Initial disclosure, this is not intended to criticize any specific tournament or demean the work and effort that goes into running them, it’s hard, generally thankless work that I have a great amount of respect for. Especially the speedgaming channels who are the primary hosting platforms for these tournaments, because that all looks like a spindly nightmare to manage and I’m not implying it’s not worthwhile on their parts. Hug your TO folks, they deserve it. Nevertheless, this will be a criticism of the general structure of the speedrun tournament and the pitfalls it often winds up falling into, especially in comparison to the kinds of esports it apes.
Speaking of esports, if you’re not up to speed on this whole thing, basic outline. People play video games against each other for money, in competitive fighting games this usually takes the form of an elimination tournament whereby players are seeded into a bracket and then eliminated as they lose. Fighting games have gotten pretty huge over the years and with the latest edition of the Evolution Championship, the fighting game community’s premier tournament, having prize pools of tens of thousand of dollars, it’s no surprise that speedrunning as a nascent vaguely esport shaped entity wants to get in on this action. This double-elimination format is the structure most frequently copied for speedrunning, so it’s what the majority of this article will talk about. This almost immediately runs headlong into the issues I will now ramble about.
Notably, popular tournament games like Randomizer or Mystery Game racing don’t suffer from much of what I’m going to talk about, this piece mainly concerns straight vanilla speedrunning. Speedrun tournaments are also rarely played for money, prize money tournaments are incredibly new to this scene but they are starting to happen, which is what compels me to write this in the first place.
Firstly, speedruns are inherently non-interactive between players. Racers can’t effect each other’s games. This sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but it bears emphasizing. Fighting games are interactive between players, they fight each other, the other player isn’t just a game system, but a living breathing person who you have to out-think, out-strategise and outplay in order to achieve victory. In a speedrun race, both players are playing entirely separate copies of the game, so they just have to do the thing that they do anyway. In this regard one could liken it to professional athletics like running or swimming, which is valid, but also then begs the question why we structure our events like 1v1 games and sports do rather than the athletic events that we more closely resemble. Athletics events aren’t conducted 1v1, because that would be incredibly silly and cumbersome. There’s no inherent reason why matches need to be 1v1 and can’t be conducted in groups of greater numbers simultaneously. But we don’t do it that way because these tournaments have an additional millstone around the neck in the form of streaming. Speedrunning and streaming are inextricably linked, and races become increasingly harder for a viewer to enjoy the more people you add to it, with anything over 4 generally being excessive. As a result, we consign ourselves to this limited format with generally few attempts to break the mold to find something more suitable.
Another issue this causes is that speedrun tournaments just take forever to resolve themselves. A fighting game tournament is done and dusted inside of a few hours, generally, with only the truly massive tournaments spanning more than a day. Speedrunning is a hobby where our mid-sized tournaments regularly take several months to decide a victor, which is completely insane. If we pulled numbers like EVO, our tournaments would take actual years. Part of the reason for this again is streaming culture being linked to the hobby, people don’t travel to congregate in a single place to compete, we all do it from the comfort of our own homes, online. So scheduling has to remain flexible to account for different timezones in this very global hobby, which sounds good! Until you get those matchups where two people on opposite sides of the planet need to play each other and the only window available for both players crops up once a week. Enough of these matchups will occur in a sufficiently large or not regionally localised tournament to cause massive hold-ups that further drag out the pacing of an already laboured tournament. Speedrun tournaments are therefore fantastic for initial buzz and excitement but tend to taper off in enthusiasm as they slowly drag towards their conclusion, with fewer matches later in the bracket meaning lots of downtime between actual tournament activity. In some ways, this is actually great for the hosting channels since it ensures they’ll have content to broadcast for months, for the players however it is usually excruciating. Viewers also are not going to pay attention to a bracket for that length of time, they’re likely to just skip around. Smash 4 Grand Finals at EVO18 took 30 minutes, which is a slow game and that match had a bracket reset in it. Our grand finals (if they go to fifth game, which CAN happen since speedrunning has also bafflingly adopted the best of 3 late in bracket rule) can at worst take five hours. The ENTIRE Olympics conducts itself over 16 days, a massively complicated undertaking between several countries and sports, we can’t run a tournament for a single game inside of 3 months. Viewers aren’t even guaranteed a constant stream of good matches for this obscenely long duration due to a unique problem with speedrun tournaments. Blowouts.
