I'll confess I've never been as up on the Mega Man phenomenon as I should have been. Growing up I got to play the original, but not enough to get good at it. At home the only gaming device I was allowed was my Game Boy, so I made do with a couple of the Game Boy titles until I could use an emulator.

In the previous entry on this subject I mentioned playing fair as a quality common to all games that are speed-run-friendly, and this refers to possibly the most important aspect of game design: heedful circumspection (you must have seen this coming). This bombastic philosophical term refers to the way a person uses the tools and abilities available to pursue a goal. A game that is conducive to speed runs, a game like Super Metroid, is designed as possibilities; a player will at any given time be expected to have certain tools or abilities, and the levels will be designed according to what abilities the developers intend for them to have. This is "playing fair" because a deal exists between player and game: the player has abilities, and the game provides obstacles with these in mind. If the player somehow "outwits" the intended path and uses his or her abilities in a new or inventive way, a game that plays fair does not invoke some deus ex machina to prevent this unintended progress.

Obviously this design philosophy has to be used carefully. If the game is not well crafted, game-breaking exploits may emerge, a terrifying possibility that has led many a developer to carefully wrap each layer of a game in layers of safe, reliable limitation. The more this is done, the more the game environment and abilities reveal themselves to the player as obstacles rather than useful things at hand. This notion is by no means unique to speed running, but it's never been more apparent than in the actions of a skilled player running an artfully made game.

Another scourge of speed runs that hurts everyone is the forced delay. The freakish impulse to speed run every game ever made was savagely put down by the realization that a run of Xenogears would have seven hours of dialogue alone. I'm not making fun of the game for being wordy here (I'm in no position to, frankly), but rather for being unstoppably wordy. Four-thousand pages of shallow symbolism and mind-grindingly inane plot twists (spoiler alert: soylent green is people) are no problem as long as the text moves by at a good clip, but as in many games there is no control given to the player as the exposition grinds its way across the screen. I'm not just going out of my way to bash Xenogears here, either, since some of my favorite games ever are guilty of this--any Zelda game ever made has been full of slow text you can do nothing about, and I can't even count how many RPGs have had sluggish menus that make you wait for every input to register. A lot of thought goes into game flow, but at no point can I understand why it would be necessary to display text letter by letter rather than all at once, and when the majority of the notes on a speed run are there to describe the finely-tuned method of skipping text you know there's something very, very wrong. Voice acting has only aggravated this problem, as there are usually three second pauses between each line that make things take even longer than ever. Once again, an obstacle to speed running presents itself as an obstacle to casual, everyday play of the game.

The last aspect of a good speed run game is a touchy one--randomization. It's the hallmark of every RPG, and to a certain extent is necessary to keep a game experience fresh. It's also a case where speed runs can highlight problems with a game, but aren't necessarily the guide for how things ought to flow. Grand Theft Auto 3 is a perfect example of this: often, some random and inescapable event complicates the mission you're currently playing. This can be game-breakingly frustrating when a random event simply makes you lose the mission outright, but when these complications force you to adapt to emerging situations, letting you discover the power you have to make things work out in your favor, the game shines gloriously. Neither case is particularly good for a speed run, but the lesson they can teach us is there in the former.

A great example is Yakuza in Metroid Fusion. This boss fight is the bane of every speed runner's existence, and anyone who plays the game will feel their pain: Yakuza jumps around the room randomly until chance works in your favor and the game deigns to present his sole weak point. Most boss fights work on the mechanic of revealing a weak point, but ideally it is up to the player to coax it out, not the game. The beauty of fighting Kraid in Super Metroid is washed away when suddenly instead of forcing his mouth open you're waiting for it to open. These moments pull the player out of the situation, replacing challenge with frustration.

Ultimately, the lesson to be learned from speed running is that the video game should be placed in the hands of the person playing it. For a medium whose defining aspect is interactivity, an alarming amount of game design these days seems to be carefully and meticulously obtuse, restrictive, or downright punitive. Games work best when they reward experimentation, and there are few better places to see the best and worst of this the medium has to offer than in the ultimate forum for experimentation: speed runs.

A lot of games back in the day started making a big show of having "role-playing elements" worked in. In some cases this just meant there was an inventory that may or may not affect gameplay, but sometimes it translated into actual choices the player got to make. The phenomenon began long before anyone talked about it, probably most originally and elegantly with the first Mega Man. The levels could be tackled in any order you pleased, and the weapons you got along the way would make each level a very different experience from that had by someone playing in a different order.


There are more obvious examples, like Metroid and The Legend of Zelda, that have already been talked about enough. In Mega Man, the opportunities given to the player to progress in any way he or she chose were an integral part of the gameplay, and in Metroid and Zelda they give the player an opportunity to experience the same areas from different perspectives as the game progressed. Aspects of these games could present themselves to players in ways that were determined by choices they themselves made. It was primitive, yes, but well-used, and another example of ingenious developers making the most of small games. Because this was an intentional decision made by the game designers, much effort was put into preventing the player from acquiring everything at the outset of the game and playing through the entire thing homogeneously.

In console RPGs this phenomenon became rather more mechanical. Leveling up was mostly just a means of satisfying a player's Progress Quest appetite, and while some gameplay complexity would arise from it, it was really just a way to keep certain powerful items and monsters out of reach until the designers felt they weren't imbalancing. Character progression became a way to put video games on rails, and players found that usually by the time they got that powerful spell or item, they only got it because it wasn't very useful anymore. Over time, the means of extending a game's duration have become the means of limiting the possibilities available to the player. Somewhere along the line this process became moralized.

