Content uploaded by Jonathan Hay
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Jonathan Hay on Aug 08, 2020
Content may be subject to copyright.
doi: 10.5325/jpoststud.4.1.0005
Journal of Posthuman Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2020
Copyright © 2020 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
FULLY OPTIMIZED: THE (POST)HUMAN
ART OF SPEEDRUNNING
JONATHAN HAY, UNIVERSITY OF CHESTER
ABSTRACT
Over time, speedrunning communities work collaboratively to optimize, re-
configure, and improve upon the quickest possible completion times of video
game titles. I argue that this progressive ethos, coupled with the performative
nature of modern speedrunning, lends a distinctly artistic character to the
practice. Speedrunning is a form of (post)human expression that is manifested
not only through the programming of a video game, but also through players’
approach to gameplay. By choosing to speedrun, players actively impose a
discrete temporal limit on the inhuman algorithms of video games, and so
attempt to conquer and thereby curtail their technological novelty. However,
within the field of game studies, the literature published on speedrunning to
date is almost unilaterally anthropocentric, and focuses on the transgressive
nature of the practice, ignoring the intricacies of its technological fundament.
Rather, (post)humans and technologies interact in a transformational manner
through intra-active assemblages, broadening the condition of embodiment.
To theorize a posthumanistic theory of the practice, this article takes as its
focus the speedrunning community of the video game Super Mario Odyssey
and suggests that speedrunning may ultimately be considered a mode of (post)
human performance art.
KEYWORDS
Posthumanism, speedrunning, video game, performance art, anthropocentrism
As in cognate forms of new media, the everyday ubiquity of video games in
contemporary Western cultures is symptomatic of the always-already “(post)
human” (Hayles , ) character of the mundane lifeworlds of those mem-
bers of our species who live in such technologically saturated societies. is
article therefore takes as its theoretical basis Hayles’s proposal that our species
01_Hay.indd 5
01_Hay.indd 5
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
| JONATHAN HAY
currently inhabits an intermediate stage between being human and posthuman;
that we are currently (post)human, engaged in a process of constantly becoming
posthuman. In the space of an entirely unremarkable hour, we might very con-
ceivably interface with our mobile phone in order to access and interpret GPS
data, stream a newly released album of music, phone a family member who is
physically separated from us by many miles, pass time playing a clicker game,
and then absentmindedly catch up on breaking news from across the globe.
In this context, video games are merely one cultural practice through which
we regularly interface with technology, and hence are merely one constituent
aspect of the consummate inundation of the everyday lives of (post)humans
by technologies. Nevertheless, the formalized nature of our species’s interaction
with video games renders the medium particularly indicative of the autopoetic
manner in which contemporary (post)human subjectivity is mediated through
technology more broadly. It is consequently significant that video games are
not only the products of an incredibly lucrative industry, but also a major facet
of contemporary popular culture.
Since the medium first emerged into arcades in the s, video games have
not only permeated and significantly transformed the landscape of popular cul-
ture, but also become the object of sustained academic attention. e now well-
established field of game studies continues to expand alongside the commercial
successes of video game titles, yet despite the object of its enquiry, this field is
rarely conversant with posthuman philosophy. In her article “Automated State
of Play,” Sonia Fizek notes that “[a]utomated play is a growing phenomenon . . .
from idling gameworlds, seemingly autonomous NPCs, player-automated
characters, to smart self-learning bots” (Fizek ), and she subsequently
proposes that self-playing games have begun to instigate an alternative to the
anthropocentric ideologies that govern both video game criticism and player
cultures. Fizek accordingly proposes that there is a need for additional, thor-
ough, and persistent work in the field of game studies to theoretically “rethink
digital games and play, shying away from the purely anthropocentric perspec-
tives according to which humans are the sole active subjects and the game a
mouldable object of their desire,” since at present it still remains the case that
the “proverbial state of play in how digital games are perceived and defined
reveals a very binary worldview: an active human player versus an acted upon
non-human game” (Fizek ). As Fizek implies, gaming practices that blur
the boundary between players and video game technologies deconstruct the
humanist performance model, and so are appreciably (post)human.
Nonetheless, while it follows that with the advent of self-playing games,
“the agential dimension of the machine becomes an ever more present part of
01_Hay.indd 6
01_Hay.indd 6
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
FULLY OPTIMIZED: THE (POST)HUMAN ART OF SPEEDRUNNING |
gameplay” (Fizek ), the paradigm shift toward the posthuman model of
gameplay identified by Fizek is problematized by the persistence of antithet-
ical and stubbornly anthropocentric ideologies within player cultures. One
gaming community that is centered upon such an anthropocentric ideal is the
speedrunning community, which undertakes and facilitates a universalizing
mode of gameplay which is premised upon “the act and process of reaching a
goal in a video game while intending to minimize interaction cycles between
human and machine” (Koziel , ). More specifically, participants within
the speedrunning community attempt to complete a given video game title
in as short a time as possible by repeatedly running the game from start to
end. eir quickest discrete run—the apotheosis of their repeated efforts at
achieving a quick time through gameplay—is then subjected to peer review
by the wider community. Once a run has been verified to certify its legit-
imacy, the time the player achieved on the run—his or her personal best, or
PB—is added to that particular video game title’s ranked leaderboard on
speedrun.com. e leaderboards of more popular titles are subdivided into
categories, which may have different requisites for runs, such as requiring
completion,
avoiding any gameplay element that the community deems
a glitch, or even requiring the player to play blindfolded. Aside from peer
reviewing the runs of others, the speedrunning community further engages
in collaborative practices by researching, detailing, and sharing the optimal
routes they have discovered, so that fellow runners may utilize the corpus of
the community’s knowledge.
