kasdeya
kasdeya
for a long time I thought speedrunning meant “go as fast as you can” and to me that means exhausting myself rushing, which is not sustainable and not fun
but now I understand that it probably means “play the game so frequently that going fast is almost automatic”. it’s not that in their head they’re frantic for the entire run - instead it’s more like the “slow is smooth. smooth is fast” philosophy:
they started at the fastest pace that they could complete all of the required tasks with no mistakes. (this was probably pretty slow at first) then they practiced at that pace until they were able to go faster while still making no mistakes. and then they got faster and faster
so it’s not exhausting and hectic for them - it’s a practiced skill that feels natural
and to be honest, I wonder if the whole concept of speedrunning came from autistic people replaying their favorite game over and over. starting at a normal pace and getting faster over time until they started wondering “how much faster can I go?” because trying to be faster added a new layer of fun to a game they already loved
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I think there’s a certain type of autistic person that hears “get the fastest time you can” or “try your best” and understands that to mean “overclock your brain as far as it will go for this task. put in the literal maximum amount of effort you possibly can, no matter the cost”
I’m that type of autistic person lol. so for anyone else confused by this, what “try your best” actually means is “put a reasonable amount of effort into doing this task. treat it as a serious task that needs deliberate effort to complete”
so yeah I’m currently trying to re-understand speedrunning from the perspective that it can actually be kinda relaxed and not an exhaustingly frantic task that has to go “as fast as possible”
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I think that the internet’s fixation on only the “best” players is creating an extremely skewed perspective of what it means to play a video game at all, which is creating a lot of cultural problems in the video game world (like many games - especially MMOs and PvP games - no longer being designed to facilitate certain types of ludic play because there’s no longer a cultural understanding that ludic play exists or that it’s valid). but that’s a whole other post that I might make at some point
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case in point: World of Warcraft has gradually sacrificed the flavor of its class abilities in order to make optimized damage rotations more complex and interesting for high-level optimization-minded players. and it seems like all of its max-level content is designed to pressure the player to optimize and practice the “right” way to play so that they can gain mechanical mastery and then be rewarded for it
and other WoW-like MMOs almost invariably take this much much further. instead of having flavored abilities with implicit rotations, they almost always have unflavored abilities with explicit rotations baked into the mechanics, like Black Desert Online’s combo system. with the idea being (I assume) that flavor has little to no value and the fun of using abilities comes from learning to use them in the right order to optimize damage
which takes the focus away from the fantasy of being a certain class as a character in that world, and towards mechanical optimization instead. and that seems to attract a lot of players but it alienates me as someone who loves WoW for the flavor, the atmosphere, the adventure, and the class fantasy
and I wonder how many people would love WoW if they looked at it like that, but they can’t see the potential for that kind of ludic play because they have no cultural concept of it
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Ember Yuuki Ortiz
emberyo@mastodon.social@kasdeya yeah I noticed while I was learning rubix cubes that it inst fast it's slow and steady look a blindfolded run to see what I mean
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