rta_2023

I started both streaming and speedrunning in August 2013. It was after watching SGDQ 2013. I knew about speedrunning and SDA from around 2010, but with SDA's strict standards and a lack of a developed community to talk to outside the forums, I didn't really think much about it besides being a cool little niche thing on the internet. But after attending AGDQ 2014, I was solidly hooked on it.

The years of 2014 through around 2018 were the best times for the hobby. There was a palpable sense of excitement for every event I went to. Figuring out what your speedrun projects were, seeing what other people were up to, chasing personal bests or the world's best times in a rapidly changing environment was at its peak for multiple years during this time. Twitch was going through its blossoming phase too, and soaking in everything about the hobby was just a fun time. From what I've talked to people about and just simply witnessed myself, this is a pretty widespread sentiment, maybe with some differing ranges of the years.

There are a lot of reasons why things were so fun during this time, and I think about them now and then. Most speedgames during this time were not yet optimized, and the idea that "anything can be improved" was widespread. Many popular speedruns had active runners that were good but not yet great, and the in-the-weeds training and chase of trying to get better were best during this time. And it was very reasonably possible to pick up a game that hadn't yet been really routed or optimized and make your mark on it. The environment of finding your niche and growing with the community was at its peak. And some people don't like to think of all of speedrunning as having to do with popularity, but growing your recognition as a speedrunner at least has something to do with people paying attention to what you're doing, and it felt much easier and more natural during this time to find your place in the overall scene. Undoubtedly, in-person events during this time were the most fun to me too- GDQs felt like very grassroots run events with genuine excitement of the schedules, and frankly, just the right amount of dumb stuff and drama happening both behind the scenes and at the events. And maybe most importantly, because things were fun during this time of speedrunning, making real friends around this time felt very organic. Not everyone had the same experience, but I made a lot of actual friends through it, and it's arguably the best part of the whole thing.

After this time, around 2019 or so, I started to feel the fatigue of the hobby overall, and I've always wondered why. Speedrunning is objectively not dead; it's still very much around, and there are tons of people who still do it. But it simultaneously doesn't feel really alive either, not in any capacity like it used to, as I described above. So what happened? Why do I have this general sentiment?

I think the perception is that games mostly got figured out. It is exceedingly rare in the most popular speedruns to find some new tech that will open up the routing potential for the game massively. In the mid-2010s, it was exceedingly common for this to happen, on top of people simply trying to optimize their performances. That doesn't really happen anymore. A great recent example is SM64's carpetless becoming viable, which was undoubtedly one of the biggest speedrunning finds in the past few years where everyone's talking about it, and it inspired a wave of runners trying to incorporate it. But my point is that those sorts of explosions of findings are super uncommon anymore, and instead, when games are mostly figured out and solved, the excitement of optimizing a run purely on technical ability turns into a rote process. The weird thing is that I still kind of think that many games AREN'T actually mostly figured out, and if they had the level of attention that the SM64s and OOTs of the world did, they'd be in a different place, but speedrunning is hard and a lot of work, and it seems to me that the general sentiment is that well, it's been long enough; they must've found most everything by now, right? As an aside, over time I appreciate how ridiculously hard and complicated routing is, and why day/week/month 1 WRs are meaningless.

Sometimes it feels like a lot of older runners respect speedrunning but know how hard the optimized run grind is and simply don't want to bother doing it anymore. And what incentive do you really have? When the internet as a whole has already seen what speedrunning is about and an experienced runner has done the whole tango before, it's almost like doing yet another speedrun is another chip on the block that may not be all that different in how it makes you feel from start to finish, like all the other speedrun projects you got into over time. Is everyone like this? No. But when you simply look around at the activity of people organically getting into new speedrun projects out of interest, it's fallen off a cliff compared to the older days, and to me, it's indicative of a trend.

Another reason is that Twitch matured and became so much less of an exciting thing to be a part of as it grew. Like I mentioned before, you can pretend that socialization and popularity aren't part of the hobby, but they are. People don't sit alone in their rooms, bust out some speedruns, and never tell the internet about it, simply because they love the hobby. Sharing your runs at the bare minimum is part of the whole thing; then comes everything from growing a Twitch channel to openly discussing and collaborating routes with communities. Your opportunity to break out in speedrunning as a community namestake has dwindled over time because people simply aren't invested in it like they used to be. Can you do it? Yeah, definitely, people have. But when Twitch isn't the cool and fun new platform to try to figure out your place in and instead is the ad-ridden experience with strange features no one cares about, it doesn't feel organic to explore other speedrunners anymore, mostly because you'll get slammed with ads for clicking around the platform. I can think of at least a few channels where the insular-ness (is that a term?) of the chat feels like you're in or you're out, and not really by any devious means; it just is what it is. Twitch built its platform around subscriptions and channel loyalty, and I think it has had a slow-burn effect on the visibility and cross-pollenation of speedrunning.