e community’s totalizing perception of speed as a teleology ensures that
although individual speedrunners compete for the quickest completion times
within particular games, the speedrunning community in aggregate hypostatizes
a collaborative attempt to complete the entire published canon of video games
as expeditiously as possible. As Eric Koziel’s assertation that speedrunning is
based around a “measurable proficiency” metric on behalf of its player reveals
(Koziel , ), the community conceives of the praxis as an egalitarian
mode of competition between human players, within which the quantifiable
value of speed serves an autotelic purpose. Hence, although Fizek presumes
that the “digital and networked nature of the computer calls for a decentralised
understanding of the player as an active agent” (Fizek ), at the level of dis-
course between participants, the speedrunning community instead reasserts a
thoroughly humanistic model of agency in gameplay, which figures the video
game as a totality entirely distinct from its player, and as a technological object
that should be conquered as optimally as possible by the human agent. Yet, as I
shall demonstrate, the performative aspect of speedrunning nonetheless reveals
01_Hay.indd 7
01_Hay.indd 7
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
| JONATHAN HAY
the distinctly (post)humanistic character of everyday life in Western societies.
Whereas Tanya Krzywinska and Douglas Brown assert that video game “players
are interpellated through regimes of progress and predictability into a humanist
rather than a posthumanist position” (Krzywinska and Brown , ), I will
demonstrate that the performative creativity and artistic rigor that underpin
speedrunning practices palpably disrupt the humanist separation between
player and game, epitomizing the in-phenomenal and characteristically (post)
human character of everyday life.
e ostensibly egalitarian and inclusive nature of speedrunning is problema-
tized by the incapacious demographics of the players who choose to undertake
the activity, who—despite the practice having a global audience—are almost
exclusively white, male, Western, and able-bodied. Such a skewed demographic
is not, however, unique to the speedrunning community, and is reflected not
only in the majority of gaming cultures, but also by the gameplay objectives
of many video games themselves. As Astrid Ensslin emphasizes, “the gaming
industry is (still) male-dominated, for which reason the needs of female gamers,
designers and developers are often sidelined” (Ensslin , ), and as Anna
Everett further affirms, the lack of character customization options within
the majority of video games functions principally to interpellate the “essential
and privileged male gaming subject . . . who is ‘universalized’ under the sign
of whiteness” (Everett , ). To give just one example, racist and sexist
ideologies are patent in two of Nintendo’s highest grossing titles. In the dec-
ades since the inception of their respective series, Mario and Link have both
perpetually engaged in periodic and recursive quests to rescue their princesses
Peach and Zelda. Both these series have migrated from D to D graphics,
had titles released on multiple video game systems, and played host to a range
of fresh gameplay mechanics, but the object of their gameplay has failed to
move beyond the misogynistic trope of the damsel in distress. Consequently,
although it may ostensibly seem contrarian to claim that speedrunning is in
any sense a posthumanistic practice, this article argues that the activity of
speedrunning may reasonably be considered to be an emerging (post)human
art form.
If we presume that the “essential feature in art is its power of perfecting exist-
ence, its production of perfection” (Nietzsche , ), then the endeavor of
speedrunners to produce optimal gameplay through practice reveals an artistic
pursuit of perfection that surpasses anthropocentric ideologies by situating
the (post)human in intimate dialogue with technology. As the cultural sphere
constantly metamorphoses, established artistic modalities are supplemented by
new approaches, broadening customary definitions of what constitutes valid
artistic practice. Consequent on such challenges, the conventionally defined
01_Hay.indd 8
01_Hay.indd 8
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
FULLY OPTIMIZED: THE (POST)HUMAN ART OF SPEEDRUNNING |
boundaries of art undergo redefinition. Consider two examples: in the s the
composer John Cage’s postmodern composition 4’33” interpellated its unwitting
audience into the role of its instrument, and thereby invalidated presumptions
of there being a rigid separation between works of art and their consumers;
and more recently, in the late twentieth century, the rise to prominence of
BioArt has problematized assumptions that our species’ scientific pursuits have
ever been distinct from our artistic endeavors. is article will subsequently
contend that, in a manner analogous to such prior artistic developments and
movements, speedrunning can be conceived as an artistic practice that refutes
assumptions about both artistic performance and the relationship between our
species and technology in the artistic process. It will prove necessary to begin
by situating this thesis in relation to the field of game studies, and in particular,
the current literature on speedrunning.
THE DEATH OF THE DEVELOPER
Although speedrunning has been practiced in some form since video gaming
began, there is still “relatively little [academic] literature on speedrunning,”
which emblematizes an “apparent deficiency in existing game scholarship”
(Scully-Blaker ). Although Fanny Barnabé () and Koziel () have
both independently echoed fragmentary discussions within the speedrunning
community itself by beginning to position speedrunning as a mode of perform-
ance art, in order to advance this as-yet-underdeveloped interpretation of the
practice, it is necessary to emphasize the artistic character of the practice. In
particular, in the majority of the academic literature on speedrunning that has
been published to date, there is a pervading overemphasis upon the purport-
edly transgressive character of the practice (Franklin ; Scully-Blaker ;
Barnabé , ). Seb Franklin, for instance, characterizes speedrunning as
a means of playing “through the game in ways that are other than those in-
tended at the design and programming stages” (Franklin , ). Franklin’s
emphasis on the thought processes of the game developer is highly extraneous,
because it presumes that speedrunning is principally an attempt to play video
games in a contrary manner to the way the developers intended; however, his
conceptualization of speedrunning as a transgressive practice echoes the stance
of numerous other theorists. In attempts to theorize speedrunning, the emphasis
laid by Franklin and others upon the intentionality of video game developers
is therefore problematic, because the notion of authorial intentionality is an
obsolete and exceptionally dubitable philosophical paradigm.
