Why Speedrunning Blows

Why Speedrunning Blows
	or: Why Speedrunning is Killing SRL
		or further: Why Fun Should be Forefront

(disclaimer: this isn't meant to try to change anything, or get anyone up in arms. I made this mostly as an outlet for my own frustrations, though I've long since gotten over them. Its just food for thought, and not great food even. More like shitty day old Taco Bell. tl;dr at the bottom, this ended up being way longer than I anticipated)

Speedrunning isn't exactly blowing up in popularity, but with the record amount of money that's poured in from this most recent GDQ, and the introduction of Communities on Twitch, its become clear that its at least a regularly well frequented subsection of Twitch viewers and streamers.

Even as someone that's been speedrunning for a pretty short amount of time, (I started up in the summer of 2013) I tend to get jaded at a lot of new faces that come in and out.  Its hard to try to connect with new people that show up, all excited and full of gusto. Some of them just want to watch, but a large portion of them are aspiring speedrunners themselves, they want to play the game and try to do some cool tricks too.

I never know whether to encourage them or be more cautious. Its a fun hobby for sure, but its addictive qualities and abusive relationship can often overshadow the fun eventually. Either way, I always try to tell them to do whatever they have fun doing. If you're not having fun speedrunning, that's the quickest way to burn yourself out and make you dislike what you're doing.

They take that advice in stride, as if its something incredibly obvious. Sure, it more or less is, but then you watch them doing their first streams, or first speedrunning streams. For people that are completely new to speedrunning, they usually try to just learn the bare minimums they need to finish a run. That usually works out pretty well, but often you see those kinds of players hit the "bare minimum practice required" barrier, where they need to start actually learning new things and refining their movement to improve their Personal Bests.

This leads me into the main points I've been thinking about lately. Namely: Scarcity, Impatience, and Unpredictability. All three are interconnected, but lets break them up to see what I'm talking about.

First, lets go back to the new speedrunner. They're happy and excited, They've done their first couple of speedruns, and gotten a few Personal Bests. Those first few feel great, you've gotten some of the cool tricks you wanted to do, maybe you screwed up some things, but its ok, because you feel accomplished. Then it comes, the first full run you do where you end up in the red. You're probably pretty close, or maybe you missed a vital trick, or died somewhere. It doesn't really matter, from that point on its a classic case of an addictive quality. To present something as easily obtainable to begin with, and taper off rewards later and later. Thus Scarcity is introduced, meaning you can't have everything you want.

Secondly, lets talk about that speedrunner's reactions to said realization of the Scarcity. There are a number of different things that they can do to try to overcome that wall, but most commonly people do some combination of the following. They can reset in early game when things don't go the way they like. This is pretty common because newer speedrunners almost always watch more veteran speedrunners than themselves reset often, but often times it can severely hamper a newer player's skill progress, as they don't spend as much time on the entirety of the game.  They can grind practice to become more comfortable with certain troublesome parts of the game. That helps them become more proficient and confident in playing the game, but can often turn off a newer player who "just wants to play the game." Impatience enters here, but Unpredictability is tied pretty heavily into it, so lets move on to that for now.

So the newer runner tries to overcome the harder parts of speedrunning by practicing and resetting, and generally just playing more.  They learn some new strats and solidify their understanding of the game even further. They're back on the grind, getting some more PBs, and improving their leaderboards position, then suddenly they start hitting another brick wall.  This is where the top 10% of times really showcase the disparity of skill between those runners. What I mean by that is that the faster your speedrun gets, the more skill it requires to lower it. It sounds like an obvious statement, because it is an obvious statement. But the reality is that its a wall at a certain point in any speedgame, and to get past it, the newer runner tries the previous tactics they did before, namely: more practice, and more resets.

Finally, Unpredictability rears its head. I'm not talking about random results, like faster enemy/boss patterns, better or worse drops, or favorable outcomes in general that are out of the player's control. I'm talking about the pure Unpredictability of harder strats that runners have to start incorporating into their speedruns to get better times.  Now you can practice til the cows come home, and your chances of getting the hard strats can certainly improve, but oftentimes when your Personal Best has been pushed far enough, you're relying on pushing buttons within a very small window, sometimes within 16 milliseconds, and no matter how much you play or practice, something like that will never be assured. So that's a trick that you say, "Alright, right now I maybe have a 60-70 percent chance to get this trick correctly in the run. I should practice that to improve those odds." Off you go again improving your odds at a certain trick, and you feel more confident in it. The newer runner, emboldened by their success rate in practice, goes back to doing runs. They get the trick in their speedrun, or they don't, but that's not important. What is important is the 20 other tricks that they neglected during their grind of a certain trick they needed to improve.  This mostly comes down to a "spinning plates" analogy, where a runner tries endlessly to figure out what they need to practice and focus on to try to have the best chances of getting a new Personal Best.  There are so many hard tricks that are implemented, that it essentially becomes a form of educated gambling, where you simply figure out your personal chances to get all of the tricks you need to pull off in a row, and you smash your head against the wall until you maybe get a run where you're more or less fortunate enough to not choke them all.