Live stream content as a whole has evolved in the last 10 years too. Expectations about viewership and numbers to yield some sort of sustainable result were not at the forefront of conversation in the early days of speedrunning; mostly people did not yet know it was a feasible prospect. But when you hear person X getting in on the part-time or full-time stream thing and you look at the way they are handling their streams, how they think about their content, etc., the person who maybe was super into speedrunning starts to think about it differently. Maybe live PB attempts aren't for long-term engagement. Maybe actually getting better at the hobby isn't it. Maybe it's more about chat engagement, or whatever. And to be clear, I don't have an issue with people relying on speedrun adjacent stuff for income; I think it's great. But don't conflate the idea that speedrunning has changed with the idea that making money off speedrunning-related content is bad; speedrunning has invariably changed because of how content has changed. You can find counterexamples everywhere- I know a decent amount of people who still just speedrun for the sake of it and don't really care about content. But you can't turn a blind eye to the entire hobby feeling different than it used to be. I know a ton of modern streamers who still "speedrun," but it's not really about the grind, the routing, or the optimization; it's a social experience. It's not like it's a problem or something, but it's been a big, slow-burn tonality shift. I can point to tons of channels that are currently speedrunning as a bridging-of-the-gap feeling for their overall content: "if this run dies, I'll just play something else, it was the stream warmup anyway". The question I'm trying to pose is, is it really about speedrunning anymore? Or is it about content? And how's that balance changed over time?

This is a bit of an aside, but I sometimes am astounded by longtime speedrunners who have been around the community and just simply don't know who other people are. I know a very solid amount of people who just sort of know the landscape well, know people that have been around, etc. On the flip side, it genuinely baffles me when other people just have absolutely no idea who other people are, especially for people that were active in the 2013–2018 golden era, or whatever you want to call it. Part of my dwindling interest in going to live events was this sort of thing: having to reintroduce myself multiple times to people who I really thought would have just "got it" by now- sometimes it felt like a weird twilight zone experience. It's not even just about me either; I would often encounter person A phasing by person B at an event or something and I'd be like "how do you.. not know  each other by now??"

And it's kind of a weird thing on the whole. Almost everyone you know in speedrunning is both around, but not really actually around. This is one of the stranger sentiments I have. It feels like a ghost town or something. Some older runner in speedrunning goes live, and all the speedrun inner circle crew with clout show up, but it's not really about the speedrunning anymore. It's easy to say that something like, speedrunning feels different because all of they people you knew moved on with their lives to something else. But I think that's sometimes not true - a lot of these people are very much around, and maybe they are doing other things, but it always feels like some sort of one-foot-in-the-door situation, not really actually removed from the scene, but also not really into it either. This is one of my hardest-to-articulate thoughts, but it's also one of the ones I feel the most in my day to day musings in the community.

I always felt like speedrunning never got its chance to have a sort of grassroots-like competition that felt organic and inspiring to be a part of. I look at other communities, especially fighting games and Melee, and how much vibrant support they get from the ground up for simply wanting to encourage competition. Speedrunning is a challenging thing to get right in this regard because, ultimately, there are so many games to choose from. Some events like PACE take a stab at this sort of thing, but it never felt like the entire community could ever get a handle on what the best speedgames were and to encourage people to participate in events or collaboration to compete. It's weird to me because there are just so many forms of potential competition in speedrunning, ranging from getting PBs, winning races, or participating in tournaments, but with some exceptions, all we ever really amounted to was a strange ELO-like system on SpeedRunsLive and a bunch of tournaments across the hobby that candidly, usually, the only people who really cared about were the participants themselves and the one-time tweet you get with a bunch of engagement to capstone the whole thing. You can point to things like Twitch Rivals as one-offs, but did they have a lasting impact? No way. No majors, no circuits, no alignment for what could've been an in-depth and immersive competitive experience. All attempts at an online league system felt like they never took off past a small group of participants. Bounties and record chasing never got a foothold as a staple of our community. It feels like, in sum, a sadly missed opportunity to have something like a binding agent to bring it all together.