In his article “La mort de l’auteur,”
the structuralist critic Roland Barthes
contends that “e author is a modern figure” (Barthes , ), symptomatic
01_Hay.indd 9
01_Hay.indd 9
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
| JONATHAN HAY
of anthropocentric and humanistic modes of thought. Barthes thus concludes
that the meaning of cultural texts is polysemic and exists independent of the
historical contexts and convictions of their authors. Because textual meaning
is formed subjectively, it is self-defeating to attempt to determine the character
of the author or developer’s intentions at the time of producing a text or game,
and the notion of reading—or playing—contrary to authorial intent is therefore
founded on a fundamentally erroneous supposition from the outset. Rather
than a deliberate act of transgression, speedrunning must instead be considered
a manifestation of the immersive cognitive state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
terms flow: the “[e]njoyment [that] appears at the boundary between boredom
and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity
to act” (Csikszentmihalyi , ). Speedrunning performances accordingly
manifest a creative synthesis—showcasing the speedrunner’s habitualization to
his or her in-phenomenal means of interaction with the technological appa-
ratus. erefore, speedrunning is not a transgressive act, but a performance of
technologically embodied creativity.
By having presumed that the developers of video games retain authority over
their texts, and hence that gameplay must proceed with either a normative or a
transgressive proclivity, speedrunning criticism has frequently failed to recognize
the vital importance of the technological aspect of the practice. It is therefore
necessary for this article to move beyond the prevalent yet demonstrably
facile discussions of whether speedrunning is a subversive activity or not, and
instead to formulate a posthumanistic theory of the practice. We must, as it
were, theoretically suppose the death of the developer. I by no means intend to
imply, however, that the practice of speedrunning should be theorized through
a narratological lens—such an approach would prove greatly reductive to un-
derstandings of the practice. As Paweł Frelik emphasizes, when narratological
methodologies are applied within the field of game studies, they are indicative
of a “compulsion to see video games as a new frontier of storytelling, [which,]
however, remains at odds with the character of digital visual culture” (Frelik
, ). While narratology “seeks to identify in [video games] both the con-
tinuation of traditional narrative strategies and their permutations, affected by
the constraints and affordances of these new forms” (Frelik , ), video
games are a distinct and innovative medium. Although video games make use
of “narrative and thematics,” they are more acutely “concerned with simulation
and participation” (Frelik , ), and thus, if their artistic integrity is to
be conceptualized adequately, both video games and speedrunning practices
must be analyzed in terms which acknowledge their technological fundament.
is is best achieved via a ludological approach, which, by foregrounding the
01_Hay.indd 10
01_Hay.indd 10
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
FULLY OPTIMIZED: THE (POST)HUMAN ART OF SPEEDRUNNING |
significance of practiced game play, emphasizes the aspects in which speedrun-
ning is a distinctive and emergent performative practice.
As Hayles asserts, when in assemblage with new media such as video games,
the (post)human’s “involvement extends beyond cerebral to affective and bodily
engagements” (Hayles , ), and so the player enters what we may desig-
nate a technological/(post)human assemblage, within which both parties are
augmented for the duration of their interaction. Accordingly, as Ensslin theorizes,
(post)human players “interact with videogame content in highly individualised,
multilinear ways which are never exactly the same from one person to the
next” (Ensslin , ), and so the semantic character of each assemblage
formed between a given player and a given video game is phenomenologically
unique to a greater extent than the player’s interaction with a book, or film,
could be. e player therefore implicitly gains agency through interfacing with
the video game medium, as the sequence of gameplay events in the majority
of modern games is only partially fixed, and thus large portions of titles are
agentially contingent. us, in a tangible manifestation of how “the complex
dynamics between the body and the machine entwine together to codetermine
our situation” as (post)humans living in technologized lifeworlds (Hayles ,
), players gain a relatively increased level of agency in the assemblage when
interfacing with a video game.
Barnabé recognizes the highly collective nature of speedrunning com-
munities when she contends that, rather than “being defined as an inspired
creator and owner of his work, the author of a speedrun is therefore more like
the performer of a script whose development does not entirely belong to him”
(Barnabé ). Nevertheless, her model is still based on a model of human
subjectivity, which implicitly presupposes that the player’s agency is absolute,
and denies the distinctive role of the technological/(post)human assemblage
within the practice. Likewise, although Koziel suggests that the definitive
purpose of speedrunning is seeing “what humans [a]re capable of in” a given
game (Koziel , ), an acknowledgement of the role of the video game
technology itself must be added to this equation—specifically in terms of the
manner in which the player intra-acts with it. As video game technologies
palpably transform (post)human agency, speedrunning can instead be defined
in posthuman terms as the co-constitutive practice of playing a video game quickly,
taken to the level of expertise.
Now that I have offered a redefinition of the practice, it will next be ne-
cessary to explicate the nuances of the posthuman aspect of speedrunning in
greater detail. As the speedrunning community is composed of a remotely
networked and constantly shifting multiplicity of players and technologies, it
01_Hay.indd 11
01_Hay.indd 11
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
| JONATHAN HAY
proves conducive for this thesis to ground its theoretical analysis by analyzing
the gameplay mechanics and speedrunning practice of one specific video game,
which can be taken as synecdochal of the practice more broadly.
