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Hello everyone ! I did'nt really know where to post this, I hope I'm in the right place.

Well, my name is Antonin, I'm a French student in audiovisual in Paris Sorbonne (If you find some english mistakes, that's why), and I'm currently writing a long essay about "Glitch as a way to revolt in Video Games" . The third part of this essay will be about bending the rules of the game with intentionnal glitching, and, of course, I will write about speedrunning.

To do so, I would like to understand why people glitch their games, so I wrote some questions that I would like to ask you. If you're interested in helping me for my work, I would be delighted if you could answer these questions in this thread !

1) Introduce yourself (Name or nick, what game(s) do you speedrun, anything you find relevant)
2) Why did you start speedrunning ?
3) What do you think about glitching in speedrun ? Do you think that 's cheating ?
4) Do you feel like you're breaking the game while speedrunning ? And when you use glitches ?
5) Does the speedrunner play the same game as the « normal » player does ?
6) Do you think that glitching is a way to break the game or to create a new one ?
7) Would you consider speedrun as an aesthetical work ?
8) Are'nt you affraid that learning the game by heart for speedrunning will destroy all the fun in it ? Is speedrunning still playing ?
9) Is it possible to speedrun with style ? To recognize a speedrunner to his way to play the game ? What freedom does the speedrunner have to play with style when he is researching the perfect move to finish the game ?

It would be great if you could keep the numbers of the questions before your answers  !

Thanks a lot to people who will help me and answer, do not hesitate to debate about these questions ! ^^
Thread title:  
All the things
https://kb.speeddemosarchive.com/What_is_a_speedrun%3F#Constraints
Edit history:
LotBlind: 2016-08-19 10:44:32 am
1) I don't speedrun mostly, just glitch and trick hunt and routing etc. to help runners. I've done Alone in the Dark, SiN, Thief II, Jetpack, Typing of the Dead. I also do some SDA volunteer work, including verifying runs.
2) It challenges me in an area I'm very familiar with, can use my creativity. May find things no-one else ever has or that change the game around suddenly. On a more concrete level, I got involved with SDA and trick hunting after seeing... probably one of the earlier GDQs.
3) Not cheating, as everyone else will also say. Reason: can't discern "developer intent".
4) Semantics
5) Filthy casuals. Haha... well I guess yes, it's semantics though.
6) Break it? It's semantics.
7) Only if you have time to spare for fooling around can you really do anything like that. Optimizing an assembly line isn't aesthetical either is it? The sleek nature of runs is more like sports so if you see esthetics in that, sure.
8) To break games you have to play them HARDER.
9) How risky/consistent the runner wants to be: e.g. Carl Sagan vs. Trihex in Yoshi's Island. It's easier to recognize runners by their game choices. And if there's time to spare they might tag the wall with their initials or something. The only other case is when two strats are basically equivalent. I guess if you really wanted to find stuff, there's things like mouse sensitivity and maybe fov for PC games.
Edit history:
Judgy: 2016-07-27 01:32:07 pm
Borderlands 2 Glitch Hunter/ router.
1) Judgy, Speedrunner of "Sniper: Ghost Warrior","Borderlands 2", "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas", "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2", "Call Of Juarez Gunslinger", "Wolfenstein: The New Order" and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood" I also glitch hunt each of these games and a few others that people ask me to.

2) I started speedrunning because it gave new life to games I had played many times before by setting a new kind of challenge that the game didn't give me before.

3)No, I do not believe that using glitches is cheating it is just using what the game gives you in an intelligent way to get a desired result, to me cheating is input codes, cheat menu activations and 3rd party hacking softwares (cheat engine for example).

4)Personally (as a glitch hunter) I feel like I am breaking the game the first time I find a glitch, to me that moment of discovering a glitch or trick is the "breaking" point after that I am just using what I have learnt to do what I need to do and it just feels like I'm playing ... not breaking.

5)Depends on the game some games feature in game timers and give rewards for going fast, a fine example of this is 007 Goldeneye on the N64 the game rewarded you with unlockable cheats if you completed the mission in a certain amount of time in this case it very likely that a "Normal" player would in fact play like a speedrunner, where as for a game such as a Real Time Stratagy game (CnC Generals for example) It is VERY unlikely that a 'normal' player is going to play the same as a speedrunner.