But what about GDQ, isn't that the binding agent that brings it all together? Well, you can definitely argue that it either was or is, but I don't think so anymore. At first it was, definitely. Just a few thoughts, because I think you could spend a lot of time on this topic. First, GDQ was never competitively focused, which I'll cover briefly more below; it's always been a showcase, and sure, you have some segments of competition sprinkled throughout, but it's purpose is to showcase something and to raise money. And that "something" it showcases, I strongly argue, has changed over time. It used to be about speedrunning, which I think is much more in touch with what speedrunning is. Generally, I do not at all like being the "good old days" kind of person about anything, but I definitely feel it for these events. In concert with what I wrote above about Twitch and content and speedrunning all changing, these events are no exception: the schedule, the crowd, the people submitting runs—the whole thing feels palpably different. And truly, I think these kinds of events are for the greater good. But is it true to the speedrunning experience that I got inspired by and so heavily invested in a decade ago? No, it's not. What once was a pretty natural catalyst for the hobby felt like it took on the whims of content change to support its initiatives—what else was it going to do? But when we're talking about speedrunning—the actual act of speedrunning, the rote technical stuff, the grind, the nerd stuff—it just doesn't have the same place in events like these as it once did. It's got nothing to do with both the event and me getting older, or it being online sometimes, or a changing of the guard with runners, or any of that. It's just a different event altogether for me now.

GDQ not being "competitive" is not a problem at all perse, but part of my point from the two paragraphs above was that healthy competition can be a huge binding agent for both participants and spectators to be part of a naturally growing and self-sustaining atmosphere relevant to speedrunning. And all I'm trying to say is that GDQ was never intended to be that, but that we also never really got anything like that for all of speedrunning.

I went on a long term hiatus for speedrunning in spring 2022, about a year and a half ago. I wrote a lot of thoughts on it then, but the tldr is that I felt fatigued with the hobby. There are times when I miss it - in particular, when the last Classic Mega Man relay happened, I definitely missed being part of it all. And both in that write-up from back then and a few tweets since, I've entertained the idea of returning someday. But I also wonder, like, why? Would it really be fun again to really dig into the whole thing? I'm getting older, getting more relationship and familial stuff going on, whatever else, and speedrunning takes a lot of time and effort to get better at. I am more than confident in my ability to learn a game and put up a good time. But truly doing the grind and getting into it all again, is the juice worth the squeeze, with all of the stuff I mentioned above about the hobby changing over time? The simple answer is, well, do it if you'd have fun, but I don't know if I would have fun. After I finish the No Damage series for Classic Mega Man (which has been really fun and totally worth the endeavor), it could be fun to try it again. Part of my problem with speedrunning before was that I spread out too much, and had many good but not great times, and I would definitely want to keep it much more targeted in a revisit. But I also question if it's even worth it.

I always like the idea of getting good at something, any hobby really. Sinking your teeth into it, trying to figure out your place in it. And that was what was so appealing to me about speedrunning a decade ago to me. I find myself questioning how important it is to me over time now. And maybe the weird part to me is that I have this sentiment that other people feel somewhat the same way in differing capacities, but no one really talks about it, because truly speedrunning isn't dead, but it's sort of like undead or something. It's hard to articulate just how different the atmosphere around the whole thing is, because speedrunning itself is still the same as it's always been, but how we all seem to talk about it or care about it feels considerably different.

The closing sentiment is that I wish I had more of a binding vested interest in the hobby to keep up, to organically WANT to get better and improve, to be around. The reason I think about the competitive angle and the missed opportunity is that I try to think about the what-if scenario of speedrunning not feeling like a shell of its former self, what if we were all still around and thriving in the hobby like we used to, what would it have taken? Instead now, I tend to think like, well, if I spend a bunch of time into something like this again, will it even be fun anymore? It might, but it also very much might not. And back in 2016 or so, I would have never had this thought cross my mind, because it was automatically going to be fun given the atmosphere. In a nutshell, that right there is the hardest thing to try to unpack. Because at its core I still think speedrunning is awesome. But how I interact with speedrunning and how others are invested in the hobby are difficult aspects of it all to assess, and it's tough to ascertain how worth it is anymore. My current idea is that getting back to it in a concise fashion sometime in the near-sh future could be good, but to go in with very different and smaller expectations about how it plays out than in the past.