrononormativity,’ the set of expectations that dictate how individual lives and larger historical narratives should progress” (185). They go on to say that “[i]n the context of video games, chrononormativity names a set of foundational logics that have come to shape how games are designed and experienced” (190–191).
Ruberg writes that “[t]hrough speedrunning, players can also transform supposedly bad video games into ‘beautiful’ ones[…]precisely because these players value the very same things that traditional players find undesirable, like glitches” (194). They continue by comparing speedrunning to the notion of queer failure, arguing that “speedrunning is its own ‘queer art’ — one that appears to conform to mainstream notions of success yet contains within itself countless failures” (195). Ruberg also relates speedrunning to the chrononormativity of society: “when video games are played at top speed–the result is a mode of play that resists the dichotomy between what is typically perceived as fast, productive time (e.g., time spent working) and slow, wasted time (e.g., time spent gaming).” (196) Paratextual elements of livestreamed speedruns are also analyzed, such as the “collective euphoria” of Twitch comments where “excesses of speed result in the breakdown of space[…]queering the functioning of comments by disrupting meaning made through communication, transforming utterances from content into performance.” (197) Lastly Ruberg considers the psychological and physical dimension of speedrunning, stating that “[t]his way of knowing [through speedrunning] can be described as queer because it requires an internalization of the game into the embodied experience of play. It represents a form of non-heteronormative intimacy that develops through the player’s extensive knowledge of the game.” (198) In other words, speedrunning is an act of love.
If 2019 was the start of a growth spurt then 2020 saw a relative explosion in academic interest in speedrunning, both in number of articles produced and the depth of the analysis provided. Among these articles the one that stands out the most is Jonathan Hay’s look into the Super Mario Odyssey (2017) speedrunning community from a posthumanist perspective. Hay’s article is invaluable simply for the sheer amount of claims it is making — both about speedrunning as well as meta-arguments about speedrun studies — some of which I highly agree with and others disagree. To start with the positive, I think that Hay’s focus on embodied play and his formulation of videogames and players as “intra-active assemblages” is spot on (5). I also fully agree with him that intentionality is a poor lens through which to view speedrunning (and videogames at large). However, I find that going to Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” for that analysis, as if videogames are textual in the same way books are, is both an oversimplification and very ironic given that Hay claims to take the stance of ludology rather than narratology. While I don’t have enough experience with posthumanism to form an opinion on his suggestion that Mario’s use of Cappy serves as a metaphor for humans’ relationship to technology, again I see this reading as leaning more towards the narrativized; to a ludologist both Mario and Cappy are merely objects within a simulation.
I also think Hay is correct to assert that speedrunning constitutes a form of performance art, however this doesn’t really land as hard as I think he thinks it does, both because Lowood, Newman and Franklin already made similar claims way back in the late aughts and because I think within the speedrunning community this is a given. Hay also moves to challenge previous scholarship that frames speedrunning as transgressive, which I can get behind, as Newman suggests speedrunning is not something one does to a videogame but with it. However the alternative that Hay provides is that speedrunning is “immersive”, citing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow but not expanding on it whatsoever (10). This partly led me to write a blog post directly refuting the application of flow to speedrunning.
The final thing I must address is Hay’s claim that the speedrunning community is “almost exclusively white, male, Western, and able-bodied.” (8) I find this particularly hard to swallow when there are so many readily available examples to the contrary: cheese, Narcissa Wright, Trihex, TheMexicanRunner, PangeaPanga (and those are just runners with Wikipedia pages), not to mention the immense contribution of the Japanese speedrunning scene. If Hay had altered his adverb and instead said “predominantly” this wouldn’t be so galling (in fact Mitchell and Ruberg make similar observations regarding diversity but are more even-handed), but I think the larger issue here is that we are treating speedrunning as a microcosm of games culture without acknowledging the fact that games culture has changed immensely in the past decade, and continues to do so. This is not to paper over the harassment, sexism, transphobia, etc. that has occurred within the speedrunning community and its audience, but to acknowledge the strides that have been made in insuring a more inclusive space both physically and virtually. I would hold up GDQ’s biannual all-woman speedrunning marathon Frame Fatales as an example of this.