6)Both, when I was finding glitches for borderlands 2 I did both with a single glitch 'Weapon Merging' both broke the game for speedrunners and also gave new life to the game for everyday players who were starting to get bored with the game as it was, people found that by using this glitch to spread weapon effects on to other weapons they could have huge amounts of fun just experimenting with effects and by making certain tasks in game easier to achieve.

7) (I don't like this question)

8) Nope, You lose the fun when you lose your interest in the game, while you still have an interest in achieving something it should still remain fun, also for the most part we could still play the game casually anyway for example (again) Borderlands 2 doing a speedrun you only do the main story quests, you don't even touch the side missions , easter eggs, gear grinding, optional boss battles etc etc. if we wanted to because we skip so much we could take a day off from speedrunning by playing the same game without skips and still enjoy it.

9) Yes it is very possible to speedrun with style and many runners do that Trihex , Carl Sagan for example give little flourishes and (though I hate to use the term) 'Swag' to the way they perform the task at hand, I also believe that each runner can have there own Style even if it doesn't look stylish, 4 different speedrunners doing the same trick might have 4 different setups and while watching you can say "this must be done by Blood Thunder because he sets up that trick that way" so to cut that short yes you can speedrun with style but each runner has there own style and methods.
1) ais523; I (used to) speedrun Neverwinter Nights, TAS NetHack, and do the occasional "random act of routing" to help out someone in other games.
2) I came into the speedrunning community via TASes (and am still focused more on TASes than realtime runs), but it's nice to see the humanly possible side of things on occasions.
3) After a while it becomes very hard to determine what's a glitch and what isn't a glitch. You can often guess that the result of what you're doing is something that the developer didn't intend, but it's hard to know what to ban to stop it. (For example, there are plenty of platformer games which can eject you from a wall in the "wrong" direction. The same sort of ejection happens every time you land from a jump, run into the wall, or the like. So how do you ban the unintended uses but not the intended ones?) "Cheating" is a technical term in speedrunning (referring to modifying the rules of the game via a means "outside" the game, such as entering codes designed by the developer for that purpose, or modifying the platform on which the game runs); that's something that's banned in nearly all speedruns. The general use of glitches and exploits is separate from cheating; I can see why some people don't like it but it's very hard to draw a barrier between a glitch and intended play, and in many cases it's impossible to play the game in an intended way without glitches. (For what it's worth, the difference between a glitch and an exploit is that a glitch is a mechanic that was added to the game accidentally by the developers, and which often would be changed if the developers were aware of what they had done; whereas an exploit is a mechanic that was added intentionally, and is used for its intended purpose, but somehow produces an unintended result.)
4) Not necessarily. There are some cases where the game outright breaks, but a well-written game will respond to glitches and speedruns gracefully. A good example is Chapter 2 of Neverwinter Nights, especially before the plot item duplication glitch was discovered. We used to complete the chapter in a way that's unrecognisable to casual players, but for which everything we did seems to have been 100% intended by the developers. It's one of my favourite parts of a game because the whole thing is based on misdirection and guiding the player away from the main plot (something that fits the flavour of the area), and if you know what you're doing already you can pierce through all the deception and complete the chapter very quickly. (Another reason I like it is the moments of discovery that an unspoiled player can have when they realise what was actually happening.) Would I call this breaking the game? Not really. It plays out very differently from what the developers would expect from a first playthrough, but it's still a style the game was designed to cope with. (Likewise, even when we use outright glitches, the game doesn't seem to be that broken, and reacts in a reasonable way.)
5) No, at least if you're talking about the time spent actually doing runs. In some ways, there's less to think about; many games have an exploration component which is absent in speedrunning because we have the maps memorized. In many other ways, there's more; in many cases there's mechanics (RNG seeds are a common one) that casual players would be unaware of, but speedrunners and other players who play games at a high level have to think of constantly. Some of the most fun I've had is RNG-manipulating Pokémon without a set initial seed; I had to keep track of my position in three dimensions (map x, map y, and RNG seed), and try to navigate my way through all three. This is a kind of fun it's impossible to have without a deep level of knowledge of the game. When you're routing, you're playing the game a lot more like a normal player does, but to a much higher level; a normal player who's exploring a game world can think "I wonder if I can make that jump" and try a few times, but if it's a jump that's important or would save a lot of time a router is likely to try many more times to see if there's some method they can use to pull it off, and when they make it they'll try for much longer to see if they can get a consistent setup. I don't think this is a fundamentally different game, you're just putting a different amount of effort into it.
