sardasdas

One thing that I have learned this year, is that no matter how seemingly useless your talent is, it can be used to do great things. Especially as I have felt like I was lucky being born into a more fortunate life than many others, both in economic status and physical health, I always wanted to give back to people who didn’t have that luck. But as someone who is young, I never felt like I could do as much as I wanted to. All I could realistically do is volunteer here and there, and pitch in a few dollars to charities I care about. I never felt like that I was doing enough, that I wasn’t making a big enough impact on people’s lives. So when I learned that I was going to be able to participate in a massive charity marathon for a organization as highly acclaimed as Médecins Sans Frontières, I was ecstatic, satisfied, and shocked. This is a more unique marathon than most would expect; instead of running 26 miles, it’s people from all over the world playing and completing videogame as quickly as they can — speedrunning! I was given the honor of flying out to Minneapolis and participating in this charity event, where I’d play two video games to completion as fast as I could.  Taking part in an event like this has helped me understand many aspects of life that I took for granted before, and helped me not only appreciate many niche hobbies more, but also appreciate the sense of community and using that community to push to improve the world in some capacity.
The charity event in question was Summer Games Done Quick 2017, organized by Games Done Quick, LLC. The organization is well known in internet cultures, being an organization that has raised over $12,000,000 for various charities. The Games Done Quick events, that happen twice annually, are the pinnacle of the speedrunning community — a community of people who play various video games to completion as fast as possible. I was nominated by Games Done Quick to speedrun two games at this event: Half-Life and Portal.
Speedrunning as a hobby is a very weird and interesting beast. Most people from the outside most likely see it as tedious, monotonous, and outright silly. While, at times these things may be true, the hobby has taught and allowed me to hone particular skills that are very prevalent in more normal, “mainstream” hobbies. Almost everybody has to hone particular skills that they often don’t want to think about, due to their unappealing nature; in particular having to study, understand, and apply a new idea to your work. I see my hobby as similar to learning an instrument, you can play basic things that sound okay without much effort, but playing a beautiful song takes days and weeks of painful learning, understanding, and applying of new techniques, or new ways to apply those techniques. With speedrunning a game, with little effort you can play a game at a decent jogging pace, but to truly cut down on time and make a particular run very optimal, you have to painstakingly learn, understand, and apply new tricks and techniques to escalate your skill in the hobby. These are important skills for learning as well! Although it may seem farfetched, being trained in my mind on how to better learn, understand, and apply concepts in speedruns helps me do the same thing for education. It provides the foundation for how to learn in a way, not just knowing the concepts, but being able to truly understand them and apply them to genuine problems or activities in the real world. Speedrunning has helped me hone these skills, and I feel that I have further understood and improved on my “skill of learning” in a manner because of the hobby. Learning this about my own hobby made me realize that this same idea can be applied to nearly every other hobby — they all require particular skills that are trained and honed over rigorous effort.
The charity event itself was a very surreal experience I don’t believe I’ll ever experience the novelty of again for anything else. Most people don’t know of speedrunning, as it is a niche community within the gaming community. Going to an event filled with hundreds of others who appreciate the hobby as well is very different — and oddly comforting. Being surrounded by people from all different walks of life, from all over not only North America, but even as far as Germany or Japan, to come together not only for the care and passion for their hobby, but for a common cause to support charity. This sort of community of like-minded people who all have the same passions is comforting — knowing that there are other people who I can share my love for my hobby with, while at the same time raising a massive amount of money for good causes. A feeling of community attachment and community involvement, I have grown to realize through going to Games Done Quick events, is something that I really love. It's something I wish I realized sooner, as before partaking in this speedrunning community, I didn’t really associate as much with groups or communities as much. I focused more on my own projects, my own personal interests, and I liked to pursue my own path. After engaging further in this community, meeting great people, and doing great things with them, I started to realize how great being part of a community really is, and how much time I wasted by not engaging further into various communities beforehand! Its given me new value of being a part of something, whether something small or something big, just to be part of a community of different people with a similar interest opens up my eyes to many different walks of life, and opens me up to their different views and different ways of life.
Running for Médecins Sans Frontières at Summer Games Done Quick 2017 was a truly unique and large event for me. It made me value the diverse array of hobbies and communities for more niche aspects of life more than ever — and made me value the own positive aspects of the community I made myself a part of.