SPEEDRUNNING AND SUPER MARIO ODYSSEY
Released in on the Nintendo Switch, Super Mario Odyssey is the second
most recent entry in Nintendo’s successful Super Mario series, and the second
most speedrun video game title of all time, with over , complete runs
of the game listed on speedrun.com (“Games—Sort by Most Runs” ).
Speedruns of Odyssey use a real-time attack (RTA) timing principle,
which
counts time from the moment at which the player presses start on the game’s
title screen until the “last meaningful action” the player can undertake (Koziel
, )—which Odyssey’s speedrunning community has determined to be the
moment Mario and Cappy capture a spark pylon and exit the “pillars” room
in Moon Kingdom. As a result of the RTA timing standard, the time elapsed
during the game’s last cutscene is discounted, as it proceeds automatically
with or without the player providing inputs through the Switch controllers.
e final action the player must undertake to complete a run is therefore con-
sistent across every Any speedrun of Odyssey and involves the title’s pivotal
gameplay mechanic. Namely, Odyssey is the first game in the Super Mario series
to introduce the sentient companion Cappy, who replaces Mario’s familiar cap
throughout the narrative of the game. Cappy accompanies Mario as he travels
between kingdoms, and together they collect power moons to power the game’s
eponymous airship in order to rescue Peach and Cappy’s sister Tiara from
Bowser’s clutches. Cappy’s introduction allows the player of Odyssey to utilize
its capture mechanic, via which Mario is able to enter and gain direct control
of many enemies he encounters by throwing Cappy atop their heads. Mario is
also able to use Cappy to manipulate many inanimate objects he encounters,
and by bouncing off it, he can gain height and jump far further and higher
than he would ordinarily be able to.
Karen Barad notes that the “ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting
‘components’” such as the game and its player produces an assemblage between
the two that is intensely mutually informative (Barad , ). Barad therefore
argues that it is greatly reductive for a dichotomy between the human and non-
human to “be hardwired into any theory that claims to take account of matter
in the fullness of its historicity” (Barad , ). Hence, the interrelatedness
of networked phenomena must be acknowledged, and intra-active assemblages
must be presumed to be “in-phenomena” (Barad , ), rather than distinct
01_Hay.indd 12
01_Hay.indd 12
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
FULLY OPTIMIZED: THE (POST)HUMAN ART OF SPEEDRUNNING |
entities throughout the duration of their interaction. Furthermore, as Susan
Kozel suggests, our species’s rapport with technology in contemporaneity is
extensive enough so that “the contours of our own extended bodies” can, in
pragmatic terms, be “found in our technologies” (Kozel , ). In this light,
Barad’s notion of in-phenomena assemblages can be seen to problematize a
broad range of theories of embodiment that presume our species’ bodies to be
hermetically sealed vessels, and thus the sole realm of (post)human cognitive
processes. Rather, technological/(post)human assemblages provoke a flexible
process of embodied outsourcing—of cognition, sensory inputs, memory, and
so forth. us, in Odyssey, Mario and Cappy’s intra-active relationship forms
a salient metaphor for the co-constitutive means of interaction between the
player and the video game title that is materialized through the process of
playing. Because a given (post)human player engages with the video game in
an embodied manner, within his or her and the game’s mutual association in
gameplay, each of their agencies is distributed omnidirectionally.
Hence, Odyssey operates through an in-phenomena model that is both
implicitly and explicitly realized (respectively through gameplay, and through
Cappy’s capture mechanism). Fittingly, the optimal speedruns of Odyssey
are the runs that use Cappy most advantageously, and hence the quickest
speedruns of the title are those that involve the (post)human player recur-
rently choosing to enter an intra-active assemblage not only in embodied
terms, but also in aesthetic terms. Gameplay of Odyssey therefore literalizes
Hayles’s supposition that technology and (post)humans are engaged in a
pervasive “coevolutionary spiral” (Hayles , ), as we have been since
our species first developed tools. As Hayles emphasizes, “Embodiment will
not become obsolete because it is essential to human being, but it can and
does transform in relation to environmental selective pressures, particularly
through interactions with technology” (Hayles , ). When speedrunners
playing as Mario bounce off Cappy to access areas within the game’s world
that would otherwise be inaccessible, the two avatars metaphorically become
“body and machine in open-ended recursivity with one another,” and both
Mario and Cappy gain the collective ability to achieve feats beyond their in-
dividual abilities “as each partner in the loop initiates and reacts to changes
in the other” (Hayles , ). Likewise, in playing Odyssey, the embodied
positionality of any given speedrunner is constantly reconfigured through
his or her in-phenomena interaction with the video game technology, which
allows him or her to complete feats beyond his or her abilities outside of the
technological/(post)human assemblage.
It is therefore appropriate that video game players “do not regard their avatars . . .
as mere representations or empty animations [and] inhabit their avatars much
01_Hay.indd 13
01_Hay.indd 13
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
| JONATHAN HAY
like they inhabit their own body . . . within minutes of controlling an avatar”
(Besmer , ); the process of playing a video game such as Odyssey is a spa-
tially proprioceptive means of perception to the degree that the controller and
the avatar it controls temporarily become an extension of the player’s corporeal
body. As Besmer indicates, however, the player “must become familiar enough
with the bodily co-located interface equipment so that it withdraws from focal
awareness, becoming integrated into the prepersonal body schema” (Besmer
, ) for this proprioceptive relationship to become entirely practical and
instinctual. Hence, to speedrun the digital environment of Odyssey optimally,
players must undergo an extended period of training and practice that is situated
in the realm of physicality. Because this rigorous means of gameplay literally
comprises the enactment of an in-phenomena interaction between the video
game and its player, this is no contradiction, but merely a demonstration of
the extent to which (post)human materiality is always already determined by
our relationships with technologies.