Moving on, Justyna Janik sought to introduce Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “texture” into game studies via “gameplay texture”. From my reading texture seems to have two main ingredients, the first being spatiotemporality and the second being that it is collectively defined; the ever-popular example of desire lines is given to illustrate this. While I struggle to see what gameplay texture adds to descriptions of regular gameplay that a more straightforward discussion of genre conventions/expectations lacks, the application to speedrunning as an “alternative gameplay texture” is quite natural given its component parts. Janik then takes on Super Mario Bros. speedrunning as a case study, drawing mostly upon interviews from Speedrunning. In a way Janik and Hay’s articles conclude like mirror images of one another, with the former elaborating on TAS and briefly mentioning posthumanism and the latter vice versa.
Akin to Boluk and LeMieux, though strangely not engaging with them directly, Michael Hemmingsen argues that speedrunning is a metagame and makes a distinction between rules and physics that echoes Scully-Blaker’s implicit and explicit rules or Boluk and LeMieux’s similar treatment of rules and mechanics (used in the classical sense and not in the sense that e.g. jumping in a platformer is a game mechanic). While I think Hemmingsen’s diagnosis of speedrunning in relation to skill and collective knowledge is mostly correct (I quibble with the notion that knowledge necessarily supplants skill — think of the TASer who is non-competitive in real-time runs), his conclusion that speedrunning’s ethos is contingent upon the subversion of developer intentions rings false to me (funnily enough Hemmingsen also turns to Barthes to make this point). Contrary to Scully-Blaker’s schema, Hemmingsen argues that all speedruns are deconstructive because “even glitchless runs are not truly glitchless.” (14) While he may be right that glitchless runs do not account for all possible glitches, I prefer Boluk and LeMieux’s interpretation that “[i]f videogames are agnostic to how they are played and every operation yields states of equal value, then there are no glitches, nothing is out of bounds, and the intentions of an author and audience are a completely arbitrary metagame in and of themselves.” (46)
Hemmingsen raises an interesting conundrum of why glitches are allowed in speedruns but cheat codes aren’t, however this claim itself is so game and category-dependent (for example Sandcastle% in Banjo-Kazooie (1998) and Cheato% in Banjo-Tooie (2000) do permit cheat codes) that I think it’s impossible to concoct a universal rationale. Also, while Hemmingsen does bring up examples, I think digging further into speedruns which use ACE would have been beneficial to round out his discussion of what constitutes cheating in speedrunning. Hemmingsen goes on to discuss whether or not speedrunning can be considered a sport, a debate I have little interest in, although I think the recent popularity of speedrunning races goes against some of his finer points.
Within an article about the playfulness of pause menus Madison Schmalzer dedicates a section to speedrunning. She uses the relatively common technique of pause buffering as a case study to illustrate that “[t]ime flows differently for speedrunners than it does for most players”, as with practice runners become “attuned to the computer’s micro-temporalities”, eventually being able to perform complicated tricks without pause buffering. Ultimately Schmalzer makes an argument about menus and videogames that is startlingly similar to my own conception of the “possibility database” (or what Jesper Juul would call the “game tree” [56]), with both of us borrowing from Lev Manovich, as she says “[o]n a fundamental level, videogames are made of databases.” As final examples to underscore this point, Schmalzer discusses the infamous “pipe glitch” from Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (1992) and the credits warp from Pokémon Yellow (1998), as for her they literalize the spatiality of the database.
