this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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Neither? Speedrunning is entirely nihilistic. It rejects the rules of society to the point of rejecting the rules of games themselves in favor of meaningless tantric repetition. It's the eternal pointless chase for a meaning that was never there and never will.
I find it fun and dreadful at the same time, as a concept, I would never do it myself in a million years.
In short, it's an artistic performance.
I can't fully articulate the reasons why, but I dislike the entire speed-running culture. I've always been someone who sinks as deeply as I possibly can into the environments that games provide, placing a lot of value on carefully crafted details, flora, object clutter and ambience.
Speed-running is essentially the exact opposite of this, and it takes what was intended to be an enjoyable escape and gamifies it beyond recognition. It becomes a sweaty, disgusting mess of button mashing, sprinting, wall-glitching, exploitation, and a bastardization of mechanics. I definitely get why some people find this interesting, but I just can't find the off-switch for how much I hate watching it. It's in a similar ballpark as extreme min-maxing in modern MMOs, where people get so addicted to arbitrarily raising numbers by the smallest margin that the game itself just evaporates into the background.
To me, it's like someone took art, sucked the creative soul out of it, and turned it into a math game.
It's more like they made an optimization puzzle out of a game they really likes.
Also before you speedrun you gotta understand the game and it's capabilities first and well.