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Recently, I've developed a weird sort of obsession with videogame speedrunning. For those who don't know, this is a hobby where players try to beat a videogame as fast as possible. Here's why that's interesting...
First, people who do this are *really* good. Like that game you played as a kid and spent months on people have gotten it down to twenty minutes. But even if you don't care at all about videogames (I don't play much at all anymore), I think the community around is fascinating.
While I'm not super into videogames these days, I do care a lot about learning. In particular, what processes need to be in place for people to get really good at something. In this sense, speedrunning is really a microcosm for looking at learning and innovation.
One thing that matters a lot: live replays. This facilitates social learning and means you can study and emulate the best. Yet livestreaming is rare professionally. Why don't more companies, internally, pick their top 10% to livestream parts of their job for others to learn?
Another important factor is clear success metrics. Speedrunning is extremely objective: you had the fastest time or you didn't. This metric drives useful competition that allow people to get insanely good.
Differentiation and niche-categories are another useful point. Virtually all games have speedrunning leaderboards. The popular ones often have several categories for different constraints. More categories = more winners = more participation.
The use of live replays as "proof" of a run also fosters innovation because winners can't monopolize new methods. If you're going to use a technique to succeed, everyone else will know about it almost immediately.
I've written a lot more about the applications of these kinds of environments to learning well here: scotthyoung.com/blog/2019/01/0…