A blowout occurs when one runner is just much much better than the other, and will finish far ahead of the other. In competitive 1v1 games, these types of matches have a way of resolving themselves before you have much time to dwell on it, as a weaker opponent will get swiftly cleaned up by a stronger player, since these games allow a stronger player to leverage their skill to end the game faster and more decisively and can even allow creative expression by “styling” on a weaker opponent with gimmicky tactics or showboating, though this can often be impolite. In a directly interactive game, this kind of match has value for the players too, the weaker opponent can benefit from the experience and insight that comes with playing against a stronger opponent and it’s a large draw to entering tournaments for aspiring but not quite-as-skilled players. Speedrunning basically lacks this entirely, a weaker racer won’t get finished off, if anything, the race lasts longer as they slowly plod towards the finish line and everyone just gets bored and switches off and the commentator increasingly struggles to find things to talk about. In a directly competitive game, closer matches last longer as people trade sets or otherwise can’t quite gain an edge on the other. In speedrunning, worse performing players occupy more runtime. Better players will finish faster, which is the nature of fast gameplay but also sucks for spectating. This could be solved with some sort of mercy kill or forfeit clause, since in games like Chess it’s considered polite to concede if you have clearly lost and speedrun tournaments could probably benefit from something similar if the other player is just too far behind to be meaningful.
However, even that would not solve the problem that losing a race to someone much stronger than you doesn’t teach you anything. Unlike a competitive game where you gain experience and matchup knowledge or maybe just perspective, losing a speedrun race doesn’t tell you much other than that you were slower than the other guy. There’s nothing to be learned from this experience, other than maybe practice more, but if you needed to lose a race to figure that out I’m not sure how your mind works. Speedrunning is a very solo, isolated activity in this regard which makes it all the more curious of a fit for a 1v1 tournament. This leads into another problem where there’s just not that much incentive to enter one if you’re a distinctly mid or low-level player. Your time would likely be better spent practicing and improving your own PB unless you just enjoy racing for the hell of it, but you’re not going to get much out of a tournament that will actually improve your gameplay in a direct way. It gives some people motivation to practice more leading up to a tourney, certainly, and this is undeniably effective in its own way, but it’s the practice that’s helping, not the tourney. This segways neatly onto how tournaments figure into speedrunning’s general culture, namely, how they don’t.
In competitive games, tournament performance is everything. If you win EVO, you’re the king, that’s the ultimate mark of achievement and your name goes down in the history books as Best At Games. In speedrunning, everyone will forget by the end of the month who won what. I have no idea who’s won any tournaments and I’m deeply entrenched in this hobby, if I’m not keeping up, I seriously doubt most other people are. Tournaments have no infrastructure or prestige giving them much particular meaning because we assign all of it to another system. Speedrunning already has a system by which we measure and compare ourselves to each other, it’s called a leaderboard. If you wanna measure up to someone in a competitive game, you have to actually play them or win major tournaments to show your skills. In speedrunning, if you want to measure up to someone, check the leaderboard and look at other runs. Because speedrunning is an isolated singular activity, and good times in speedgames are functions of playtime, experience and consistency, people at the top of this board are also obviously likely to perform well in tournaments. There’s a much lessened possibility for exciting happenings and big upsets in a hobby that rewards consistency as a default. This isn’t even exclusive to speedrunning, God knows Usain Bolt and Micheal Phelps dominated their respective fields in the public eye. But even physical sports have a bit of a different culture, mainly focused around events rather than all-time records, so people still get excited about new blood at the Olympics or some such. There are no fresh faces in speedrunning, if you’re tearing ass up the leaderboard that everyone is already looking at, people are going to notice and you just become a known quantity. This has the habit of contributing to the general pointlessness of investing time into one as a lower level player where early matches in bracket that can sometimes be as wild as 1st vs 400th where they entirely feel like a formality until the top stages. This combines with another problem endemic to speedrunning, the player pool.
