EssaysResearch and Development

MARGINALIA
[1]  Summoning Salt, “The History of Rainbow Road World Records”, YouTube, July 2019, (31:43). ,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuzUKT2Shn8

[2] Derek Guy (@dieworkwear) “ive been wearing menswear blogs...”, X, July 2023,  
https://twitter.com/dieworkwear/status/1676723917036343296

[3] “Derek Guy, https:twitter.com/dieworkwear/status/1676732034948145152

[4] See: Guy Debord, Theory of the Derive (1958)

[5] Hugh Matthews, Mark Taylo, “The Unacceptable Flaneur: The Shopping Mall as a Teenage Hangout. Childhood”, 2000, 7(3), https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568200007003003

[6] Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity”, Theory, Culture & Society, 1985, 2(3), https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276485002003005

[7], Lieven Ameelm Sirpa Tani, “Parkour: Creating Loose Spaces?” Grografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 2012, 94, 102307/23258524.
[8] tomatoanus, “How speedrunners beat Elden Ring in under 5 minutes”, YouTube, July 2022, (5:56),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt_F6ZSC2Pg

[9] tomatoanus, “How speedrunners beat Elden Ring in under 5 minutes”, YouTube, July 2022, (6:06)
[10] tomatoanus, “How speedrunners beat Elden Ring in under 5 minutes”, YouTube, July 2022, (37:11)
[11] seekerTV, “Elden Ring Any% Unrestricted Speedrun in 3:58 (WORLDS FIRST SUB 4 MINUTES)”, YouTube, July 2022,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFf4APizCs4

[12] Kellen Beck, “Playing a game in a different language can make or break a world record speedrun”, Mashable, March 2017,
https://mashable.com/article/speedrunning-version-matter
[13] dragonbane, “Breath of the Wild — Voice Acting Comparison (Any%), YouTube, March 2017, (0:25) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEZMMbK8Dzw&t=25s

[14] Madion Schmalzer, “Play While Paused: Time and Space in Videogame Pause Menus”, Journal of Games Criticism 4.1, 2020, https://gamescricisim.org/2023/07/25play-while-paused-time-and-space-in-videogame-pause-menus/

TITLE: NEW NARRATIVES: THE ART OF OPTIMISATION IN SPEEDRUNNING
DATE: 31-10-22
TIME: 12:24


AUTHOR: FIN COUSINS

WORD COUNT: 1566
IMAGE COUNT: X
TAGS:  X

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ARTICLE ID: TWIST003/I-01/NEW NARRATIVES/001/001-12004


“The problem is, who’s going to be the author?”

• Summoning Salt (i)

According to Jason, a commentor on a menswear blog, a flaneur drinks whiskey. He owns a nice car. He observes the world around him with a passive eye, breathing in a narrative of cigar smoke and modernity. Jason is adopting a figure originally from 19th century Paris, a movement of individuals that attempted to find sensory stimulation in the urban environment, strolling through the streets of the city.

Menswear writer Derek Guy posted Jason’s comments on the app formerly known as Twitter, prompting a series of sneering reactions (ii). It’s not hard to understand why: Jason appears outdated in an internet setting. His vintage, narcissistic, Steve McQueen-loving meninism falls short of the way the world actually works now. In his post, Derek translates the flaneur into the algorithmic language and identity categories of today. In the 21st century, for Derek, the flaneur is an “idlecel”, he’s “gentlemaxxing”, he has switched on “adventurer mode” and created a “voyagecorfe” aesthetic which has just started blowing up on TikTok. (iii).

Jason’s tackiness reveals something about our experience of the world and aesthetic judgment today. He becomes an image in the junkyard of internet excess, the chintzy mass of commodities associated with late-stage capitalism. He’s a phantom-like image, slipping between ain’t nobody got time for that memes, Dyson Zone headphones and Google Glass. Encountering this version of the flaneur feels like encountering a fossil preserved in the compounded dysfunction, the senseless waste.

The flaneur has been a productive figure in terms of spatial dynamics; their relaxed strolling made the otherwise tightly mediated rhythms of a modern city visible. The issue is, the world Jason fetishises doesn’t reflect the urgencies of our present. Today, speed is paramount. Corporations, growth rates and capital find new, brutal efficiencies. We are anaesthetised. Asbestos enters our lungs when we walk between buildings; policing is algorithmic; our names fall into data leaks. A sensory wander just isn’t how our lives work; our narratives become stuck, we lose interest. We hold devices that listen to us and think they know what we want.

Over the last century, the flaneur’s passivity has been criticised and updated. The situationists in the 20th century turned the flaneur’s wander into a more active “derive” or “drift”, aiming to engage with the city and subvert dominant capitalist culture (iv). More recently, young people hanging around shopping malls in the East Midlands of the UK have been called “unacceptable flaneurs” for their image of deviance (v).

Others have drawn attention to racialised or gendered subjects, contrary to the typically affluent white male figure, raising questions as to who holds the right to move freely through a cityscape and bringing forth the “marginalised flaneur” or feminine “flaneuse” (vi). In 2012, Lieven Ameel and Sirpa Tani drew a parallel between the flaneur and practitioners of parkour, or traceurs. For them, tracers playfully “loosen” urban spatial texture, pushing against the concrete (vii). In the context of Jason, there is another subculture which can be productively considered as an updated, virtual flaneur. One that crashes into a space increasingly indistinguishable from our material reality.

