gymnast's Thoughts on Turbo in Speedrunning

I don’t normally talk about my opinions on Twitter, but I feel that the discussion on allowing turbo functionality in speedrunning is something worth sharing my thoughts on. Although I should note that some of these thoughts are within the context of 3D Zelda speedrunning and may not apply well to other games/communities.

As others have stated, there isn’t some global rule that determines if turbo is allowed in speedrunning or not. It’s a decision that would be made by every community individually after debating what its potential pros and cons are for that community.

Turbo is also something that shouldn’t be restricted to a binary decision of either “Ban turbo completely” or “Allow turbo for everything”. You can pick and choose what you think turbo should be allowed for and have the rules be something like, “Allow turbo for X and Y, but not for Z” if you think allowing turbo for Z would compromise the integrity/meaningful skill of a run. Every game is different, and the nuances of where/when it would be beneficial to allow turbo are probably different as well.

As an example, here are two situations where I think it could be beneficial to utilize/allow turbo functionality in most 3D Zelda games:
- Mashing for text
- Mashing for built-in cutscene skips

Most 3D Zelda games have *a lot* of text mashing and the newer ones have some additional mashing for built-in cutscene skips. The mashing technique used in both of these instances is to pretty much blindly mash as fast as you can. I consider this to be a skill, but I don’t think it’s a skill that matters a whole lot in the context of a run. Times are almost always determined by things such as movement, precise tricks, RNG, etc, not by how fast the text and cutscene skips were mashed. Despite this, a lot of us still mash for text and cutscene skips fairly aggressively because we want to get the text/cutscene skip to be over as soon as possible to not potentially waste any frames.

Here would be the potential broad outcomes of allowing turbo for these two situations:
- Reduction in hand/wrist stress. This is the main benefit and argument for allowing turbo in place of excessive mashing and I think
it’s a strong one. While I’ve personally never had hand problems specifically because of mashing for text/cutscene skips it would be good to reduce the overall chances of it potentially being an issue in the future as well as make the runs more welcoming to those who might already have problems with their hands/wrists. I (and I’m sure most others who
speedrun) would like to continue speedrunning as long as it’s enjoyable without being forced to stop due to injury.

- Reduction in controller stress (for the mashing buttons at least). It’s possible that our controllers could last longer if we aren’t
mashing on them as much. I’ve only ever had one instance of needing to replace a button I mashed a lot, but it certainly would’ve been
convenient/cheaper if I never had to do that.

- The skill discrepancy between those who mash text well and those who don’t is gone. While the skill of mashing for text/cutscenes
would be gone, I think the benefits of the previous two outcomes easily outweigh the loss from removing this skill from
the run. And with it being lost, run times will be slightly more determined by things such as movement and trick execution (ya
know, the skills we value the most), since everybody would be going through text/cutscenes at the same speed. It wouldn’t be a huge
difference, but it’s still a difference nonetheless.

There are probably more that I’m not considering right now, but these were what I thought of off the top of my head.

Of course, there are other things to consider if a community wanted to begin allowing turbo functionality for text/cutscene skips. Are there controllers out there which can provide turbo functionality for the game? If so, are they easily obtainable? If not, is there some potential software/homebrew/cheat code solution that would be more financially accessible that people would be willing to accept? If we’re only allowing turbo for certain things, can we easily detect if it’s being used for something else? Does accessibility somehow become worse in other ways with different implementations? Etc.

And these questions would likely be thoroughly discussed within each community, since the nuanced implications of allowing turbo would be different for each one. I know that for some 3D Zelda games it would be harder to implement turbo functionality due to the complexities of having to account for the implications. So if something like this were to happen, it probably wouldn’t happen for a while (especially in communities where there’s already a backlog of things to be decided/voted on).

Anyway, I think those are all of my current thoughts on turbo functionality and I'll add more later if I think of more to add. I do think it's possible that we can implement turbo functionality to benefit speedrunning health and accessibility while also not trivializing the skills of the run that we value. And from what I've seen, that's the main argument against allowing turbo functionality to begin with. If anyone else has thoughts and opinions on turbo functionality, I’d appreciate hearing them.