Hey everybody,
Another SGDQ has come and gone, and with it, an amazing week-long showcase of incredible gaming skill and unbelievable (and often hilarious) game glitches. Not to mention the raising of nearly $1.3 million in support of Doctors Without Borders. Congratulations and thank you to all involved!
And, as is tradition, seeing so many cool, dedicated people come together gives me pause to think about just what is the draw of such an event. For an event that started, literally, in a basement some years ago, to have become a biennial fundraising powerhouse, obviously they're doing something right.
The attraction to me is the raw amount of skill on display. Speedrunning - that is, completing a game as quickly as possible - never really appealed to me; games are supposed to be fun, and doing it faster just makes less time for fun, right? Well, yes - from a very narrow perspective.
But, as time goes on, I've taken a shine to how speedrunning is carried out, not just the end result. To be fast is not just to _go_ fast - there are so many minute and specific strategies, thorough understanding of the game, and, of course, the ability to actually execute what you know in as quick and efficient a manner as possible. It's not just 'gotta go fast', but 'gotta do the best, and by extension gotta go fast'.
Of course, just being super-good is not the only way to go fast; there is also exploiting certain...shall we say...'shortcomings' in how a game is put together. Or, 'glitching'. From wall clips to sequence breaks, chances are that if glitches exist, a speedrunner will find it. And, sometimes, the glitches are so great as to skip the game entirely, warping you to end bosses, end cutscenes, and final credits.
Suffice to say, as entertaining as some of those glitched runs are to see, I don't really care for them. It seems more about skipping a game than having fun with it, and less about skill and capability than poking the game in just the right way. To be sure, exploiting glitches can be even more reliant on execution skill - pixel-perfect, frame-perfect, or just plain lucky.
(Nevermind the existence of tool-assisted speedruns, where controller inputs are scripted to execute more quickly and accurately than any human could possibly be capable of.)
No matter, though - because I like skill in playing games way more than skill in breaking games. Who knows; maybe some day I will be able to attend, or *gasp* even participate in an AGDQ or SGDQ?
That's all for now.