6) Glitches can sometimes create a new game, but it's more like putting a different layer onto an existing game. The set of tools you have for dealing with any given situation is much larger, but expanding the tools you have available, either in terms of direct in-game upgrades or learning more about how the game works, is something that's common in games anyway. Is Super Metroid a different game after you have 100% upgrades? I wouldn't say so. Is it a different game with, say, the ability to gravity jump and mockball (both of which are probably glitches, although it's hard to tell in the case of Super Metroid)? Again, I wouldn't say so. Is it a different game after you glitch out of bounds and try to find your way to a location where you can corrupt memory? Now you're not really playing the same game, you're doing something else which has much of the same physics but many of the rules are different (e.g. you can't see the map). That said, you haven't really created a new game either.
7) It can be. There's two main joys I get from watching a speedrun; one is the aesthetics, and the other is understanding all the thought and effort and knowledge that went into planning it out. I like watching games which are full of unintended routes and creative uses for items. That's aesthetic in a way, but in a different way from most art.
8) Some games become less fun when speedrun (for example, if the start of the game is tedious, and is followed by a section that's hard to optimize, speedrunners will get bored very quickly, whereas casual players will probably only play the section in question once and not mind much). Some games become more fun (sometimes because they're broken in ways a speedrunner can ignore, or sometimes because they're shallow before they're speedrun but become much deeper when you try to optimize them). Speedrunning removes some aspects of a game, but adds others; and many of the aspects that are removed are preserved in the routing, if not the speedrunning itself. The only thing that's typically missing from a speedrun that's present in the game itself is the capacity to caught by surprises that the developers placed there, as there's only a finite supply of those and you see them all after a while. However, the same problem would affect casual players after they've completed the game a few times. Meanwhile, speedrunning and routing can sometimes show you surprises that weren't placed in the game intentionally, and there tend to be many more of those unless the game was very simple.
9) It's frequently possible to figure out who's speedrunning a game from a recording, if you're familiar with the game and speedrunner in question. In that way, every speedrunner has their own style. This is even more true when the recording has commentary, because commentating a speedrun is an art form in its own right. Some games have only one fast route that everyone tries to follow, but that's rare. Much more common is for there to be multiple routes with similar times (for which some speedrunners will be better at some and some will be better at the other), and scope to do things which doesn't affect the final time (different speedrunners will react to waiting times in different ways). For example, in many games running and jumping are equally fast; some speedrunners will prefer to run everywhere, others to jump everywhere. Likewise, if you're waiting for a door to open, some speedrunners will wait for it to open then run through, some will press against it so that they fall through it as it opens, and some will waste time and get to the door only at the last moment (as a means of showing off). Depending on the game, these might all take the same length of time if done perfectly.
HELLO!
Glitching isn't revolting or breaking the rules.  The game's program *is* the set of rules we all play by.  As long as you're not doing a crooked cart or something like that, you're not cheating at all.
Jorfin around
7) rta is an anagram for art
I don't think there's enough charact
1. Marill, I speedrun The Legend of Zelda: TMC and LADX. 
2. To join the community. I wanted to be relevant. Found more passion the more I continued. 
3. Anything that doesn't affect the hardware or software from outside sources is fair game, unless the community decides against it (I.E, Vermin Skip in SoE). No, I don't think using Glitches is cheating. 
4. No. I feel "Breaking" the game is when you alter the game from it's original state. All of these glitches have been a part of the game since it was released. They're just not found right away. 
5. No. A "Normal" player doesn't consider methods to do faster. When to roll, when not to roll, taking as little unnecessary steps as possible, potential glitches, etc. 
6. Umm... what? No, I don't think glitching is a way to break the game, and... create a new one? A new game? No. It's the same game from a different point of view. 
7. No. Lol. It's an interesting work. It shows our skill at the game, our knowledge on how we route the game, our knowledge on how the games coding works, our creativeness to use glitches in various ways to make the speedgame faster, all different kinds of things that differentiate the Speedrunner and the Casual player. 
8. As someone who has been speedrunning for 3+ years, I can't simply replay a game without already theorizing how to go faster, in case I were to ever pursue it as a speedrun. So no, I don't think it'll ruin the fun of it. 
9. When new gllitches, strategies, routes, whatever is found, people tend to have their own coat of paint on it, but as the run gets more and more figured out, everyone, and I mean EVERYONE will always favor the faster strat. In the end, the only time someone how a chance to define their run as their own is during times when they have no control over the speed of the game. I.E, auto-scrollers. 
No one who is a good speedrunner will favor uniqueness over speed.
What's that gemma?
1) I'm Crow!, though I go as iICrowIi on most sites that don't allow punctuation in screen names.  I speed run Secret of Mana, as well as its lesser-known prequel, Final Fantasy Adventure, and a number of unusual titles.  I tend to prefer to play whatever category is the hardest one for a given game, and I prefer finding new strategies instead of perfecting my execution of existing ones.