Speedrunners are individuals who engage in the practice of completing video games as quickly as possible. Similar to the tracer, they are hellbent on getting from start point to endpoint, uncovering a series of mechanical exploits not immediately evident to the player. The runs are collaborative exercises, with runners uploading their times to speedrun.com, an online community based on discovering exploits, complete with leader boards and rules for legitimate tactics.

In this community, there is a learned series of routes and combinations to beat a game as quickly as possible. This can range from optimising movement to ‘sequence breaking’, or performing actions that exist outside the linear order of the game. At their most basic level, many speed runs analyse the biomechanics of a game to optimise how quickly a character is able to move. If we take 2022’s Elden Ring as an example, the fastest speed runners discovered that when the character runs, they move at 10 units of speed. Jumping spikes the speed up to around 12 units, before dropping to around 8 units, then returning to 10 unites when the character continues running. When jumping on slopes, the character lands before the speed has a chance to drop down to 8 units, so this becomes the most efficient way of moving possible (viii).

This obsession with speed exists at a much more expansive level though, including skipping cutscenes and manipulating the memory of the game itself. This creates a conversation about the notion of legitimate runs, as well as a tension between hardware and software. An ‘Any%’ speed run is a category of speedrunning in which the runner simply has to get to the end as fast as possible, by any means necessary, including the use of hardware.

The Elden Ring world record holder for the Any% category, a runner called Seeker, used a ‘Zip Glitch’, a technique that uses a program to count frames. Seeker begins counting, then blocks and walks in a specific pattern. When done correctly, the animation of the character blocking overlaps with the animation of walking forward, creating a glitch that sends the character flying across the map (X). Using this technique, Seeker was able to complete Elden Ring, a game that on average takes 57 hours in its entirety, in just 3 minutes and 58 seconds (xi). The speedrun, as it develops in techniques and routes, evolves from optimising the runtime of the game, avoiding loading screens and fights, to cracking the entire game open.

If the flaneur creates a dialectic between their body and spatial constraints, the speedrunner, like the tracer, goes even further, creating a new narrative, documenting their runs with live streams and videos. Rather than existing linearly, guided by design or narrative, this practice radically transforms the game into a socially-constructed cultural artefact, with the key objective being to actually engage in normative play as little as possible.

In terms of narrative, the speedrun often enacts a complete subversion of language itself. Runners will often disregard cutscenes, but they may also adjust language settings dependent on which is most optimal. The number of letters can mean there is less text to scroll through, which makes voice acting faster, helps the game run smoother and can withhold time-saving bugs. For example, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is quicker in German, saving a crucial 13 seconds when compared to the English version (xii).

In pursuit of optimisation, speedrunning becomes a post-lingual act. The developer can try to wrestle back authorship through patches and updates, but the runner has already stripped words of their context until they’re barely signs, attributing new meanings and functions to the game’s units. With the use of third-party hardware, these units are quantifiable only by frames. The runner transforms the game from narrative into an amalgamation of data, a movement pattern, computing each glitch and detail into muscle memory.

In this sense, Speedrunning mirrors today’s aesthetic of overdrive and repetition. Pop has sped into hyperpop. Netflix and YouTube queue videos for you. Songs are being shortened into ringtones. There are personalised Spotify playlists ready to introduce you to everything, from Goblincore to the soundtrack for your funeral. Generative AI language model ChatGPT arrived and was instantly upgraded. Today, an AI Donald True perfectly covers Lana Del Ray’s ‘Summertime Sadness’. Tomorrow, it’s a rendition sung by a door from Minecraft. Trends are compounded by micro trends. Blokecore. Adidas Sambas. Jorts. These attention grabs stretch our perception of time, to borrow a phrase from Madison Schmalzer, we become attuned to these “micro-temporalities” (xiv). It becomes a synthesis of our habitualisation to the virtual space; speakers, shoelaces, pixels, anomalies; we exist in the slippage.

Speedrunners exemplify how this practice exists in digitality, developing a complex map that extends beyond passageways and into an unconnected series of frames. They expand the map from within, creating a new form of freeplay and expanding the dialogical relationship between the built environment and the subject. The impulse for speed underlines a media and culture obsessed with it, an infinitely self-replicating circle— it’s a natural reaction. Gluttonous consumption becomes an autonomous statement. Anthony Fontana speedruns the latest 6ix9ine album, Ludwig speed runs fast food drive-throughs, twinfettucine speed runs Duolingo in a completely unfamiliar language.

The term applied to parkour, ‘freerunning’ is a useful linguistic device. It explains the performance art of the movement— a desire to push the scope of what is physically possible in the name of reclaiming space. The movement is never truly free, but it is a pursuit of the ability to move freely. These transgressive spatial practices give the feeling of having a stake in a particular environment. ‘Speedrunning’ is similarly concerned with loosening, with a pursuit of spatial mastery in the digital sludge of commodities, hieroglyphics, abstractions.

Where the tracer demonstrates resistance to disciplinary elements in the urban street grid, speed runners wrench rules away from the mechanical, commercial and computational operations of technical media. The speedrunner holds up a concave mirror, reflecting our distorted, insane, fucked-up present. Peering into it, we can see the dense banality of late-stage capitalism, but there are glimpses of a communal euphoria, embedded in the folds and glitches.