Fraser McKissack and Lawrence May turn to concepts from Gilles Deleuze in their analysis of speedrunners’ performance of games in the Left 4 Dead series (2008–2009). These include the “movement-image”, where linkages between spaces are coherent, and the “time-image”, where the only logic that persists is the passage of time (548). McKissack and May’s primary example of the time-image in Left 4 Dead is the respawn warp which occurs when the player has navigated out of bounds, which they argue is not an “empty space” but a “still life” (551). They then discuss the speedrunner’s avatar as “a body without organs”, which has capabilities beyond that of a regular Left 4 Dead player (552). McKissack and May also pull in the language of “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” in the context of both zombie fiction and Valve’s patching of the ability to skip certain zombie hordes (555). The authors write that “the narrative and structural ruptures enacted by speedruns are generative and heighten the player’s and audience’s exposure to the narrative chaos and instability of zombie storytelling.” (556, emphasis original) Furthermore they say “[t]he speedrun is an emergent form of storytelling that accelerates[…]and embraces chaos and decay”, ending their piece with the suggestion that speedrunning is “not only generative but possibly even utopian.” (561)
Ruberg returns to discuss Gone Home (2013) and speedrunning. After critiquing the game for being merely representationally queer and not providing enough opportunities to wander flaneur-style through its narrative, Ruberg moves to discuss how speedrunning Gone Home acts as a “straightening device” (633). While I think the literalization of straightness here is something I don’t fully buy, even given that to say that speedruns straighten videogames is a mischaracterization. Though finding and following the optimal route is the goal of speedrunning, no two speedruns nor speedrunners are alike in their movement. Additionally, speedrun routing is rarely ever fixed and constantly evolves around new discoveries, with some runs even requiring on-the-fly routing based on RNG outcomes. I also think a more thorough discussion around sequence-breaking here would resonate with Ruberg’s desire for a more nonlinear narrative experience out of Gone Home.
When Ruberg says “[s]peedrunning also straightens Gone Home by shifting attention away from the game’s LGBTQ representational elements”, I find it hypocritical given that their entire article up to that point was about moving away from representational discourse and towards an analysis of how queerness is and is not enacted through gameplay and level design (647). Ruberg goes on to say that “LGBTQ representation is rarely if ever never [sic] discussed in the speedrunning community around Gone Home” and “through speedrunning, this community has managed to take a game about the experiences of women and queer people and appropriate it for the interests of a far straighter and more cis-male group of players” (Ibid.). But how do they know this is the case? Did they personally ask about the sexuality, gender identities and personal interpretations of each of the 100+ runners on the Gone Home speedrun.com leaderboard? Of course not, they are making a generalization for the sake of an argument. However Ruberg themself doesn’t seem too committed to that argument, as they state “it is insufficient to say that speedrunning simply straightens Gone Home, given that speedrunning itself could be seen as a form of queer play”, gesturing towards their previous writing on chrononormativity(648).
Alex Custodio’s Who Are You?: Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance Platform briefly mentions speedrunning and TAS, stating that “a successful speedrun is a symphony based on incomparable mastery of the game code” (167). Custodio also explores the topic of randomizers, arguing that they “disrupt the game’s flow” (169) and building on the work of Michael Iantorno who says that “Randomizers have essentially created a new genre of speedrunning, where technical prowess is paired with meta-knowledge of game logic” (2019, emphasis original). Also published in 2020 was the edited volume Mixed Reality and Games, which features a brief chapter on speedrunning by Dejan Lukovic, who uses a human-computer-interaction (HCI) approach. Lukovic runs through various definitions of speedrunning by Scully-Blaker, Mitchell, Koziel and Sebastian Standke (whose work is in German and thus could not be included here) before conceptualizing what he calls the “pre-game” (240). The pre-game is similar to Boluk and LeMiex’s standard metagame, however I personally prefer the latter concept as pre-game implies that there is a tangible predefined game without a metagame, which Boluk and LeMieux would say is impossible. Lukovic also makes a distinction between speedrunning as an act and speedruns as systems that I find interesting, although it is not really played out in the chapter.