EMBODIED OPTIMIZATION
At the time this article was written, the quickest run of the Any category of Odyssey
speedrunning was by the runner Tyron, and was completed on October , ,
with a time of minutes and seconds. To attain this high level of proficiency
with the game, as another top runner estimates, it takes approximately “four to
four and a half thousand hours” of gameplay (NicroVeda ). Given that even
the lower bound of this estimate cumulatively equates to more than full days of
gameplay, the process by which a player improves at speedrunning is unmistakably
grounded painstakingly in embodied practice. Importantly, the immense amount
of practice that allows a player to perform an optimal run is undertaken through
the enlistment of an extensive range of sensory and neurochemical stimuli to the
technological/(post)human assemblage. Aside from the conspicuously haptic
stimuli that result from the player’s manipulation of the Switch controller(s),
neurochemical interactions involving endorphins and adrenaline are activated at
the most intense stages of each run (Koziel , ), foot pedals allow players
to perform hands-free splits, and the game’s soundtrack “modulate[s] activity
in brain structures commonly associated with the limbic system that are known
to be involved in emotion, such as the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the
hippocampus” (Hodent , ). Consequently, the speedrunner’s whole body
is involved in the process of performing optimized speedruns, and the practice
of speedrunning is therefore just as embodied as it is digital.
As is common to (post)human learning processes, the physical proficiency
that a given speedrunner gains from his or her persistent practice exists within
01_Hay.indd 14
01_Hay.indd 14
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
FULLY OPTIMIZED: THE (POST)HUMAN ART OF SPEEDRUNNING |
a continuous feedback loop with his or her cognitive experience of the practice.
As an activity that has been studied theoretically is practiced, “[g]radually con-
trol is transferred from the cognitive to the motor system” (Loftus and Loftus
, ), and the cognitive system correspondingly begins to forget how to
perform the activity independent of the motor system. Hence, we are most
often capable of performing better at familiar tasks involving skill when we
perform them subconsciously, and while our conscious thought processes are
otherwise engaged. Hayles refers to this cognitive learning process as “cerebral
plasticity” (Hayles , ), in order to emphasize that the (post)human
brain is—in this sense—analogous to a computer whose memory can literally
be programmed and reprogrammed. erefore, “by repeating the contents of
short-term memory over and over to ourselves . . . we can keep it in short-term
memory indefinitely” (Loftus and Loftus , ), and the longer a person re-
hearses this information, “the better it will be entered into long-term memory”
(Loftus and Loftus , ). Hence, speedrunners endeavor to practice the
same actions and sequences repeatedly in order to gradually program the entire
route for the video game they are speedrunning into their long-term memory,
where it will then remain almost indefinitely.
e necessity of performing optimally for Odyssey speedrunners is particu-
larly apparent, given that the game has long been optimized to the extent that
saving a handful of seconds in terms of gameplay can easily make the difference
between setting a world record and (yet another) failure (see Table ).
As the data set demonstrates, the Any world records that have been set
in Odyssey since its release have followed a logarithmic distribution, where all
statistically significant optimizations in speed had already plateaued almost
entirely within the first two months of the game’s release (see Figure ).
Since this point—other than in sporadic instances where new routing
discoveries have been made—the game’s top speedrunners have only been
capable of improving their personal best times by increasingly incremental
degrees through perfecting their performance of the recognized optimal route.
By repeatedly practicing the same route, runners’ motor systems become
specialized to performing the required sequence of controller inputs, which
generates muscle memory of the route. At this point, the player is capable of
entering a state of automaticity when performing the speedrun, since he or
she now retains long-term memory of the optimal sequence to execute within
the technological/(post)human assemblage. is transfer—of memory of the
assemblage into the player’s cerebral plasticity—pertinently demonstrates that
the optimization processes of speedrunning do not occur merely in routing
processes, but also effectively occur within the speedrunner’s subjective cog-
nitive processes.
