yeah, i got into speedrunning through 4chan in the wake of AGDQ 2013, and sort of drifted away through the end of 2014, with AGDQ 2015 being my last event (before i left the country for work). i drifted away for a couple of reasons, i guess;
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got bored of speedrunning. this is probably the main one; i could never find a game i really loved enough to do hundreds or thousands of attempts at. i also was never particularly good at the creative aspects of speedrunning: routing, glitch-hunting, optimization. that’s the stuff that is really enjoyable about speedrunning, in hindsight, but i didn’t necessarily realize that at the time, so i tended to try and run games where the randomness made perfect routing less important, or ones where the routing was already set in stone. basically i was a “grind monkey” without the grind, and without a game i loved enough to commit to.
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going to GDQs was kind of an eye-opening experience for me in terms of realizing, there’s always many many levels of nerd above you – and there is simultaneously a sort of prestige in their removal from “normies” combined with all the negative sides of nerd-dom. guys who didn’t know how to act around women, people who didn’t shower, didn’t have social skills, etc, but hey you know all about NES games so.
it’s important to note here that most good or popular speedrunners in my experience were the exact opposite – very nice dudes (almost all dudes) who were super friendly and open, and most of whom didn’t have these massive egos as a result of their e-fame. there was also definitely an age divide: once dudes got into their mid-20s, they generally chilled out. so i still have some good friends who were or are speedrunners – trihex, a small minority of folks from /srg/, folks from the halo speedrunning community. but at the end of the day my tolerance for folks who exhibit behaviors i outgrew in high school is fairly low.
i also struggled with the fact that i lacked a lot of video game touchstones with these people. if you grew up with NES games, i don’t have a lot in common with you! i grew up on windows 98 pc titles, original xbox, 360. i only became a PC gamer after I drifted away from the speedrun community in early 2015. speedrunning is also generally a fairly constrained demographic – white, male, stereotypically nerdy/glasses/balding, late high school to early 20s – with the associated pathologies. it might be different now, as the scene has seen year-over-year growth. -
i came to speedrunning through 4chan – /srg/, the speedrunning general thread in /vg/. when this started in the wake of AGDQ 2013, we were a tiny group of people that enjoyed getting into the hobby and all sort of dreamt of ‘making the big leagues’ and running at a GDQ. unfortunately, the general sort of neo-nazi fascism that pollutes 4chan in general also made its way to various members of the 4chan community. the sorts of folks that would meet up at a GDQ were usually really nice, but the stream monsters, the thread monsters, and the folks who hid behind anonymity were the vilest sorts of people. i got all sorts of shit for being an “SJW”, this, that, the other thing. the other thing i started realizing was that these sorts of attitudes weren’t just an /srg/ thing – they spread to the wider speedrun community. i don’t know how it is nowadays, but there was a point in 2014 when pretty much every major speedrunner would lurk the 4chan thread and kind of absorb all this vitriolic shit that was being said about them, other people, women, trans folks, racial minorities, ‘sellouts’, prominent personalities in general. getting at all popular meant putting a target on your back. it’s not a coincidence that this sort of coincided with the rise of gamergate. there is a strong strain of ‘purity’ discourse in speedrunning – people construct this false dichotomy of folks who are doing it ‘for the love’ versus folks who are ‘fake’ / ‘doing it for the money’. it’s very easy to get lumped into that latter category if you run strange categories, run a website, are vocal in the community, or bring attention to yourself in any way. a fair bit of awful shit was said about me personally, and when it came down to attempted doxing, endlessly reposting your picture with hateful comments, basically inciting a hate mob for no discernible reason, well, i decided that the hobby wasn’t worth the risk.
a lot of the srg folks who were explicitly using trans slurs or tacitly accepting a discourse that was heavily tinged with racism, were the same folks that actively or passively supported gamergate, were the same folks that eventually bled over into the anime nazi #MAGA clique. there are limits to my desire to voluntarily expose myself to this kind of behavior. i’ve got better things to do than sit around in an IRC where randos throw around racial slurs and i’m supposed to be cool with it otherwise i’m #reddit #triggered #sjw.
i love halo speedrunners, many of those dudes i talk to on discord on a daily basis still. heck, i was part of a triumvirate that ran haloruns.com for a number of years and created exponential growth in the halo speedrunning community. but in the speedrunning community at large, as a racial minority and as someone who holds liberal values, there are people who are on your side, people you can have good discussions with, people who will tacitly or actively question or badger you, and people who straight-up have it out for you.