For Lukovic, speedrunning communities are made up of four distinct actors–speedrunners, viewers, glitchhunters and TASers–who engage in three distinct aspects of interaction–consuming, understanding and disassembling (241–242). The machine on the other hand has three parameters or measures: time, goals and interference with code and/or developer intended mechanics. I find it odd that these first two parameters/measures are attributed to the machine as in my view they are applied to the machine by humans. Timing a speedrun is not what makes it a speedrun (imagine a scenario where a world record is achieved by a runner who forgot to start their timer–it would still be valid once re-timed). Likewise goals are arbitrary markers set by humans; a videogame does not care if you beat it or not.
As for developer intentions, for me those become irrelevant once a videogame is in the hands of players, and Lukovic’s distinction between glitches and exploits is based on an incorrect assertion (in most cases, save for the use of ACE) that speedrunners are “changing the code of a videogame” (245). The way Lukovic then maps glitchless speedruns, glitched speedruns and TAS onto his three established human aspects of speedrunning happens a bit too cleanly in my opinion, although he does conclude that “[t]hese three described kinds of human-machine-interaction thus can occur in every meta-category of speedruns” and “this process is neither top-down nor bottom-up. It is a constant flow of information and knowledge between every layer up and down” (247).
THE EXPLOSION CONTINUES (2021)
While 2021 did not see the sustained growth in speedrun studies that the previous two years did, there was renewed interest in speedrunning from different disciplinary perspectives. Matthias Groß, Dietlind Zühlke and Boris Naujoks produced a paper looking at speedrunning from a computer science background, building on the mathematical work of Manuel Lafond to examine how one may automate the routing process, while Iantorno returned to discuss the technical affordances of the Super Metroid (1994) VARIA randomizer. Schmalzer also returned with an article that looks at TAS through the lens of animation studies, arguing that “the act of TASing requires a unique pulling apart of the layers of animation which lays bare the animations that are always present during videogame play.” (65) Schmalzer offers up five of these layers: sensory output, game state, code, material and operator. She then moves into a discussion of a TAS by MrWint, which uses ACE in Pokémon Yellow to fold different games and even cartoon animation into the “run”, demonstrating that “TAS can be thought of as a multilayered artifact.” (69) She then breaks down her five layers of animation with other TASes serving as examples, concluding that “TASs’ ability to deconstruct videogame animations sheds light on the ways animation occurs both within, and well below, the perceptions of human players and viewers” (80–81).
Speedrunning was also discussed in two edited volumes, Mythopoeic Narrative in The Legend of Zelda and Japan’s Contemporary Media Culture between Local and Global: Content, Practice and Theory. In the former Ethan Smilie borrows ideas from J.R.R. Tolkien and medieval thinkers to draw parallels with the Zelda series and its speedrunners. Namely Smilie evokes the concept of “curiositas”, a form of curiosity or knowledge-seeking deemed illicit or potentially sinful. For Smilie, just as literary critics engage in curiositas when they focus on the detail of a text and not the story as a whole, so too do speedrunners “miss the forest for the trees” when they exploit glitches to gain faster times (51). I would counter that while speedrunners do disregard story, they are in fact more fully engaged with the totality of what a given videogame is able to produce within its possibility space.
Smilie’s argument largely hinges on the conception of speedrunning as an immersion-breaking activity, for “[t]he quest to beat a game as quickly as possible renders the story an enemy.” (52) Personally I don’t care for immersion arguments, nor do I care for Smilie’s application of Roger Caillois’ concept of “Paidia” to speedrunning, as many scholars (such as those cited above) have noted speedruns are subject to very particular non-provisional rulesets. However Smilie does grant that while speedrunners do not engage in the wonderment of videogame narratives, wonder is instead instilled in the viewers of speedrunners who follow the metanarrative of their pursuits: “[s]peedrunners become heroes of their own narratives, documented cinematically during live streams and archived videos.” (58) Thus Smilie is at least somewhat aligned with McKissack and May’s assertion that rupture itself is generative of narrative.