It's a common bit of stubborn ignorance that people want everything about the world to conform to their own assumptions. Explanations of the world around us have a way of "fulfilling themselves". When Isaac Newton says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, the observation becomes a moral proverb: actions have consequences. Soon we find people punishing others to teach them this lesson about the world. We call them natural consequences, but they are really imposed by people more often than by nature. The moral law set forth is that someone has to pay when something goes wrong; all forces must balance out or there can be no rest. "You can't get something for nothing."

There has never been as great an example of this warped and misguided ethical view as the Grand Theft Auto series. I'm not sure anyone has complained before that Grand Theft Auto reinforced traditional moral values to a fault, but I assure you it's the case. The games have toys and joys too numerous to mention, and the devoted player who overcomes their challenges will have a lot of fun with the bonuses he or she unlocks. But the challenges themselves are not fun by any definition of the word; they are punishments, ordeals set forth so that the player's fun might not accidentally grow out of control. The developers, when including a very fast bicycle or a well-armed helicopter, seem to have collectively decided that these things are too good to give to the player for free. The player must pay for the privilege, above and beyond the cost of the game.

The result is that every mission has about a hundred ways to lose and only one way to win. Punishment is doled out liberally, and the bonus missions that unlock great things are the purest distillations of raw agony. Powerful, useful tools and games in GTA are withheld not to develop the game experience or to prevent a trivial completion of the game, but out of spite. And those who complete the challenges will tell themselves that it is worth it. That the satisfaction of accomplishing these meaningless feats of repetition and arbitrary precision make the rewards that much more satisfying. These people will grow up to deprive their children of joys and tell them it "builds character". After all, misery necessitates equal reward. It's a law of nature.

It's not worth it. Each entry in the Grand Theft Auto series is more dehumanizing than the last. As much fun as I've had flying around with a jetpack and a dozen kinds of weapons blowing up half of a fake Las Vegas, if I could return not just GTA: San Andreas but the entire experience I would. It's more fun to watch an expert play than it is to play. It's more fun to download a 100% save file off the Internet than it is to get 100% yourself. The game allows the player to engage in violent sex acts, murder national guardsmen, and commit a terrorist act on a hydroelectric dam, all in the name of profit and power, but none of those aspects of this game is as hurtful or socially base as the "challenges" offered the player.

I've been into speed runs for a while now. There's a lot to say about speed runs in general, but for me the best cross-section of the history and awesomeness of the practice is found when you look at the Metroid series.

Every Metroid game included a timer that changed the ending of the game depending on how quickly you beat it. This was actually pretty common practice in the NES days, but Metroid stands out because not only did it tell you what your time was after the credits rolled, but if you were extra speedy the reward was irresistible to my peurile fourth-grade mind: Samus would take off her power suit and reveal her hotness in her underwear. This was honestly better than any porn.

At any rate, speed running of Metroid really took off, especially with Super Metroid. The game was one of the most elegantly made in history, with a world that opened up as possibilities in an intricate environment rather than arbitrary barriers to linear progress. Even better than this, though, is that the developers included a few secret abilities that the player could use to bypass a lot of the game's "intended" progression. These abilities were intuitive yet difficult, and were not at all obvious; most players got through the game without learning them. On top of this, people learned to abuse the physics of the game in useful and consistent ways. These abuses seemed so natural they felt like intended moves, and terms like "spike jumping" and "mockballing" became part of the lexicon not just for speed runners but fans of the game in general.

When the series went 3D with Metroid Prime, it remained surprisingly easy to speed run. While most or all of the exploits seemed clearly unintended, the way players manipulated physics in the game still felt like it was "playing fair" with the game engine. Speed runs were just as interesting as ever, and continue to this day.

However, with the game's sequel the party ended. The developers of Metroid Prime 2 actually built the game deliberately so that sequence breaking, the way speed runners bypass chunks of the game to beat it in impressively minimalistic ways, would be impossible. When a game allows players to accidentally fall out of the sequence and get stuck or confused, it makes sense for the developers to program around it, but in this case it was simply that their vision of the game was completely linear. It was like a direct affront to the speed running community. The challenge was met, and the game was broken just the same, but it wasn't the same as before.

The main difference was that while Super Metroid and Metroid Prime placed certain areas legitimately out of reach to the player, it was possible to get there through arcane and inventive means without the intended ability or item. In Metroid Prime 2, they put invisible walls in place to make it completely impossible for anybody to get there who "wasn't supposed to". This sort of thing is now common practice, and raises the question: how much should game designers build their games with speed running in mind?

Older games were packed with glitches and abusable oversights that made speed running interesting, much like with the first Metroid. Nowadays, though, the idea of a game's design being elegantly open is generally forgotten, and games are "open" in very controlled ways. Developers don't seem to realize that a game can be conducive to speed running without being glitchy. When discussion comes up of whether a game is going to be interesting for speed runs, recent games are usually wrapped in duct tape, holding the player on set paths through brute force. This is usually to keep the game from being confusingly open, but it seems like developers have forgotten how to make a game open while still making objectives clear and progress rewarding.

Not every game has to be open and nonlinear, but this phenomenon got me thinking about how all games could benefit from being made with speed runs in mind, and as someone who's watched basically every speed run ever made I've got a few observations about how design decisions that get in the way of speed running can get in the way of the game's fun even in an ordinary play context.