Derust: On Speedrunning, Writing, Final Fantasy XV and the Search for Revelation

On episode 68 of Josiah Renaudin’s podcast The 1099, the critic Tevis Thompson says “A critic’s task is fundamentally revelation.”

I’ve watched a lot of speedrunning these past few months. What I love about speedrunning is that there’s something inherently revelatory about the process. By approaching games in an entirely different way from how we do as “casual” players, speedrunners can’t help but reveal things about these games that we were never meant to know. They peel back the facade and interact with aspects of the games players were never meant to interact with; they turn the tables on games and find ways to manipulate elements that were designed to manipulate the player.

Games used to be full of the possibility of revelation to me. They seemed alive in ways I couldn’t completely understand. Coming home from my Wednesday afternoon CCD classes, I saw the existence of God as much in my family’s Atari 2600 cartridges as I did in incomprehensibly vast skies and in contemplations of the concept of eternal life that made my mind begin to frighten me with its capacity to ponder the infinite. The Catholicism didn’t stick but the sense of wonder in games did. Each game was a new experience, wonderful in its distinctiveness and initial unfamiliarity. Missile Command wasn’t Warlords wasn’t Pitfall wasn’t Yar’s Revenge wasn’t Star Raiders wasn’t Adventure. And there, deep in the catacombs of Adventure, hidden and glowing and mysterious, were the words Created by Warren Robinett.

image

The mark of its creator, intentionally left. Today, speedruns sometimes reveal idiosyncrasies left intentionally and unintentionally in games by their creators that have gone undiscovered for decades, or they find new ways to apply glitches that have been known about for years. They reveal the imperfections, the humanity, the digital equivalent of brushstrokes, and in doing so, they take games I thought I fully understood and make me realize that there are entirely different levels on which a person might know and understand them. There’s an intimacy to this approach, and to the way that runners have to be aware of and account for elements of a game’s code that most players never even know are there. 

One of my favorite examples of this is what Super Mario Bros. runners call “the judges” of 8-1, an idiosyncrasy in the code that can result in 24 frames being lost at the end of the level even if the runner completes it flawlessly. However, runners can ensure that they will not incur this penalty from “the judges” by hitting the star block in the stage on the first possible frame as they hustle past it at breakneck speed. (This is why the speedrunner darbian, in the video below, says “I think that was first…I don’t think it was, actually,” after hitting the star block at around 2:38 in the video below. In any case, he got “good judges,” which is why he says “I think we’re OK” after reaching the flagpole at the end of the level. That run went on to be the new world record.) Why do the judges even exist, and why does this work, hitting the star block on the first pixel to appease them? It’s just one of many elements of this game that border on the mystical to me. Now, when I return to Super Mario Bros. and to many other NES games I’ve watched people run, I sense a life in them that I didn’t before.

Darbian makes it look incredibly easy. Watching him, I sometimes feel like I could do that too, no problem. But it takes tremendous amounts of study, practice, and determination–you can watch darbian’s two-hour tutorial video on how to run the any% category of Super Mario Bros. to get a sense of just how precisely every element in the run needs to be executed. 

When you stop running a game for a while, the mastery of it fades. You can’t just pick it up again months or years later and expect to be as good as you ever were, and speedrunners call the process of returning to a game they used to run “derusting.” I love that. During derusting, they warm back up with a game, relearn its tricks, get plugged back in to the specific muscle memory of it all. I feel like I have some derusting of my own to do. Like it’s gonna take some work to get the rusted, clunky, fickle, mercurial old machinery in my mind working again.

It’s been a while since I’ve done the kind of personal writing about games that I really enjoy doing. So this piece will probably not be what speedrunners call a PB (personal best, natch). But that’s okay. I know not every attempt can result in great things. I spend a lot of time watching darbian, and most of his stream is resets. As he says in this interview, “The expected outcome is failure, and the better you get at it, the more you fail.” He fucks up and he starts again and he fucks up and he starts again and he fucks up and he starts again. I’ve seen him get to 8-4 on world record pace, only for everything to fall apart. That’s heartbreaking, but he doesn’t stop. He resets and he goes again. Hours and hours of resets in relentless pursuit of the one run where everything comes together, where he lands every trick he needs to land and executes every maneuver flawlessly and the game cooperates with him and finally he’s done it, he’s beaten Super Mario Bros. faster than anyone ever has before.

In speedrunning, the impossible becomes possible. Super Mario Bros. is as alive as it’s ever been. New idiosyncrasies in the code and new ways for humans to pull off tricks once thought to be doable only by computers are still being discovered. 4:56 was out of reach, and then it was within reach, and then it was done.

Speedrunning has made revelation and discovery a reality in games for me again, and god, I needed that. Lately I sometimes feel like games are determined to stamp out those feelings. Franchises churn out entries that trade on familiarity and comfort, each new Assassin’s Creed or Call of Duty seeking to reassure players that here they will find more of what they liked about the previous games, the series titles the equivalent of the golden arches on a long road trip promising weary and wary travelers the familiarity of another Big Mac. Recently in a GameStop I heard an ad touting that Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection contains more than 80 hours of gameplay, and I wondered how anyone could hear those words and feel excitement rather than existential exhaustion at the very thought.