In the latter volume Fanny Barnabé outlines the “rhetorical figures” (251) of two Pokémon speedruns in a chapter adapted from her PhD dissertation, which centered around the concept of détournement (Barnabé also has some previous scholarship on speedrunning which she cites here but is only available in French). She first takes up the argument of Lowood (and others) that speedrunning is “transformative” (Ibid.), as well as making parallel observations to Boluk and LeMieux that it constitutes “both a gaming performance and an act of (meta) game design” (254) and to Nguyen that “speedrunners are indeed playing[…]a different game than the one they are using as a support” (255). She then introduces the concept of the “game apparatus” where “external rules and structures are aggregated to [the game-object]” (Ibid.). Barnabé moves on to her two case studies, a glitchless 100% run of Pokémon Snap (1999) and an “uber-large-skip” run of Pokémon Green (1996), borrowing and applying Scully-Blaker’s taxonomy of finesse and deconstructive runs. She then concocts her own dichotomy of rhetorical figures, those that “dismantl[e] the game coherence” (figures of deconstruction) and those that “codify[…]the speedrun apparatus” (figures of formalization) (261).
The first figure of deconstruction is “resemantization”, which is the process of “modif[ying the game’s] ‘lexicon’[…]and[…]attributing new meanings and functions to these different units, without changing their signifier” (Ibid.). Some examples of this are how through the use of glitches in Pokémon Green doors are resemantized into portals and obstacles such as trees are made passable, or how photographs in Pokémon Snap are subject to “de-aesthetization” due to the lack of care in framing (262). The second figure of deconstruction is “anti-model play” where “the speedrunner’s actions brutally contradict or elude an instruction given or valued by the game[…]generating an effect of deviation” (263, emphasis original). Here I bristle with Barnabé’s statement that “[s]peedrun performances, in fact, do not show the difficulty of the game, its rhythm, the player’s hesitations, the frustrations, or successes”, because if they did not do that to some degree I don’t think they would be as entertaining to watch (Ibid.). However Barnabé and I make similar claims around what I have called “distractivity” — in this case the act of speedrunning Pokémon Snap while livestreaming–as she says the “shifts[…]from one enunciative posture to another contribute to the deconstruction of the game because they simply interrupt the performance and contradict the conception of play as an immersive experience.” (266)
The third figure of deconstruction is “exposure” which is the “uncover[ing of] the possibilities embedded in the original game.” (267) Barnabé observes that “[t]he presence of comments (internal to the video or paratextual)[…]gives the activity a meta-communicative dimension [that] reveal[s] the inner workings of the speedruns”, also noting how input displays function as part of this “meta-discursive framework” (268, emphasis original). The fourth figure of deconstruction is the “dilution of auctoriality” where Barnabé gestures towards the dialogical nature of speedrunning (270). She then moves into figures of formalization, the first of which is “analogy”, which simply refers to the tendency for speedrunners to compare themselves to other runners, their personal best (PB) or a TAS, in other words the “constant reminder of the existence of a shared script behind the individual performance.” (274) The second figure of formalization is “codification”, which can refer broadly to the uniformity of video submissions, the standardization and naming of tricks or the establishment of category-specific rulesets (Ibid.). Lastly is the figure of “over-compliance”, where “speedrun differs from play because it has the effect of suppressing the low-intensity moments of videogame activity” (276). Considering all of these figures, Barnabé concludes that “[t]he speedrun product is therefore plural, transmediatic, and, above all, collective” (277).