2) To me, speed running started as a way to get more replay value out of a game I liked, but as I continued it became more about socializing with a group of people online.

3) Let me put it this way: when I started encountering people who criticized me each time I used a glitch, I wasn't annoyed or indignant; I was confused.  It had never occurred to me that anyone might disapprove of using erroneous code to your advantage in any context, speedrun or casual or whatever.  I honestly still do not have any understanding of how or why people feel bad about glitches, though I have gotten used to what will tend to tick those people off.

4) Not usually.  There are specific categories for specific games where the game does feel like it hasn't truly been completed - for example, my preferred speedgame Secret of Mana has a credits warp that most runners of the game do not take seriously because it does not feel as though you've finished the game.  But in general, using a speed run's strategies to complete a game often feels more natural to me than doing whatever it was the game apparently wanted me to do.

5) I am poorly equipped to answer this question, because when I'm casually playing through a game, I'm always looking for the strangest and least-obvious solutions to the problems the game presents, which is not how most people play.  To me, a speedrun is hardly different from the sort of tinkering I usually do with a game, but this may not be same way "normal" players experience it.

6) Neither.  Glitches are a part of what makes each game unique; somehow repairing or avoiding a glitch is what would change the game into something that it wasn't before.

7) I'm not sure what this question is asking.  If you're asking whether a speed run is itself a work of art, I think that Tool Assisted Speedruns are closer to being "art" than most human-played speed runs, which I regard as more of a live activity.

8) This depends on the game.  Speed running is first and foremost a way to try to get more fun out of a game you already liked.  Some games have more fun to give, but others just don't.

For the second question, there are indeed some speed runners who take their hobby too seriously and stop having fun, but this is true of players of many games. Consider a stereotypical rage of a League of Legends player who has lost a game, for example.

9) For most games, yes.  Here are a few common examples of why and how a player's style will shine through:

- Risk/reward management.  For many games (especially longer ones) it is unreasonable to expect everything to go the way the runner would like it to go.  Different runners will choose different places to take risks and go faster versus playing it safer.  Each runner will also tend to have their own idea of what is "safe" when they do slow down.
- Filling time while waiting.  Some games feature sections where the player's actions are more or less irrelevant (such as "autoscrollers" in platforming games).  This gives the player time to choose to show off - or not.
- Practice time.  Learning a new strategy takes time.  Sometimes, a player will decide that the amount of time a new strategy saves is not worth the amount of time it would take to master it.  This will lead to a situation where players use "new" strategies for most of the game, but each person has unique places that they've decided to stick with "old" strategies.
Thanks all of you for your precious answers. You can still answer these questions or edit your answer, it is not too late ! Smiley
Edit history:
mrprmiller: 2016-08-18 05:02:16 pm
mrprmiller: 2016-08-18 05:01:51 pm
mrprmiller: 2016-08-18 05:01:16 pm
mrprmiller: 2016-08-18 04:56:57 pm
mrprmiller: 2016-08-18 04:56:12 pm
mrprmiller: 2016-08-18 04:55:37 pm
mrprmiller: 2016-08-18 04:51:41 pm
Everyday is puppies and sunshine...
1) Well, my screen name is mrprmiller, but I am Pastor Paul.  I am a United Methodist minister, and beyond that, am known (if at all) for being an enthusiast for one particular game series: Quest for Glory.  It is a five game RPG/Point-Click Adventure from the late 1980's to mid 90's.  I've been speedrunning the games for about 20 years now.  My first son is almost as old as I was when I first played the game.

