Public Apology

In light of recent events, I should probably explain myself and issue a public apology about my behavior over the past few weeks. A lot of this has already been said in a pastebin I made back in November (and so it will be somewhat shortened), but a good portion of it is new information as well.

For my entire life, I've felt inadequate and have had extremely low self-esteem. I've always felt like I could never do anything right, and I never really had any good friends (with one exception in elementary school). Deep down, I've always hated myself, and I tried to compensate by copying other people's behavior. I got inspired to start playing video games competitively after seeing videos on the internet, and eventually it became a way for me to feel better about myself when I ended up doing really well at it.

Eventually, I got into speedrunning near the end of 2009, and by mid-2010 I had absorbed enough of the speedrunning culture to want to do my own runs. Back then, speedrunning was quite a bit different than it is now - it was more like an art form than like a sport, and usually only one (maybe two) people would be working on one category at the same time. The goal wasn't to get a "world record" (that concept wasn't really meaningful back then), but to get a run on video that people would want to watch. SDA was the place that archived these videos, and the goal of a "serious" speedrunner was to get a run up on SDA to represent his or her game on the site.

This whole idea was what got me absorbed into speedrunning so deeply. I felt like i was working on something important, like I was creating something that no one else could and was making a difference in the community. Suddenly, I didn't feel inadequate anymore - I felt like what I was doing really meant something, and that I was contributing to something larger than myself. I did a run for The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, and it was one of the best and most rewarding experiences of my life. I wanted to do the same thing with Twilight Princess, and for a while it seemed like things were going well. But as I progressed, the speedrunning community became larger and more competitive, and speedrunning transformed from a kind of art form into a kind of sport. Suddenly, speedrunning wasn't about getting a run finished for SDA anymore - it was about constant competition for world records, and the idea of a "finished product" went out the window. Suddenly, I wasn't the only one seriously doing the Twilight Princess run - other people came along who could do it much better than I could, and my contribution was no longer needed. I was out of a job. I felt like my hobby - my project, that I had put so much work into - had been "stolen" from me, and I became bitter. I was a complete ass to Pheenoh because of it, and I have a feeling that's why a lot of people in the TP community have so much animosity towards me. If Pheenoh is reading this, I'm sorry for being so bitter and hostile towards you, and I hope you can forgive me for how I acted.

People have always accused me of "wanting no competition", and while this accusation is correct in a sense, it's not quite fair to what my actual attitude is. It's not that I want to be "the best" and don't want anyone threatening my title - I outgrew that attitude long before I joined the speedrunning community back in 2009. Rather, I want to be able to work on a run and know that what I'm doing really means something - that it's something that only I can do, and that I'm making a meaningful contribution to something bigger than myself. And if I have "competition" - that is, people who can do it much better than I can - I just feel like I'm wasting my time, because I'm not needed anymore.

The reason I've been acting like such a bitter, condescending asshole on Twitter the past couple weeks is because I've once again been mourning the loss of a hobby that used to mean a lot to me. I wanted to get back into Twilight Princess and finally get a run up on SDA, and because of past animosity between me and the community, I was afraid that someone would suddenly gain interest in submitting to SDA again just so that I couldn't do it. Even though no one really cares about SDA anymore, it still means a lot to me personally and I wanted to be able to make at least one last contribution to it that I had wanted to make for over 2 years. If someone else was already planning on submitting to SDA, I would have been okay with that, even though I would have been disappointed. What I was so paranoid about - and the reason I started acting up on Twitter - was that someone who normally didn't care about SDA would suddenly gain interest in submitting, *just for the sake of keeping me off of it*. This paranoia was completely unfounded, but it really got to me because i was so desperate to feel needed again, and felt threatened by anyone who might be actively trying to stop me. It wasn't fair to the TP community, and I'm sorry for being such an asshole because of it.

I'm probably not going to try to beat Pheenoh's TP No Save+Quit record, depending on how good it is - if it's something that won't be beaten in the foreseeable future, I hope he'll submit it to SDA to get an updated run up on the site, although if he doesn't I'll understand. I'll probably always regret never having made a contribution to TP, but that regret pales in comparison to a lot of the other regrets I have, so it's nothing to lose sleep over. I'm sure I'll find another game that doesn't already have a lot of runners that I can make a contribution to, and if not I always have music composition to fall back on. If anyone is somehow still reading this after the huge wall of text I've already written, thank you for taking the time to do so, and best of luck to you in the future.

-Steven "ingx24" Brown