So, the newer runner is hooked into playing the game with easy Personal Bests, then is introduced to the fact that they have to start working for it, that's the Scarcity element, and its a fantastic way to get someone addicted and invested. Then you have another wall, where the player realizes how much work they have to put in, and you run up against Impatience. Every speedrunner has been there, they've all said variations of, "I know I can get this PB, I'm just going to keep grinding and playing, I'm more than good enough for it." That's tied in with Unpredictability, where the runner starts to realize that some things are just a crapshoot, and they get hooked on throwing the dice.

So what does this all mean? Am I just shitting on speedrunning because I'm bored? Really I'm just interested in the dropout rate of newer runners and speedrunning in general. There are certainly tons of new faces, and although I'm really mostly only involved in the SNES scene of speedrunning, you don't even need to look far to know that the rate of runners quitting and stopping playing is pretty high.

Take these as examples if you want them:
http://www.speedrunslive.com/races/#!/racestats (the monthly totals on the side, but I'll talk about the fall of SRL in a bit)
http://deertier.com/Leaderboard/AnyPercentRealTime (all of the runs complaining about what went wrong, and what will go right next time. plenty of people promise to come back, but they don't, they've burned out. there are plenty of examples on every leaderboard you look at)

The first example, the demise of SRL, is something that I think is contributing to how often newer runners are quitting. I won't explain myself as to why I think its fun to race beyond taking it as assumed that racing with people to get to know them more is more fun than talking to yourself and your text based chat.

So why is speedrunning killing SRL?  I think its all related to what I talked about above. As speedrunning evolves, and WR times are pushed down further and further, top runners are less inclined to do races because of the time investment they represent, and the efficient likelihood of getting a PB/WR in a race is significantly less than if you allowed yourself to reset. The top runners of the games are certainly the most watched, and when they participate in races much less frequently than they used to, it sets an example for the other runners of the game.

I'm not saying SRL didn't have their opportunities to continue expanding and growing and being a great place for speedrunning content, because they certainly did. They missed plenty of opportunities, but its only a natural result of how speedrunning works that racing in general is slowly dying out.

Edit 1: I cut this shorter than I wanted to the first time through, so I'll add the final section now.

	Lets go back to the new speedrunner. What do they envision when they start playing? What do they want to get from speedrunning? You can only ask them, and results may vary. They can say they want to become a big streamer with lots of subscribers, viewers, and donators. (That's hilarious to me for several reasons, but I'll let it alone for now.)

	They sometimes say they want to be a World Record holder. To that I can only imagine the quitting rate of someone who goes into this with that kind of mentality. There's like a 1:10,000 chance they probably get to that point, if that. I don't say that to discourage people from attempting it, but I don't think that should be a primary reason why you want to speedrun.

	Then you have people who say something to the effect of : "Whoah that was cool what you just did there, how did you do it?" These always give me hope, because being excited over learning something is a great way to indulge a for fun hobby like speedrunning. Its a fantastic way to stay involved, stay happy, and not become burnt out. This kind of mentality is really what it takes to be a speedrunner long term, you have to be not necessarily excited, but you have to enjoy what you do. No one, and I do mean NO ONE, speedruns for very long when they don't have fun. Sure you'll see plenty of runners rage, or get sad, but I can guarantee you that that can't be your default state when speedrunning, or you WILL stop playing.

To wrap things up and tl;dr:

	Why bother writing this? Who knows, it was mostly just things that were rattling around in my head. But having thought them through several months ago, it helped me remember why I speedrun. Maybe this can help you find motivation in your speedrunning adventures, or maybe it can help refocus you as to why you do what you do. Its entirely for fun, there's not really any real world skill I obtain from it, and it certainly doesn't help me or my life to be sedentary for hours at a time, or to bash my head against a wall over and over for years. That's not saying I regret it, its been a lot of fun and overall, and when people ask me how they can get started speedrunning I'm more than happy to introduce them to a fun hobby that may or may not lead them down a rabbit hole.