Thread by @Gankra_

can't sleep, so here's a big braindump on the social and historical relationship between speedrunning and glitches, and how the concept of a glitch is too blurry for simple hard and fast rules

so like i could start this either by digging into definitions or the historical/social context. i think it's more interesting to start at the context, so for now what exactly a "glitch" is will be left unspecified

(i will note i'm not really part of any speedrunning community, but i am a very avid consumer of the artifacts of these communities, so whenever possible i will try to provide source material from actual speedrunners. hopefully i won't mess this up too much.)

so let's start with the modern relationship between speedrunning and glitches: by default no one gives a shit if a run involves a glitch. anything goes. beat the game however you can. this often results in gameplay that is wildly different from the "casual" experience.

this can be very jarring to someone who isn't really into the scene. especially if they casually play the game a lot.

"hey that's not how it goes! you're ruining the game! you skipped the best/hardest part! this is cheating! this is boring!"

so there's a social pressure to play the game "right" (a messy concept, as we'll see). but like, speedrunners are pretty fundamentally playing the game "wrong" anyway. they're spending endless hours obsessing over how it works, how to optimize it. they're going to Break Things.

but even among those who love to endlessly replay and destroy a single game, there are limits. things can get so broken that even *they* don't like what's happened. in the modern times, this is solved with a very simple tool: New Categories.

basically, if enough people want to play the game in a certain way, they just come up with a new category with rules specifying certain things need to be done or aren't allowed, and boom everyone's happy. you get to be exactly as degenerate as *you* like!

see for instance the "main" categories of two of the most popular and completely smashed to pieces speedrunning games: super mario 64 and ocarina of time

"16 star? 0 star??? HOW?"

"Any%? Defeat Ganon?? All Dungeons??? How are these not the same??"

here's the general categories you'll see a community slowly grow:

* 100% - do "everything"
* any% - do *anything* to win asap
* low% - do as little as possible to win
* no major glitches (nmg) - don't do the really fucky stuff
* glitchless - no fun allowed

a really long running game will also develop categories like

"beat the game with the old route a bunch of us still love" (i.e. sm64's 16 star)

"fuck exactly this one glitch" (i.e. oot's no wrong warp)

"some meme goal" (super metroid's Nintendo Power%)

any% is often what a community most cares about because it has the most room to do interesting stuff in BUT once a game gets broken enough any% can become too fucked and get sidelined.

like, OoT any% is *7 minutes* now

when that happens NMG can become the "main" category!

so the question of "what counts as a glitch?" *mostly* doesn't matter in the modern context because communities split off categories whenever they want to play the game in a certain way

"major" glitches can get singled out if they completely change what the game is about

but the question of "what counts as a glitch?" was a lot more important in the earliest days of speedrunning! i'm very fuzzy on these details but recognition used to be way more tied to the developers of a game, who were understandably less interested in celebrating glitches.

like, you might get your highscore for a game published by atari in a magazine or some shit? idk, i vaguely recall hearing about this in some piece about the ever ongoing controversies about ancient probably-fake high scores for like, donkey kong or whatever?

this established a culture of needing to play the game "right" which endured for a long time as it was mandated by one of the major gaming leaderboards, twin galaxies.

this video by summoning salt discusses that a bit (@ 12:45):

as summoning salt discusses, this glitchless culture suffocates communities.

it limits the space of possibilities and creates a vague specter that any innovation you will be deemed a glitch and get your hard work thrown out.

thank god twin galaxies became irrelevant!

but that vague specter fascinates me, so now let's talk about what the fuck a glitch is!

first off: it's gotta be a social construct. if you just have some binary and no context, there's no way to tell if something is "designed" or a "bug". so what social construct shall we use?

probably the first idea to reach for is *intent*. did the developer intend this to be possible? this is a pretty horrible definition because it basically argues that you aren't allowed to have a creative thought the developer didn't. it also runs into Death of the Author problems

did the developer think you could make that jump? did they *want* you to be able to skip that section? hell, even if you run every decision by "the developer" they might not know that this was Totally Intended by that dude who no longer works there.

boring! lame!

ok, let's allow for more creativity in the definition of a glitch: is this just effective application of an "intended" mechanic?

ok now you're allowed to make a really tight jump that seems unintended but is barely possible, better!

but now you need to identify whether a mechanic is intended or not! some cases are easy: if there's a tutorial for it, or a special animation/effect for it, or it's just required to beat the game -- seems legit!

