On Speed Running and Glitches

This is a video by Source Engine speedrunner Michael 'DemonStrate' Yanni. In it, he manages to complete the game "Portal," which is designed to take the average first-time player about 6 hours to complete, in less than 10 minutes. In order to accomplish this, he abuses several programming oversights with regards to the game's central game mechanic, the portal gun. Upon viewing this video, many people's instinctive reaction is that these glitches are somehow "cheating," without realizing that the abuse of glitches is one of the oldest traditions of video game speedrunning. Obviously, I must correct these poor unenlightened souls.

The record is sorta legit, I suppose.


I'm not the type to exploit glitches for any purpose, though. Which is really hard to resist in Morrowind.


In fact, I generally hate glitchers with a passion. Even when they glitch single player games. So, all of you people who actively try to break the game tend to piss me off.

If you hate glitch abuse, then you're perfectly free to not abuse glitches yourself. The people who are trying to find the quickest possible way to complete the game are going to continue using them to try and set new records regardless of your opinion. Speed running is about getting to the finish using *any* actions that are possible within the game, glitches included.

The fact is, the game allows these things to happen. These things are part of the game, regardless of whether the designers intended them to be possible. Disallowing them from being used in speed runs simply because they're not possible in real life is incredibly silly, considering that we're talking about a game that gives you a gun to shoot wormholes into walls.

You would have thought that the debate would have ended here, all detractors shying away in light of my clear intellectual superiority. But alas, they had to brave my wrath.

Umm... no. Using the portals to move around is part of the game mechanic. Glitching yourself OUTSIDE THE MAP is not part of the game mechanic. You haven't found a wonderful technique... you've just found a mistake made by the development team. They're human. They make mistakes. In an ideal world, they'd come along afterwards and patch them all. But this is not an ideal world.

Developer intent is completely irrelevant here, and I'll explain why.

If video games are art, then part of the way we interpret them is through the way we play them and by exploring the entire game space that is offered to us, intentional or otherwise. Since when has the interpretation of any work of art ever been limited solely to the intentions of the artist? People see things in art that were not the intent of the artist all the time, and that has never made those observations any less valid interpretations of that art.

If the developers don't find a certain unintentional feature which opens up a huge new territory of game space, what exactly is wrong with people using it? The most memorable and enduring features of many games have been glitches. Practically all of the advanced movement techniques in any game ever have been glitches. Bunnyhopping and strafe jumping (which is still featured prominently in Quake Live, which people play against each other *for a living*), skiing in Tribes... I could name countless examples. Time and time again, the consensus about glitches has always been that if the glitch increases the depth of the game by requiring skill and expanding the possibilities of the game space, it becomes acceptable.

In light of the many, many Ascended Glitches which have been found perfectly acceptable, you're going to have to show why the glitches in Portal are actually harmful to the game or somehow require less skill than beating the game without using them. You're going to find that difficult, considering that the author of the video spent over 6,000 attempts on the companion cube level alone. Seriously, watch his commentary, it takes him several tries to reproduce many of the techniques he used. If you actually try to do it yourself I think you'll find that using the glitches is no less skillful than the "normal" way of beating the game. In fact, the creativity involved in finding these glitches in the first place is to be commended. Portal is a game about thinking outside the box and, well, this guy thought outside the box.

Flawless argument or flawless argument? I know, right? AND YET THEY CONTINUE.

If Valve recompiled the engine and handed him a new version of Portal with all the glitches removed (like shooting portals THROUGH walls) then his time would be drastically different.

Yes, it would be. But that is not the game that is being speedrun here! The game that is being speedrun here is a game with all sorts of glitches that allow a sufficiently creative and skillful player to sequence break the game. These glitches are part of the game, you can't arbitrarily disallow them just because you don't personally like them.

I'm pretty sure Guinness wouldn't except this after the very first glitch exploit.

When Guinness sets criteria for a record, they define a strict set of rules under which the record is to be attempted. In the case of speed running a video game, the rules are the actions which the game allows you to make. Just because you don't like some of those actions doesn't mean that they are not still perfectly legitimate means to speed run a game. I suggest you actually watch some of the speed runs at Speed Demos Archive, which is the de-facto repository for all speed running records. The rules set by SDA are the rules under which speed runs are attempted. And SDA allows glitch abuse. I'm not exactly sure what else I can say here that will get the point across.

Yeeeaaaahhhhh. Next time you find an item dupe exploit that hasn't been patched in an MMO and you start selling them for real &/or game money, do us a favor and get a stopwatch ready so you can tell us how fast it was from the first item duped to the ban hammer.

If the MMO's TOS has rules against item duplication and RMT, then these actions are absolutely breaking the rules and are banworthy. What you're missing is that the MMO has an actual TOS on top of its game logic which serves as an additional set of rules for players to follow. Speedrunning doesn't have such a thing except for the rules set by the speed running community web sites that that certify and post speed runs, and SDA explicitly allows glitches. It doesn't matter what you think "should" be allowable, the game allows it, the speed running community allows and even encourages it, this is a legal and perfectly legitimate speed run.

Clearly, nobody will be able to oppose my flawless logic.