Lastly, Martin Ricksand asks “What belongs in a glitchless speedrun?”, taking aim at Scully-Blaker’s definitions of implicit vs. explicit rules and finesse vs. deconstructive runs, finding them insufficient for answering his titular question. One of Ricksand’s criticisms is that Scully-Blaker does not adequately define what a glitch is, and while I can’t disagree with him I find it ironic how he bemoans the lack of scholarship on speedrunning while simultaneously retreading territory covered by Newman and Hemmingsen, who he does not engage with. Instead Ricksand turns to YouTuber EZScape’s distinction between glitches and exploits, and though I am a fan of EZScape and have referenced his videos in my own writing I would personally reformulate his definitions in terms of presupposition rather than intentionality.
Ricksand moves to use theories of rules in sports to demarcate the rules of a glitchless speedrun, however he ultimately finds none of them satisfactory. I think the root of Ricksand’s issue is that he misreads explicit rules as rules at all, where Hemmingsen and Boluk and LeMieux prefer physics and mechanics respectively. Ricksand seems to resist the notion that speedrunning is a metagame, as he says “[o]ne could object that speedrunners are effectively playing an entirely different game than casual players[…]but that only exacerbates the problem: if we cannot appeal to the rules of a casual playthrough, it follows that speedrunners have to make up all rules” (emphasis original). To me this only registers as such if you are attached to the idea that videogames are games to begin with, and not equipment for making metagames as Boluk and LeMieux would say. Ricksand is unwilling to concede that “all the categories are arbitrary”, in the words of Narcissa Wright, and this includes the “casual” playthrough. Ricksand writes that “[a]s long as one strives for interpreting a work in the way the work itself prescribes[…]many issues [with glitchless speedruns] should be resolved with relative ease”, however this prescription is itself completely arbitrary.
For this reason I cannot follow Ricksand’s reasoning that the solution to the glitchless speedrun “problem” lies in narratology because we simply do not agree on what videogames ontologically are. If “fictional truth” is the measure by which inclusion in a glitchless speedrun is gauged, then is using the Ocarina of Time pause menu not just for save and death warps but at all allowed, since no such menu exists in the fictional geography of Hyrule? Or are we to understand that e.g. equipping items in a menu is an abstraction of some actual event that is not represented yet nonetheless occurs fictionally? Based on Ricksand’s model the answer to these questions is unclear.
Speedrun studies has come a long way since its Machinima-centric origins, and as any field now has its own debates. However a constant remark has been that there is a lack of research on speedrunning, so I hope that this exercise has helped illuminate what is already out there so that future writers may have a better baseline for where their work lies. In addition to this literature review I have also compiled The Speedrunning Reader, which includes both the articles and books cited here as well as articles from popular outlets/publications and individual theses. If you know of any good articles that I may have missed do not hesitate to tweet me @rhombical. Finally, this piece of writing was more expensive to produce than usual, so if you got something out of it and would like to donate you can do so at ko-fi.com/rhombical.
CITATIONS
Altice, Nathan. I am error: The Nintendo family computer/entertainment system platform. MIT Press, 2015.
Barnabé, Fanny. “The Transformative Power of Speedrun.” Japan’s Contemporary Media Culture between Local and Global: 251.
Boluk, Stephanie, and Patrick LeMieux. Metagaming: Playing, competing, spectating, cheating, trading, making, and breaking videogames. Vol. 53. U of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Cook, Lucas, and Sean Duncan. “Any% no sketch glitch’: Speedrunning final fantasy VI and expanding ‘well played’.” Well played: A Journal on Video Games, Values, and Meaning 5.2 (2016): 173–89.
Custodio, Alex. Who Are You?: Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance Platform. MIT Press, 2020.
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Franklin, Seb. “On Game Art, Circuit Bending and Speedrunning as Counter-Practice: ‘Hard’ and ‘Soft’ Nonexistence.” CTheory 5.2 (2009).
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McKissack, Fraser, and Lawrence May. “Running With the Dead: Speedruns and Generative Rupture in Left 4 Dead 1 and 2.” Games and Culture 15.5 (2020): 544–564.
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