but alas, a sea of grey lays before us.

ok so super metroid is a really great example for this concept, because it's full of tons of clearly intended mechanics that are gated by extremely specific conditions or extremely fiddly inputs, and it tutorializes some of them in-game but not all, creating serious uncertainty

in a casual run of the game there are two places where you "unlock" a new ability *purely* by stumbling into a trap which you can only escape by learning how to do something you *could have already been doing*, but probably had no idea was possible, by copying the animals' moves

i am pretty good at platformers and i am here to say: wall jumps in super metroid are so fucking fiddly they feel like a glitch. if there wasn't a tutorial for them in the game, i would totally believe they were a glitch.

meanwhile there's a totally non-tutorialized tech called a "crystal flash" which you trigger by getting below 50 hp, laying a power bomb, holding L+R, and having a spare 10 ammo of all your weapons. big fancy animation, clearly intended, totally implausible to learn casually.

now let's look at the mockball: if you're in the air and moving really fast, and transform into a ball right as you hit the ground, you get to keep all that speed in the ball form. nice simple mechanic? no no, that one is definitely a glitch! metroid.fandom.com/wiki/Mockball

super metroid's mechanics can feel jank, and they can be "secret", so what makes a jank secret trick a glitch? probably that it breaks the "obvious" route through the game, letting you get early super missiles and skip spore spawn (RIP 😿).

you know what else lets you mess up the "obvious" route? fucking wall jumps! fuck ice beam to make a platform to the power bombs, just wall jump yer way up! go fight phantoon before kraid! it's like, one of the first tricks new runners learn!

figuring out whether a mechanic is intended or not is hard! wall jump only gets a passing grade because the devs put in a tutorial trap (and afaict otherwise never expect you to use it to make progress?).

hell even if we have clearly intended mechanics, they can be used "wrong"!

here's a totally obviously absolutely intended mechanic in a lot of games: if you get hit by an enemy, they push you away. it both protects the player from getting hit more, while also being a Fun way to toss them down a hole full of spikes. That's Game Design Baby!

but those damn scheming speedrunners use it wrong! instead of getting tossed down holes they use it to get a speed boost! or even a height boost! hey you weren't supposed to get across that hole!

once again, summoning salt has a great example (@ 7:15):

if you want to call this a glitch, what do you do?

you could say *getting hit* is illegal, because all damage boosting is an exploit. probably not gonna fly.

ok let's ban *beneficial* damage boosts. still bad, good boosts happen casually all the time.

probably your most viable approach is to ban boosts that allow you to do something otherwise impossible, like clearing a gap you can't normally. or maybe just make a list of the specific ones that piss you off? no creativity, no fun, only pure innocent gameplay!!

here's an even better one: "floating gardens early" in Aria of Sorrow. You're supposed to get the ability to walk on water to jump up to a platform

but

you can just not? you can just make the jump. i literally just did it.

described here (@ 11:08)

"this trick's allowed in glitchless because it's just a... jump. really. there's no glitch or anything to it."

"yeah i mean if we banned jumping i guess that might make it fair."

But boy is that totally normal double jump a real game breaker. Skips two whole areas and bosses. What Am Glitch?

no matter how many rules you put in, speedrunners are gonna find a way to fuck up the game. literally the only way to make them follow a route is to make it The Rules

and that's how you get Nintendo Power%

so actually nice, yeah, do it, good memes

wiki.supermetroid.run/Nintendo_Power…

worth noting: although i mocked the idea of banning "useful" damage boosts, that does end up being a common practical solution for accidentally breaking rules! accidentally clip out of bounds and softlock? well you just lost a bunch of time for nothing so who cares, keep going!

basically it feels incongruent to try to mandate a prescriptive rule against *no* glitches or exploits or whatever and then have to make a big mushy patchwork of rules to make it functional.

but if you're just descriptive of the what the community likes doing? be squishy! yay!

trying to be prescriptive is how a lot of people get frazzled and confused with speedrunning categories and rules.

the golden rule for speedrunning is that the rules are literally whatever the community running the game is fine with (and almost anything is allowed until banned)

there's definitely like, conventional rules you expect between communities like "no gamegenie, no tilted cartridge, no turboboost, no savestates, no macros, no mods" but even that stuff isn't always mandated!

probably the biggest shakeup in this regard has been the massive shift in the last decade in how emulators and different input devices are treated -- previously frowned upon, now basically the default for a lot of games!

but that's a thread for a different day