sandcastles

I do not feel like speedrunning anymore.

Housekeeping: I've transferred ownership of the things I manage to others, I've gotten replacements for leaderboard mods, and if I ever had beef with you (or vice versa) it's squashed. I won't be using this twitter account anymore, but it'll stay up for anyone wanting to rt the dumb tweet. If I forgot something, tell me.

That's all. Read the rest at your own discretion.

you right now: That's great. I hope you don't make this some kind of pretentious dribble about speedrunning and its impact on you.

Unfortunately that's what this is, rip bozo.

I wanted to post this on the 5th next month since that's the sixth anniv of me first getting a RaC WR, but I have to learn to give up on interesting bookends. They don't exist in speedrunning and rarely exist in life, so it's better to get accustomed to unsatisfying ends, correct?

All of this insight/foresight/more sight comes from an incredibly narrow slice of how I understand speedrunning, but I've been connected to a ton of people from different reaches of the hobby. Much like how a musician may only know one instrument yet be able to speak on musicianship as a whole, a speedrunner of a single game/series/genre (however you'd prefer the metaphor to work) can tap into some greater consciousness of speedrunning. Still that comes with its own caveats, as even if I speak through observations of others, I might be entirely off base; in that case, who cares?

There's a monotony in the hobby that you don't really understand until you've fallen out of it at least once. Rather, it's more like the whole act of speedrunning feels *futile*, you know? It's a little deeper beneath the surface than simply "speedrunning has no material gain for society" - who gives a shit? - but that you're actively cursed for the desire of wanting to compete. Beginning the hobby, you get swept up into the idealisation of success and climbing the leaderboard, and the thrill of improvement and getting ever closer to the top is a satisfying feeling. Speedrunning attracts a specific kind of person even though it's fairly simple for *anyone* to pick up a controller and fly blindly into the sun. When I see some people get into running, you can sometimes tell when they have that 'it' factor - I'm not sure what it is, maybe just how they convey themselves when wanting to learn more about the game. It's the sense I get when I see someone like Aslov rise through the ranks in Jak at an unprecedented pace without fearing the next hardest strat, then seeing that mentality pay dividends to become the best trilogy runner right now. People might understate the skill of those quick learners because of convenient excuses but sometimes it feels inevitable that 'a person like (x)' will come along and crush the game, and everyone else has been keeping the seat warm for them in the meantime. The allure of it drags the best possible people into the competition, and it rewards those who are compelled to be better by both competition and their own internal motives.

It's a hobby that's so strangely obsessive and perfectionist for how impossible our standards are to manage. You're always hyperaware of the mistakes you're making, you always regret your last run and wish that it could be a little smoother here and there. How many graveyards of comments have you seen which say "I'll beat this soon" just to see they're from half a decade ago? It's difficult to follow up on your own promises. Independent of streaming and other incentives, speedrunning takes a brutal amount of resolve and resilience to persist with. There *is* a reward once you hit the top, and if you have the motor, you already know that you want to make that record unbreakable - or make the next best person move heaven and earth to beat you. The kind of person who speedruns to this point almost always has a desire to keep going. They accumulate chips on their shoulders and knock as many of them off as possible just to prove a point, whether it's something to do with ego or simply chasing the dragon of that first time you truly felt untouchable at the game.

But when you're done, and you've hit that peak, that wall, that barrier, whatever the ceiling is for you at that moment... Sometimes you need to take a breath and escape that rhythm for a while. For me it's escaping more than running, because so much of my time is dedicated to exploring the games and routing. Trying to re-enter that rhythm after a break is difficult - I think that's the true test of whether you love the craft of speedrunning or not. I've seen people be repelled by games they have thousands upon thousands of hours in, and it appears to be more than just simple burnout. It feels like questioning whether there's any enjoyment left to be had in speedrunning, whether you've expended every last drop of what kept you hooked initially. If you're able to see the game for what it is, when the mystique of striving for a better time shatters and the way you gauge improvement is reduced to just a Livesplit window and a few coloured numbers, and still continue onward; then I think you truly love the act of speedrunning.

Can that love last forever? Speedrunning as we know it is such a young hobby in comparison to its cousin in highscoring, and there's only a scarce few veterans of that hobby who are out there. A decade feels like an eternity but it's almost nothing in the wider gaming scene, with many of those people pre-2010 existing only on the periphery of speedrunning rather than still in the thick of competition. The fatigue in keeping up in a game compounds year after year, particularly due to such high volatility in routes and other complexities constantly being added to games as they approach their theoretical bests. It's a hobby that's almost designed to push its old guard out at certain periodic increments. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, maybe; a stagnant game forces old runners away like an ever-evolving one might. I think everyone eventually has that breaking point where they realise you're not getting nearly as much out of the hobby as you're putting into it.