01_Hay.indd 15
01_Hay.indd 15
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
| JONATHAN HAY
Date Time (s) Player Time
27/10/2017 6826 MonkeyKingHero 01:53:46
30/10/2017 5068 IMtendo 01:24:28
09/11/2017 4243 Vallu 01:10:43
10/11/2017 4222 Iwabi74 01:10:22
16/11/2017 4128 Samura1man 01:08:48
19/12/2017 3914 nedeahS 01:05:14
02/02/2018 3860 NicroVeda 01:04:20
02/03/2018 3838 nedeahS 01:03:58
05/03/2018 3827 nedeahS 01:03:47
06/03/2018 3813 NicroVeda 01:03:33
20/04/2018 3768 NicroVeda 01:02:48
30/04/2018 3766 Suisaga 01:02:46
26/07/2018 3706 NicroVeda 01:01:46
31/07/2018 3702 LilKirbs 01:01:42
15/10/2018 3658 Chaospringle 01:00:58
19/10/2018 3641 Chaospringle 01:00:41
02/12/2018 3638 Equanimity 01:00:38
10/02/2019 3620 Chaospringle 01:00:20
11/02/2019 3611 NicroVeda 01:00:11
21/02/2019 3609 NicroVeda 01:00:09
22/02/2019 3600 LilKirbs 01:00:00
23/03/2019 3599 NicroVeda 59:59
01/04/2019 3598 Chaospringle 59:58
15/04/2019 3597 Chaospringle 59:57
03/05/2019 3586 goryuya 59:46
07/05/2019 3575 Chaospringle 59:35
08/06/2019 3572 Tyron18 59:32
09/06/2019 3571 Chaospringle 59:31
10/07/2019 3554 Mitch 59:14
12/10/2019 3539 Tyron18 58:59
14/10/2019 3527 Tyron18 58:47
Table 1. Super Mario Odyssey Any world record progression (as of November )
01_Hay.indd 16
01_Hay.indd 16
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
FULLY OPTIMIZED: THE (POST)HUMAN ART OF SPEEDRUNNING |
Figure 1 Graphical representation of
Super Mario Odyssey
Any% world record progression
01_Hay.indd 17
01_Hay.indd 17
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
| JONATHAN HAY
is same process of rote learning also characterizes the (post)human’s everyday
relationship to a range of technologies. Torben Grodal states that
In several aspects, video games provide an aesthetic of repetition, similar
to that of everyday life . . . we repeat the same actions over and over
in order to gain mastery. . . . e video game experience is very much
similar to such an everyday experience of learning and controlling by
repetitive rehearsal. (Grodal , )
Speedrunning thus exacerbates the mundane basis of the act of gaming to
an even greater extent, and thereby vicariously demonstrates the video game’s
everyday situatededness in non-novel (post)human experience. Consequently,
although Koziel characterizes speedrunning as a “mental arms race” (Koziel ,
)—an aggressive attempt to colonize the novelty of any given game—the
practice can alternately be interpreted as a demonstration of the near-ubiquitous
presence of technological/(post)human interfaces in the contemporary social
sphere. Subsequently, as Grodal asserts, the attainment of mastery in video
games involves both “explicitly or intuitively learning the . . . constraints and
the optimal strategies of a given game world,” and yet, “when we gain mastery
we may not only experience the game as a series of routes that we may follow
but also . . . realize that we have a set of limited options” (Grodal , ,
). Hence the speedrunner’s especially rigorous familiarity with the video
game title can be assumed to diminish his or her experience of intra-activity
with it; the more he or she plays, the more it becomes increasingly apparent
that only a minute range of the agential possibilities within the gameworld
will ever be optimal, due to the preset nature of the game’s programming.
Perversely, therefore, as the speedrunner continues to improve at a given video
game, he or she feels less immersed in its diegetic world, and hence less of
an actor within the in-phenomena assemblage materialized by their co-con-
stitutive gameplay. We may now return to this article’s thesis, and begin to
characterize this practice of embodied optimization as a form of (post)human
performance art.
SPEEDRUNNING AS PERFORMANCE
Although the origins of speedrunning can be traced back as far as the s,
the practice became widespread in , following the launch of the online
steaming service Twitch.tv, which provided a suitable platform for the effective
dissemination of live streams of runs. As Koziel stresses, the advent of stream-
ing profoundly “changed speedrunning as an activity” (Koziel , ), and
01_Hay.indd 18
01_Hay.indd 18
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
FULLY OPTIMIZED: THE (POST)HUMAN ART OF SPEEDRUNNING |
contemporary versions of the practice can therefore be considered a subset of
the Internet . phenomenon. Although speedrunning was initially an isolated
practice, it now became a journey that could be shared with viewers, and ac-
cordingly, a form of digital performance art—a demonstration of “performance’s
fluctuating meaning” (Salter , ) in our technologically saturated lifeworld.
Although the number “of active speedrunners in the world right now probably
lies in the thousands to tens of thousands” (Koziel , ), viewerswise, the
practice attracts an audience “in the hundreds of thousands to millions” (Koziel
, ). As is implied by the : ratio of viewers to content producers that
Koziel suggests, contemporary speedrunning can be considered a form of digital
performance art in which the player “becomes the performer her/himself and
in doing so becomes the title, the work itself by engaging with, or bringing
into life, the work” (Whatley , ).
Hence, in the age of streaming, speedruns are performed with the express
purpose of being rewatched by others, and the practice accordingly “moves from
‘play’ in the playful sense to ‘play’ in the theatrical sense” (Barnabé ), thus
becoming inherently performative—a live demonstration of the intricacies and
engagements of a technological/(post)human assemblage. is in-phenomena
mode of performance evokes Chris Salter’s conception that technology “does
something in and to the world by modifying existing relations and constructing
new ones between humans, tools, processes and the environment in which all
are deeply entangled” (Salter , ), as in recordings of runs the presumed
separation between (post)human and video game becomes indistinct to the
extent that the binary is no longer an applicable means of representing gameplay.
As a mode of performance art, speedrunning is, as Rainforest Scully-Blaker
suggests, “a form of practiced practice, both in the sense that [runs take] many
hours of training but also in the sense that [the] approach . . . is so efficiently
streamlined that it becomes a new practice unto itself.” (Scully-Blaker ).
erefore, although successful runs are the culmination of many hours of
practice, the embodied optimization that underlies the activity more broadly
dramatizes our species’s corporeal situation, and hence that “one cannot ‘shift
out’ of one’s carnal body. It is a permanent anchor of one’s embodied situation”
(Besmer , ).
