![]() Arbitrarily traveling from point A to point B as quickly as possible, whether skiing or speedrunning, requires a maximum understanding of the landscape being traversed. Game environments provide an ideal space in which to learn and grapple with its implications. We’ll be speedrunning Robinhood soon.ĭespite its apparent superficiality, speedrunning presents a unified worldview, a logic that can be applied to any environment, a principle that transcends any specific game: Everything is topological. Acknowledging the game does little to preempt this either, as speedrunners demonstrate, overwriting the stated objectives, imposing their own terms, and glitching across virtual space. The logic of games increasingly pervades culture, a phenomenon Sean Monahan calls gamer bait, and anything arrogant enough to pretend it’s not a game, such as the stock market, simply entices the masses to expose the fallacy all the more aggressively. ![]() In a world where our experience is increasingly mediated by software, seemingly every facet of life is abstracted as bits and thus feels more gamelike speedrunning provides an eloquent expression of that. ![]() Even games themselves can be turned into other games. Like so many other recent cultural events-WallStreetBets and meme stocks are a notable example-speedrunning demonstrates that anything can be turned into a game, whether it’s meant to be or not. There are many ways of looking at speedrunning: a game within a game that mocks the latter’s actual objectives a deep exploration of a digital environment’s contours or a supreme waste of time, intentionally pointless outside of its own context and even dumber than the overarching game itself, a nihilistic statement that forces us to question the ultimate purpose of anything. “If you add a layer of interactivity to almost any program, someone will try and speedrun it.” You can probably speedrun Microsoft Excel. The practice of speedrunning is remarkably expansive as Harry Gowland wrote in a recent issue of Dirt, “you can speedrun anything,” even non-games like the calculator app on the Nintendo Switch console (counting to 1,000 by frantically clicking +1). Other speedruns exploit programming mistakes, or glitches, that a skillful player can exploit to their advantage.” One popular type of glitch that players utilize involves “clipping” through walls, a time-saving action that normal gameplay doesn’t allow. Speedruns follow gameplay routes that are planned out carefully and often involve disarranging the intended sequence of events or skipping entire parts of it. Wikipedia elaborates: “Speedrunners often have to reason about the game differently from the way that ordinary players might. A speedrun, if you’re not familiar, is the practice of beating a video game in the shortest possible amount of time (the current record for completing the original Super Mario Brothers game, for example, is just under 5 minutes, and players still compete to shave fractions of seconds off of that time. I don’t really play video games anymore but I’ve become increasingly fascinated by speedrunning in recent years. He posts his stray thoughts on Twitter and contributes longer essays at sites like Real Life. Beyond the newsletter, Drew is a writer and urban planner who lives in Brooklyn. It sits at the intersection of technology and culture and consistently offers up angles and ideas that never would have crossed my mind but seem obvious in retrospect. There’s a set of writers and newsletters that I’ve drawn quite a bit of inspiration from over the years and Drew Austin’s (DA) Kneeling Bus is one of them.
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