Response to shadyparadox

Thank you for your thoughtful commentary. I love when people take these ideas seriously, because I do, too.

My thoughts can be best summed up by this exchange between Lori Cole and speedrunner Paul Miller: https://youtu.be/mcF4n398-Bg?si=GkAGaoPXXEOtxpeD&t=782

`Miller: I'm sorry I'm not exactly playing the game the way you intended it to be played.

Lori Cole: Oh, that's okay, we intended this game to be fun. That means however the player wants to play it.`

Speedrunning isn't meant to be a substitute for the casual, canonical experience. No speedrunner I know thinks of it that way. It's more like an extra game mode that you unlock afterwards.

You wrote that you're annoyed by glitches. I love them because it helps me understand more about a game I already love. It's like peeking behind the curtain, and I get a rush of excitement whenever a new glitch is discovered. It's an "a-ha! I didn't know that!" moment, not unlike finding an obscure line of dialog or unused art.

Speedrunning games with glitches is fun for me, because I get to see a game differently. If I want the "canonical" experience, then I can just play the game as intended, without trying to speed through it. If that doesn't appeal to someone else, that's fine.

My biggest point of departure is with this line: `The "game," understood not as a program but as a work of art, defined by its abstracted intended design in Platonic form, presents the player with *tasks to complete*.` We're not playing the game design documents, or the Platonic form of the game. We don't have those things. The work of art we have in front of us is the game that was shipped in those wonderfully illustrated big boxes. The actual game, as sold to us by the company that made it, has programming imperfections which result in skips. And I think those imperfections are beautiful.

As an aside, I also don't think the game, as a work of art, can be distilled to only a list of tasks. It's also about character, story, music, and a bunch of other things you're missing out on regardless of whether you use skips. You've been routing a blindfolded speedrun. I'd call the visuals an essential part of the canonical experience. By speedrunning a game, you necessarily transform it.

You also mentioned the cycle changes a few times. No one is "offended" by cycle changes mid-run, at least that I know of. We disallow it because it's impossible on original hardware. (You could make arguments for the Turbo button, but that's a different can of worms.) Now, we do create exceptions to that philosophy, but those exceptions all have rationale behind them. The rulesets are a balance between accuracy, fairness, and barrier to entry, among other things.

But when it comes to the skips? It would have been possible to buy King's Quest VI on release date, day 1, take it home, and perform the gnome skip. It's hard to see why that would be a problem for the Any% category, where the only rule is, "finish the game as fast as you can."

Ultimately, this is why different categories exist. If you can define a coherent ruleset, that moderators can verify without too much trouble, and put up a run, we'll make a category for it.

I'm sure that all of us will be impressed and happy for you if you complete a blindfolded run. That's a huge feat! And I wish you the best of luck.