With Summer Games Done Quick 2017 about to wrap-up and the commercial (and social?) rise of e-sports, I think it’s important to draw, or erase a line separating “Speedrunning” and “e-sports.” With road, track, cycling, and other races being a staple in the pantheon of traditional sports, should we consider speedrunning an e-sport? But before we begin to make and destroy distinctions between the two, we need to understand what each is.
To me, the current definition of e-sport appears to require some modification. According to Dictionary.com, e-sports are “competitive tournaments of videogames, especially among professional gamers.” I think to the general public, this seems reasonable, but I think for someone embedded within the gaming community, this encapsulation requires expanding. I would argue that an e-sport qualifies as any competitive instance of a video game, whether at an amateur or professional level and regardless of game type. Most often, e-sport manifests in head-to-head, player-versus-player games and scenarios like League of Legends or Overwatch or Super Smash Bros.— but why should we limit ourselves to these direct head-to-head games, traditional sports don’t adhere to these bounds.
Speedrunning represents one of the few instances of a non-head-to-head game, but is it still an e-sport? While the definition of e-sports leaves some details wanting, speed running has a fairly straight-forward definition. According to Wikipedia, “A speedrun is a play-through (or a recording thereof) of a video game performed with the intention of completing it as fast as possible within one’s own ability.” In essence, performing a speedrun is the same as racing everyone else completing the same game, level, or section. So does this fall under the umbrella of e-sports? In a traditional sense, no, because often speedrunners most often play solo, at home or elsewhere. But speedrunning most certainly falls into my broader definition of competitive gaming, and the passion and discipline it requires are comparable to “accepted” e-sports:
Cheese05’s world record speedrun through Super Mario 64 (above) reflects so many of the qualities found in “accepted” e-sports. The passion of victory at the end caps off an almost two-hour long precision-based run through an incredible game, a viewing sensation found in e- and traditional sports. Watching this run, for me, was not a far cry from watching Gwen Jorgensen take home the gold for the US at the 2016 Rio games (similar victory reactions around 0:50) [I’m not crying, you are]. The basic components of what makes speedrunning, other e-sports, and traditional sports fun to watch and compete in are the same. Passion, dedication, support, triumph and failure most certainly capture speedrunning into the umbrella of e-sport.
So we are going to erase the line between e-sport athletes and speedrunners. What are the implications of this? I think predominantly, it gets me thinking about a grander future for speedrunning. Will there someday be more events like Awesome Games Done Quick where the world’s best speedrunners compete live against one another? Will I one day visit a stadium to watch Super Mario players race each other to the final fight like I’m going to watch League of Legends in the fall?
I don’t know, but I sure as hell am excited about that possibility.