It manifested for me in the sense of *knowing* I was still able to play the games I love at my best yet I felt tired at beginning the exact same grinds, going through the same motions of routing and practice with increasingly little to gain from it. It's not a shocking revelation at all, but it made me wonder when I'd decide to stop playing entirely. How many years down the line can you keep running, knowing you'll be eventually beaten by someone else - someone younger, better, with more time on their hands, jumping into something with fresh eyes and without the years of frustration you're keeping with you? How many excuses can you make before you accept that you just don't want it enough? I used to pride myself in pouring enough insurance hours into practice and playing that I didn't ever rust at a game, but what does that all mean when you never want to touch that game again? Maybe I'm just afraid I'll throw away time that I could spend on something else - I hesitate to say 'something worthwhile', because I don't think I live a worthwhile enough existence for that to matter. A lot of my time on earth is spent simply wanting to *know* more, whether that be a feeling or a discovery. Speedrunning was able to give that to me. Year upon year repeating the same old footsteps with only the slightest of changes in pursuit of an ephemeral record is not an existence I want to lead. Even if I pick up other games and give them an honest shot, I still feel like I'm unable to detach the knowledge I've learned of *how to speedrun* - I'm just practicing to the optimal pattern, and there's no gratification in that.

The goal at the top of JeremyThompson's splits used to say "Satisfaction". It was laughing at him, and it was laughing at me for ever entertaining the thought that I, too, could ever achieve it.

I see people who hold on to insignificant things, and I've been no stranger to that myself. You can hold on to being the first to break that iconic minute barrier. You can hold on to being the person who's been around the longest, and held streaks for years. You can hold on to toppling that streak and heralding a new era for the game. You can hold on to handcrafting a route from the ground up and pioneering the meta that pushed the game to a new standard. You can hold on to discovering the glitch that flipped the game on its head and wiped that previous route from existence. You can hold on to a marathon appearance that's remembered fondly by the community. You can hold on to it all - sentimental attachment is a wonderful gift to have. All of this only dances around the core of the hobby, the reason speedrunning became the titan it is; when all of this is stripped away, and it's simply you, the game, and the competition - does any of that matter if you don't have the fastest time?

(As an aside, it's strange seeing the pendulum swing to people who stand by 'fun' being the only necessary component of speedrunning. Come on now. You're putting a timer in front of you because you want to beat something - people shouldn't kid themselves. You're having fun that's derived from competing with *something*, whether that's yourself or the world. Embrace it!)

So it's all building sandcastles in the end, seeing your best efforts fall into the sea again and again until you choose not to fight the tide. I wonder what I wanted all along from the hobby. It wasn't knowledge alone. I know it, but I've always been terrible at verbalising it - I just wanted other people with the same curiosity as me to explore the underexplored. I still hold those days of routing the longer ToD categories for the first time close to me, because it was simply a few of us not quite knowing the best way to do *anything*, but we had a ton of fun doing it. Even if seven hours have improved off the 100% run and I'll never run the category again, the first route of mine is one of those things I'll hold onto. Now, six years later, there's people like Yugi who embody exactly what I was (and wanted to be), leaving no stone unturned in every route they touch and compiling these mountains of stats because *they're interesting*, and who doesn't want to know more about this strange hobby? When he's done, whenever that time comes, I hope there'll be someone else who will pick up the torch and keep exploring.

The only thing I feel inclined to still care about are Deadlocked ILs, but maybe that's more of a freakish addiction than truly loving them. I think they're the raw components of what I can still gain out of speedrunning as a hobby, particularly with racman - I know how much I'm improving, some are infinitely scalable to the degree where there's always some intrigue in going further, and I'm pretty much the only one who's ever going to devote such a ton of time to them. If a new RaC game comes out in my lifetime it'll likely convince me to play again as well, at least until I feel like I've extracted enough enjoyment from it and I get to go back to my hermit lifestyle once again.

Thank you to everyone who I've had an encounter with, good or bad, over the past six years of me playing these games. The internet is a phenomenally fascinating place, every endeavour of mine making me cross paths with some of the most incredible people you could imagine. I don't know if I'm much of anything, or even feel like a person at all most days, but I might as well exist while I have the chance. The clock on the wall reads a quarter past midnight.

~ ty, mm