Since, in the process of gaming, “players are integrated in what is called a
cybernetic feedback loop . . . which links them with the surrounding hardware
and software, thus enabling a complex quasi-self-regulatory interplay of stimuli
and responses” (Ensslin , ), speedrunning is akin to a dance performed
not only using, but alongside technology, which becomes an equal partner
in the creation of a live choreography. For Sarah Whatley, “the intersection
between the dancing body and digital technology, or the intermediate zone
01_Hay.indd 19
01_Hay.indd 19
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
| JONATHAN HAY
where virtual and physical meet, produces new kinds of performative events
that can only exist in their becoming” (Whatley , ), and this perfectly
characterizes the ephemeral yet recursive nature of speedrunning, which is
predominantly “a dance in simulated yet somehow tangible physical worlds”
(Salter , ). If, in our technological lifeworld, performance is constantly
“moving towards the image of the Mobius strip, in which the inside workings
of the choreographic process and the outside manifestation of ‘choreography’
fold back into each other” (Whatley , ), speedrunning demonstrates
that the distinction between practice and performance becomes irrelevant in
an age when content can be streamed across the globe at the tap of a finger.
Hence, this artistic model fundamentally problematizes the pervading notion
in the field of game studies that gameplay involves entering a “magic circle”
(Huizinga , ), in which the player steps out of real life, and into a distinct
virtualized environment. As demonstrated by both the embodied situation of
the player and the intra-active nature of the technology he or she enters into
an in-phenomena assemblage with, Huizinga’s influential concept has become
a patent oversimplification in the contemporary world.
Subsequently, via its implicit emphasis on incremental optimization, which
is achieved through repeated performance and frequently characterized by
failure, speedrunning dramatizes the falsity of conceptualizations of gaming
as a discrete and exclusive sphere of (post)human mentality. Just as “extensive
video gaming experience appears to be causally related to enhancements in vis-
ual attention” (Schmidt et al. , ), the speedrunner’s ability to perform
better by incremental degrees is subject to his or her undertaking of a gradual
process of learning to play, yet failing to perform sufficiently, that is firmly
rooted and acted out in the sphere of his or her embodied existence. Crucially,
the player’s repeated failure to perform sufficiently while in-phenomena with
the video game becomes a prominent aspect of speedrunning’s performance
medium, through the invariable streaming of a multitude of runs that fail,
and that therefore require the speedrunner to reset and begin again. Failed
runs are necessarily indistinguishable from successful runs until the point of
completion of the latter, and hence there is a characteristic indeterminacy to
the speedrunning performance until its very conclusion. Hence, failed runs
encompass just as much artistic verisimilitude as successful ones, figuratively
demonstrating that the pursuit of optimization is hard won and inescapably
embodied. Speedrunning may therefore be considered a form of posthuman
performance art, and specifically a form of performance art that problematizes
a number of traditional assumptions about art, by demonstrating practice
constantly bleeding into performance.
01_Hay.indd 20
01_Hay.indd 20
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
FULLY OPTIMIZED: THE (POST)HUMAN ART OF SPEEDRUNNING |
CONCLUSION
Salter states that:
the estrangement of daily life’s routines that long was the territory of
artists is now in the hands of everyday people who, in their attempt
to elevate the workaday to the status of the fantastic, upload videos
of their daily cooking and cleaning rituals, going to church and tak-
ing out the trash on YouTube, like so many home movies, hoping to
achieve the millisecond attention of our increasingly saturated eyes.
(Salter , )
Likewise, the performative aspect of speedrunning converts the player’s
habitualized phenomenological perspective on the game at his or her high
skill level into an artistic statement for an audience of thousands. e process
of speedrunning implicitly involves an acceptance that video game titles such
as Super Mario Odyssey will gradually become banal to the player—much like
any other technological aspect of the contemporary Western lifeworld—and
enacts a performance of them becoming so. Nevertheless, in relation to Fizek’s
assertation that video “games by their very nature break down the subject–
object, organic–inorganic, and player–game dichotomies” (Fizek ), further
research is required to determine to what extent the ideologies and praxis of
gamers beyond the speedrunning community either acquiesce to or challenge
humanistic models of gameplay. Additionally, although a discussion of TAS
(tool-assisted speedrun) practices lies beyond the scope of this article, subse-
quent studies would benefit from reflecting on the extent to which TAS runs
may be seen to remodel the balance of the intra-active relationship between
video game and (post)human player that composes the core of speedrunning’s
artistic basis,
particularly in light of the well-known antipathy of speedrunning
communities toward TASs.
JONATHAN HAY is a PhD candidate at the University of Chester. eir forth-
coming doctoral thesis is prospectively titled “Novelty Fades: Science Fiction
and Posthumanism.” Jonathan has recent publications in the Iowa Journal
of Cultural Studies, Kronoscope, and the British Science Fiction Association’s
critical journal Vector. ey are co-editor of a major recent volume of essays
titled Talking Bodies, Vol. II. Bodily Languages, Selfhood and Transgression
(Palgrave ).
01_Hay.indd 21
01_Hay.indd 21
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
| JONATHAN HAY
NOTES
. In contrast to the standard Any category, in which the object of gameplay is to reach the
end credits as quickly as possible, regardless of which of the title’s objectives are completed
along the way.
. is latter type of category is implicitly ableist, since it presumes that all speedrunners share
a normative degree of vision.
. For a comprehensive history of the medium of BioArt to date, see Myers .
. English: “e Death of the Author.”
. Loin de se définir comme un créateur inspiré et propriétaire de son oeuvre, l’auteur de speedrun
se présente donc davantage comme le performer d’un script dont l’élaboration ne lui revient pas
entièrement. Translation mine.
. Henceforth, Odyssey.
. RTA is the most popular timing method for speedruns.
.
Speedruns of Odyssey must conform to the RTA timing standard to be verified and thus
accepted by the community.
. For a cinematic guide to the Odyssey Any world record progression, see Smallant .
