What blew my mind this week was an event called AGDQ which stands for Awesome Games Done Quick. At this gaming event players come together to speedrun games for charity 24 hours a day for a week straight and it is all live streamed. Speedrunning is exactly what it sounds like, trying to complete a game as fast as possible. This event blows my mind in multiple ways.
First is that the events that this group runs generates 7 figures that goes to charity, this particular event is donating to the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Considering the age group of most of the participants (college age or younger) this is an impressive feat.
Second is that the games being played range from the obscure and old (what even is Razor Freestyle Scooter for the Nintendo 64?) to the beloved (Super Mario Bros. 3) to the new (Control).Third is what these players accomplish in these runs. Everything from 100% complete runs that can take hours (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is estimated at over 4 hours) to Any% runs that allow players to use any glitch, exploit, or strategy for the sake of speed to complete an entire game in under 20 minutes. While the run is going there is commentary about the actions the player(s) are completing which brings them from incomprehensible to accessible and exciting.
The last thing that blows my mind about this event is the culture around it. Each of these games has a sub-culture that has explored and mined the game for speed. Bending it to the player’s will, trying over and over and over to create strategies that shave milliseconds away. Muscle memory that is forged to complete seemingly impossible feats of dexterity. Players compete in races, showing off tricks and sequences that have inside jokes for names or are references to the player who first discovered them. It is like a fractal where you can zoom from speedrunning itself with its nomenclature, rules, inside jokes (kill/save the animals!) and tight schedule to a specific game with its best runners, tricks, and strategies and finally to a specific type of run within that game, 100%, Any%, etc. These can be changed by donation incentives that can make the players do strange glitches, higher difficulties, or even complete games blindfolded.
The result of this whole thing is people spending an incredible amount of time and effort to do a very specific feat that only a seemingly tiny amount of people can understand and it blows my mind.