2) I actually started speedrunning before I knew it was a thing others also did.  I started with Super Mario Bros and could beat it in about 8 minutes, which I was thrilled with.  I would wake up early on Saturday in high school (1999ish) and think to myself, I wonder if I could beat Super Metroid faster.  The first time I did a sequence break I was excited.  In my pet series, Quest for Glory, there is a mechanic that allows you to import your character from game to game and maintain your stats and spells.  The final game hadn't been released yet, and I was ramping up my character because there was a glitch that allowed you to import back into the same game so I could replay the 4th game over and over with the same character while growing for the final game.  Eventually, I just wanted to see how fast I could do it...

3) No.  We are already, almost universally not playing the game the way the developers intended.  We skip most points, coins, rings and everything else we don't need.  We pretty much universally don't like intentional developer cheat codes (unless they make the game harder), but using something the developer missed... that's fair game for our purposes.  Since we're already skipping tons of content in games, it shocks me when people are confused as to why we feel glitches are different from cheating.

4) Yes and no.  I know, particularly with my game, you are expected to get engrossed in the story.  I've played the game with the actual developers watching and commentating, using a combination of glitches and practiced routes and optimizations.  That being said, I know the story I'm skipping because I have played it so many times.  Of course, they did put in the ability to skip dialog.  Wink  To mirror Crow!'s comments, there is a skip in Quest for Glory 5 that skips about 45 minutes of gameplay and warps you pretty much to the end, which is it's own special category because you really don't do anything.  Criticizing my game series for using glitches is a little premature, though, because of the import system.  I finish the 1st game WELL before you are expected to, so when I bring my character to the 2nd game, I am drastically UNDER-powered.  By the 3rd game, I have to get clever because many of my stats are close to the start of the 1st game...  If anything, my game gets ridiculously more difficult for a while.

5) For my pet series, definitely not.  You're not expected to beat the third game in the series with 1/3 of the starting hit points because of importing.

6) Glitches don't break the game; they are part of the game.  They were released with those holes in them already.  And I believe we need to differentiate between beneficial glitches, superficial glitches, and bad glitches.  Of course, there are plenty of times those glitches crash or freeze the game, so most people avoid them.  Sometimes there are glitches that just make your player or the world look strange, but overall, it is still playable, although most people avoid these also because they are rarely pretty.  Beneficial glitches are rarely obvious, so hunting them out is part of the game.

7) Tool Assisted Runs, as Crow! said, definitely are.  They take time and dedication, like real-time speedrunning, but it's a different kind of time and dedication.  Tool Assisted Runs are like a painting of a sports event.  Real-time is like the actual sporting event.  And I know I enjoy the paintings more sometimes.  Cheesy  Tool Asssited Runs are a lot like the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day... especially when he steals money because he knows EVERY movement of EVERY person.

8) I am never worried about ruining Quest for Glory.  Speedrunning has given me the chance to talk to, interact with, and befriend the creators of the game series I love.

9) That's not fair.  That's three questions.  hehehe - To the first point, absolutely.  Anyone who has played a particular video game will know when someone is playing beyond what is generally expected.  Earlier this year, I saw a human being do something I thought only a computer-playing could pull off; he beat the hardest bosses first, with minimal equipment, where you are cleverly designed by developers to die if you do not have the right equipment and he did it!



I had watched a Tool Assisted Run do this so I knew it was theoretically possible... I never actually expected to see a real-life person to do it live.

To casual players, the precision that speedrunning demonstrates will nearly always look like "style."  For heavy gamers, who know the game really well, certain actions will still impress, like skipping an entire area that everyone thought was required.  Cleverness is a kind of style in this sense.  Even speedrunners who know games extremely well will know how difficult a particular action is, and seeing another player consistently complete that action over and over and over... those moves still leave me in awe.
Edited mine slightly.
m e m e s ?
1)
i'm butt
i'm a butt
mmz4 ng+ seems like an interesting run, too bad i'm terrible at it

2)
i wanted to die a lot in a game i suck at

3)
drawing a line is more a matter of categorization than fairness, and it usually only happens when the divide between intended play and fastest play grows extremely large (e.g. ocarina of time, where the divide between any% and any% glitchless is well over an hour)

4)
i play how i want to play
not much else to be said

5)
if you can't walk, you can't run

6)
i think i don't really care

7)
A E S T H E T I C S

8)
walk if you want to walk, run if you want to run

9)
just refer to every other post mentioning trihex famalam

p.s.
following the beat of your own drum is freedom, not revolt