. Splits allow speedrunners to gauge their current pace within a run against their PB and/or
world record pace.
. e incredibly difficult Any Minimum Captures subcategory—which requires players to
avoid using Cappy to capture objects and enemies unless progress within the gameworld is
otherwise impossible—takes this bodily engagement a step further. At present, Smallant and
Ofir are the only players to have completed verified runs of the category. At one remarkable
point in Cascade Kingdom, to reach a power moon that is virtually inaccessible prior to com-
pletion of the game, this route necessitates that players make inputs on one Switch controller
with their feet at the same time as they make inputs with another controller using their hands.
. It would nonetheless take an immense amount of practice for a novice Odyssey speedrunner
merely to be capable of approaching world record pace in the title.
. e player usually cannot change the larger overriding causal structure of video games. Two
notable exceptions to this hegemonic trend are Nintendo’s Super Mario Maker series and—to
an even greater extent—the video game Dreams, which provides a platform for players
to create their own games within its operating system.
. On passe donc ici du «jeu» au sens ludique au «jeu» au sens théâtral. Translation mine.
. According to Koziel, TAS runs enter the “realm of theoretical perfection” (Koziel , )
since they “use emulators, precise control of inputs, save states, and introspection of system
resources to construct a theoretically perfect run” (Koziel , ).
WORKS CITED
Barad, Karen. . “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter
Comes to Matter.” Signs (): –.
Barnabé, Fanny. . “Les détournements de jeux vidéo par les joueurs: Une incarnation du play.”
RESET . Available at http://journals.openedition.org/reset/.
———. . “Le speedrun: Pratique compétitive, ludique ou créative? Trajectoire d’un détour-
nement de jeu vidéo institué en nouveau game.” Interfaces Numériques (): –.
01_Hay.indd 22
01_Hay.indd 22
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
FULLY OPTIMIZED: THE (POST)HUMAN ART OF SPEEDRUNNING |
Barthes, Roland. . “e Death of the Author.” In Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen
Heath, –. London: Fontana Press.
Besmer, Kirk M. . “What Robotic Re-embodiment Reveals about Virtual Re-embodiment: A
Note on the Extension esis.” In Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human–Technolog y
Relations, ed. Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul Verbeek, –. London: Lexington Books.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. . Flow: e Psychology of Happiness. London: Rider.
Ensslin, Astrid. . e Language of Gaming. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Everett, Anna. . “Serious Play: Playing with Race in Contemporary Gaming Culture.” In
Handbook of Computer Game Studies, ed. Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein, –. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Fizek, Sonia. . “Automated State of Play: Rethinking Anthropocentric Rules of the Game.”
Digital Culture and Society (): –.
Franklin, Seb. . “‘We Need Radical Gameplay, Not Just Radical Graphics’: Towards a Con-
temporary Minor Practice in Computer Gaming.” symploke (–): –.
Frelik, Paweł. . “Video Games.” In e Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction. Ed. Rob Latham,
–. London: Oxford University Press.
“Games—Sort by Most Runs.” . speedrun.com. Available at https://www.speedrun.com/
gamesplatform=&orderby=mostruns.
Grodal, Torben. . “Stories for Eye, Ear, and Muscles: Video Games, Media, and Embodied
Experiences.” In e Video Game eory Reader,. Eds. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron,
–. London: Routledge.
Hayles, N. Katherine. . How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature,
and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. . Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame.
Hodent, Celia. . e Gamer’s Brain: How Neuroscience and UX can Impact Video Game Design.
Abingdon: Taylor and Francis.
Huizinga, Johan. . Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press.
Kozel, Susan. . Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. London: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Koziel, Eric. . Speedrun Science: A Long Guide to Short Playthroughs. Tucson, AZ: Fangamer.
Krzywinska, Tanya, and Douglas Brown. . “Games, Gamers and Posthumanism.” In e
Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television. Eds. Michael Hauskeller, omas
D. Philbeck, and Curtis D. Carbonell, –. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Loftus, Geoffrey R., and Elizabeth F. Loftus . Mind at Play: e Psychology of Video Games.
New York: Basic Books.
Myers, William. . Bio Art: Altered Realities. London: ames and Hudson.
NicroVeda. . “How I Beat Super Mario Odyssey in Under Hour!” YouTube, May. Available
at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scz_tyEk&t=s.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. . e Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values, vol. II.
Trans. Anthony M. Ludovici. London: T.N. Foulis.
Salter, Chris. . Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. London: MIT Press.
Schmidt, Richard A., and Tim Lee. . Motor Control and Learning: A Behavioral Emphasis.
Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
01_Hay.indd 23
01_Hay.indd 23
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
| JONATHAN HAY
Scully-Blaker, Rainforest. . “A Practiced Practice: Speedrunning rough Space with de Certeau
and Virilio.” Game Studies (). Available at http://gamestudies.org//articles/scullyblaker.
Smallant. . “How Super Mario Odyssey Was Beaten in Under Hour—World Record Pro-
gression.” YouTube, December. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eihjtIF.
Super Mario Odyssey. . Nintendo Switch.
Whatley, Sarah. . “Materiality, Immateriality and the Dancing Body: e Challenge of the
Inter in the Preservation of Intangible Cultural Heritage.” In e Performing Subject in the Space
of Technology: rough the Virtual, Towards the Real. Eds. Matthew Causey, Emma Meehan,
and Néill O’Dwyer, –. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
01_Hay.indd 24
01_Hay.indd 24
31/07/20 8:23 PM
31/07/20 8:23 PM
This content downloaded from
78.105.15.49 on Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:59:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
