 Speedrunning is kind of like the Olympics of video games, if every two years, some country discovered an entirely new method of skating that cut the world record in half and inexplicably turned the Romanian judge into a cone. Woo! USA! USA! In true American fashion, we may not have the best medals, but we do have a lot of them. Most of the time, if a kid wants to play a game instead of doing their homework, we say, it's just a game, it's not important, you need to prepare for the real world. But every two years, we grab those same kids and make them watch a bunch of people play games really, really well and say, look what you can do with hard work and determination. Those people are champions! That really could be said for masters of any past time. We love to see human beings achieving new heights, whether it's bobsledding faster than anybody has ever bobsledded before, or folding a paper crane that's smaller than any that has ever been folded. It's so tiny! However, there is a pretty substantial bias in our culture for only certain sports and games being worthy of hours of practice. We pay professional football stars millions of dollars every year without batting an eye, but we sort of snicker at people who master other sports that require just as much dedication and skill, like table tennis or curling. But maybe we're wrong about that. Maybe excellence is worth pursuing in any context, whether it's with skis or with a paintbrush or, as I'm about to argue, with video games. In 1994, a few years after the computer game Doom came out, a few players started to wonder just what the absolute limits of the game were. Could you beat Doom, a first person shooter, without any weapons or without hurting any monsters? How quickly could you beat it? A website named CompeteN, linked below, was created to host videos of people playing Doom in all sorts of weird ways. It also had a series of leaderboards so that people could compete for the fastest times in all sorts of crazy categories. All monsters killed, no monsters killed, no armor, no weapons, no damage taken. You had to abide by the rules of each category, but if you found a way to break the game's physics or to skip a large part of a level in the way that the programmers hadn't thought of, so much the better. Anything to get from the loading screen to the end credits a half second faster than anybody else. And so, speedrunning was born. Today, there are recorded videos of thousands of different video game speedrun world records, each of which contains jaw-dropping physical dexterity and execution. But that's not what really gets me hyped. Firstly, I love collaborative research. Communities will grow around particularly popular or interesting games, and then will work together to comb through them in order to find ways to shave seconds off the completion time. The methods that they use to discover new shortcuts range from looking at the original programming of the game to see how memory values are stored in a cartridge, to stacking a bunch of crates in a corner and seeing if you can jump over a wall. And all these gamers are technically competing to complete the game faster than each other, but they still collaborate and share their discoveries whenever they're found. For them, the enemy isn't the other speedrunners, it's the clock. How's that for sportsmanship? When's the last time you saw Olympic figure skaters giving each other tips? Second, all those hours of community research give speedrunners loopholes that allow them to break those virtual worlds and then rebuild them as they see fit, rarely in a way that the programmer's intended. You want me to lose all my items and then quest to get them back? How about I just skip the part of the game where that happens and keep all my stuff? You want me to race on the track? How about not? I love to see games broken like this, partially because it's just fun to watch, but also because it's really a triumph of creative thinking. Usually when you play a video game, you're at the mercy of the programmers in a rigidly defined world where you do this, then that, and then the other thing, and then you win. But, oh man, if you thought that Super Mario World was a game about jumping on goombas and moving right, finally, for some bizarre reason, speedrunners have become huge players in charity fundraising. For example, there are bi-annual marathons called Awesome Games Done Quick, where for a solid week, there is always an agile master with a controller on a couch somewhere streaming video as they absolutely decimate a game. They ask for donations for everything from extra levels to cool tricks to playing parts of the game blindfolded, and all that money goes to charity. To date, they've raised over $2 million dollars for everything from cancer research to disaster relief. Is that a worthwhile activity? Yeah, I think so. It's easy to say that regardless of the skill and creativity of speedrunners, that at the end of the day, they're just playing video games. But it's also easy to say that Olympians are just skiing and skating and losing. I think that we really ought to encourage people to aspire to that sort of mastery and excellence. Also, I'm pretty sure that some of those speedrunning guys are robots disguised as humans, and if I know one thing, it's don't piss off the robots. Is speedrunning as compelling as the Olympics? Is it just as impressive to watch somebody beat Halo really fast as it is to watch them ski down a hill really fast? Is excellence worth pursuing in any context? Leave comments, let me know what you think. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and I'll see you next week.