"Why speedrun X game when you have WR?"

"Why are you speedrunning X? Don't you have WR?"

I see this question come up a lot in people's chats, and I always get irritated when I see it. The reason being is because there's really only 2 ways to interpret it. The first interpretation, which is basically me giving them the benefit of the doubt, is:

	1. The person doesn't actually know if you have WR or not and they're trying to figure that out.

Sure, I can understand that people can be confused about who has WR, since stuff like this changes overnight. STill, the problem is that it's begging the ultimate question, which leads me to the 2nd interpretation, and the one I really want to focus on:

	2. The person is questioning why you would continue to speedrun X game after you have the WR for X game.

And what that implies is:

	You should only speedrun a game to get WR. After getting WR, there's no point.

Usually, this is what I think people are implying, and it's flat out wrong. Most speedrunners do not simply run a game to get WR. There are an ENORMOUS amount of reasons to speedrun a game besides getting WR. You might want to try a cool glitch you never knew about before, or maybe you want to revisit a game you haven't played in 5+ years, or you want to try out a game you've never played before, etc etc. I'm not downing people who speedrun for WR either. Wanting to get WR and improve yourself and have fun doing it is a great reason to speedrun any game. But running a game just to get WR won't bring you any happiness at all. It's not about the goal, but the journey you take to get there.

So, if most of the speedrunning community agrees that "running X game just to get WR" is a bad mindset, where the hell did it come from? I mean, sure, these people are few and far between, but they still exist, and they had to come from somewhere. Not only do plenty of people ask "why run X game if you already have WR for it", but I've also seen shit like "Reset now, PB's aren't worth anything" or "You didn't get WR BibleThump" when people get new PB's and not WR's. Where does it all come from?

I honestly don't know the answer and I don't think there really is a concrete answer. The only thing I can do is speculate, so I guess I'll start there.

The whole idea behind WR is competition. Speedrunning itself originally was a "Me vs Myself" scenario, which is less about competition and more about self-improvement. The concept of WR, however, makes it a "Me vs You" scenario, and now the focus is on competition. That's where SRL got started, it allowed room for speedrunning to be about competition and racing against people, which was and still is very cool. I'm not saying competition is bad in speedrunning, it's another facet of speedrunning for sure. Still, I do believe the focus of the community changed slowly from self-improvement to competition. It's neither good nor bad, it's just a fact.

All this competition creates a lot of hype around speedrunners beating old WR's to hold up a new WR. It's no secret that "WR attempts" gets a lot of attention in terms of views, because people want to part of the hype and witness "history" being made when someone sets a new WR.

From here I can only guess where the "why speedrun X when you have WR" people come from. Maybe people think it's more hype to beat someone else's WR than to beat your own. Maybe people think there's some sort of "WR etiquette" book out there that says that you aren't allowed to run X game until someone beats your WR. Maybe people are sucked into the drama and like to believe that Cosmo and Demoon9/ChristianF23 hate each other because they take the WR from each other. I honestly can't say.

It sorta worries me that there's a part of the speedrunning community that thinks that getting WR is where all the hype and fun is, but hey, I can't really do shit about it. All I can do is run my game and have fun, so I'll stick to that. Just thought I'd get this off my chest.