Speedrunning, despite the massively increased prominence in recent years, is not very large. The talent pool is global, but even the most popular of speedgames max out at like, 150 active players at a time. Most, far far less than that. In such a pool, it’s much easier for one or two particularly dominating players to…well, dominate. This drastically reduces the drama and narrative of a tournament, particularly because the leaderboard where we numerically rank ourselves exists and is the most prominent aspect of how we compare to each other, so the potential for surprises is minimal. Potential surprises would be limited to player busting out a new strategy or glitch on the fly to gain the edge, but this goes against speedrunning’s cultural ethos of shared collaboration and would likely be viewed as poor sportsmanship and busting out a fancy new trick on a tournament, especially one that may have a cash prize, is virtually guaranteed to ruffle feathers and may just get you DQ’ed depending on the tournament’s predilection for glitches, since some more popular tournament games have slightly bewildering rules pertaining to glitch use despite the hobby revolving more or less entirely around maximal abuse of such things. In a directly competitive game, revealing a new technique or paradigm would be incredibly exciting and could completely shake everything up unexpectedly. In speedrunning, you will probably just upset people, which lessens the incentive for people to even try and search for such things as a potential avenue to victory which I think is a missed opportunity, but this problem is somewhat endemic to the culture, so good luck with that.
Both of the above make tournaments with cash prizes less of a community wide rush to compete for the prize and more a relatively easy way for a select top few runners to pick up a quick paycheck and buzz off again. A thing in speedrunning generally is that people who are fortunate enough to be able to stream full-time and can live off it will thus have more time to dedicate to their speedrunning, and so dominate their game while others just won’t be able to, they don’t have the raw hours available to them. Tournaments do not really help this dichotomy any, cash prizes may actually make it worse currently by not being sufficient to really make a living off chasing, but do act as nice supplementary income for someone who can already dedicate themselves to the pursuit. Anyone who quits their job to live off speedrun tournament cash is a more likely contender for a Darwin Award than anything else.
Now this problem exists in directly competitive games to some extent as well, but it’s mitigated by tournament performance being far more important in the culture as well as sponsors who are willing to fund a player who performs consistently. There isn’t anyone really sponsoring speedrunners, they’re sponsoring speedrun streamers, certainly, but that’s for the stream, not the speedruns which is a crucial distinction to bear in mind. Given the limited opportunities for promotion that a potential sponsor would get out of the common online speedrun tournament and all the other pitfalls it has, why would they ever actually invest in this area? I recall Goose had a take before about sponsors and how marathons should allow runners to plug a sponsor for funding their travel expenses and that was met with mixed reactions but in light of how important they are in general to esports scenes, I think it’s actually one of the least crazy things that guy has ever said. They’re rather necessary if people actually want this culture to take off in any particularly mainstream capacity.
All of this and likely more that I haven’t mentioned or thought of yet is why I think the way in which the speedrunning community generally conducts its tournament events is fundamentally flawed and won’t break into the proverbial big time in its current form. Our structure is ill-suited to the kind of competition we actually do, our culture inhibits its growth and it’s inherently full of problems as raw entertainment. We will need to re-calibrate and come up with a new format and style, one that better suits the unique kind of competitiveness that speedrunning displays rather than trying to copycat those who’ve come before us to middling effect if people ever want it to take off in a bigger kind of way. There have been precious few attempts from people to innovate on the format and it is territory that I think needs much more exploration for the hobby to expand meaningfully into the tournament space.