Code is Law: Subversion and Collective Knowledge in the Ethos of Video Game Speedrunning

ABSTRACT

Speedrunning is a kind of ‘metagame’ involving video games. Though it does not yet have the kind of profile of multiplayer e-sports, speedrunning is fast approaching e-sports in popularity. Aside from audience numbers, however, from the perspective of the philosophy of sport and games, speedrunning is particularly interesting. To the casual player or viewer, speedrunning appears to be a highly irreverent, even pointless, way of playing games, particularly due to the incorporation of “glitches”. For many outside the speedrunning community, the use of glitches appears to be cheating. For speedrunners, however, glitches are entirely within the bounds of acceptability. Because of this, however, speedrunning frequently involves sidestepping what are typically taken to be the core challenges of the game. By examining the distinction between the use of glitches and cheating in speedrunning, we can gain a greater understanding of the unique ethos of this activity; that is, we can make sense of what fundamentally constitutes speedrunning as a metagame. I argue that by understanding the code of the game not as rules but as physics, and by examining what actions are deemed impermissible by the speedrunning community – such as hardware modification and hacking – we can see that the ethos of speedrunning has three components: constitutive skills (including dexterity, memorisation and mental fortitude); a collective, fine-grained knowledge of the game and the desire to subvert the intentions of the programmers. Each of these components limits and structures the earlier ones: collective knowledge takes priority over constitutive skills, and subversion takes priority over both. These three components form the ethos that structures speedrunning as a metagame, expressing what speedrunners take to be its central aim.

KEYWORDS:

• Video games
• speedrunning
• subversion
• collective knowledge
• metagame

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Don Oxtoby for his helpful comments on an early draft, Bevan Marten for suggesting the Fosbury Flop example, and the reviewers for their extremely useful feedback. Most of all, I would like to thank Aki for watching many moons-worth of Mario with me as “research” for this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Of course, the code ‘allows’ one to hack and modify it, in the sense that it does not resist it; it is something that can be done. Here, therefore, I limit ”allows” to those actions that involve ways that the code can be implemented without changing the code itself. By analogy, a book allows us to read the chapters it contains in any order; it also ‘allows’ us to rip out pages, or to insert our own pages with glue. But there is a clear difference between interacting with the content of the book in a radical way and physically altering the book itself.

2. As I discuss later in the paper, calling the game code ‘physics’ is, of course, figurative. However, I think it is a useful analogy nonetheless.

3. Again, while there were human-made intentions that the wall be interacted with in a particular way, these do not have the status of rules.

4. It may be pointed out that the Fosbury Flop was consistent with the intentions of the high-jumping gamewrights, whereas the use of glitches presumably is not consistent with the intentions of the programmers. However, it should be noted again that speedrunning is a metagame. The game that speedrunners are playing is not the game that the creators intended, and the programmers should not be considered the gamewrights of speedrunning. Instead, the speedrunning community itself are the gamewrights; they create the rules surrounding how the environment provided by the programmers can be interacted with, and it is their judgement as to an action’s acceptability that matters, not the programmers’. If we reject the idea that the programmers are the gamewrights, then the two cases are no longer disanalogous in this way. The programmers make the game, but they do not determine how it is used. Instead, that is a matter for the speedrunning community to decide.

5. And I think it would be fair to say that, just like changes to code in speedrunning, if a swimmer swum in a liquid other than water, or in a pool on the moon, even if they broke the world record while doing so it is unlikely that the times from such activities would be considered directly comparable to ‘ordinary’ swimming.

6. The sense of ‘subversion’ I am using here excluded hacking. Subversion in the speedrunning ethos is about taking what is given and reconfiguring it. To use the book analogy again, subversion is to read the words in a different order; hacking is changing the words.

7. Though arguably an intended glitch is more a ‘cheat’ than a true glitch.

8. By ‘passive’ here I mean knowledge that can be applied as described. For instance, being told how to predict the bounce of a ball in rugby is not enough to actually be able to do so in practice: it requires skill. By contrast, being told how to manipulate the random elements in games is frequently enough to be able to do so successfully. Of course, in practice things are not so simple, since some RNG manipulation in speedrunning is technically quite difficult. Nevertheless, the distinction is, I think, a useful one.

9. Draws in cricket test matches notwithstanding.