Sometimes it’s not anything about games themselves that leaves me feeling sapped of my motivation to engage with them. Sometimes it’s loneliness that scrambles my circuits. At times this past year it’s been a yearning for things I know I can’t find in games–companionship, intimacy, love–that has siphoned away my motivation to play them. As Olivia Laing discusses in her extraordinary book The Lonely City, loneliness works to perpetuate itself, and it can make it difficult to stay in touch with ourselves or to connect with others. But of course I feel more like myself, and more like I have something to give others, when I’m connected to my fascination with games and with all the things in this world that I find beautiful.

image

I went into Final Fantasy XV, with its road trip premise, hoping to find something unfamiliar or affecting or human in my travels, perhaps some meaningful depiction of companionship, warmth, trust, closeness. The game has none of that. It’s a stupendously safe, clumsy, lifeless game that fails utterly to capture the sense of adventure and freedom it so desperately strives for. There’s no real camaraderie–hell, there’s no real character–in the canned interactions of its characters. It can’t touch Sega’s 1986 classic OutRun for creating a joyous feeling of hitting the open road and really going places, and though the original 1987 Final Fantasy is a stiff relic, there’s a greater feeling of wind-in-your-hair liberation in piloting that game’s airship than there is in taking the wheel of XV’s Regalia, and not because the car is symbolically weighted down with all the burdens and expectations that have been passed from father to son. With the driving so listless–not a shred of Fahrvergnügen here–I instead found liberation in letting go of my burdens and doing nothing at all but sitting in the back seat and watching the world roll by.

image

The fact that the game occasionally forced me into this role of passive passenger and gave me nothing to do but listen to music and look at the shifting landscape for a few minutes seems to me the one and only remotely bold creative choice it makes. I embraced this passivity far more than the game required me to, refusing to use the fast travel option, spending hours and hours just riding in the car from one place to another, knowing that the journey would be more pleasurable and more meaningful than the destination. I played FFXV as the opposite of a speedrunner, all the while resenting the clock in the corner on every menu screen reminding me that I’d sunk enough hours into this game that I could have played seven or 10 or 15 games that have more respect for my time than it does. What a meager substitute it offered for the thing I long for, the experience of having a person or people to travel with, hitting the open road with friends or a partner, being comfortable in conversation and silence, watching the color of the sky change and knowing you’re witnessing it together.

And yet I’m grateful for it. Because it was in those hours that I spent watching the scenery roll by that I felt the machinery in my mind start humming back to life, as amazed by Final Fantasy XV’s ability to offer me absolutely nothing as I might have been if it had offered me something. When all you have are questions, you learn to find a kind of meaning in them, a more complicated, less satisfying kind of meaning than you might find in the answers. 

I realized that I haven’t been putting in the time lately, that the reason that fickle, mercurial part of my brain has been largely offline is that I haven’t been maintaining it. I haven’t been playing games in the way that I need to play games to have the kinds of thoughts and feelings about games that get that part of my brain going. I haven’t been taking my time with them. I haven’t been giving myself over to them. It’s not enough to watch other people turn games that are familiar to me from my childhood into an experience of revelation. I need to seek my own revelations in games again. Whether I find them or not isn’t the point. Not finding what you’re looking for can be as meaningful as finding it, though it’s harder and more heartbreaking, too. I need to (and want to) spend more time playing games just to play games, just asking the questions, just looking for something, because there’s meaning in that, too, and because if I don’t, then I can’t really do the work of writing about games in the way that I want to.

Recently, after completing a sweep of Super Mario Bros. world records in different categories, darbian looked over them on his stream and said, “Any%: we did it, congrats. Warpless: we did it, congrats. Any% All-Stars: we did it, congrats. Warpless All-Stars: we did it, congrats. And Minus World Ending…we did it, congrats. So the sweep is complete. And now Kosmic can take any%. AndrewG can take back warpless. Blubbler can get back any% All-Stars and Minus World.”

It was an acknowledgment that Super Mario Bros., this 30-year-old game, is alive right now. In a state of flux. Maybe he’ll hang on to those records and maybe he won’t. But he’s going to keep running.

I’ll never be a speedrunner, but I did buy myself a new pair of running shoes this week, and yesterday I went for a run for the first time in months. I think it’s good for the part of my brain where the writing comes from. Sometimes when I’m running, I tell myself that my body is effortlessly falling forward through space and I’m just watching the scenery roll by, not unlike Noctis in the back of the Regalia. As easy as that.

image

And it’s time for me to derust. To keep running, and writing. Seeking revelation. “The expected outcome is failure, and the better you get at it, the more you fail.” Persistence is key. Failure is part of the process. But I know there’s a new PB waiting for me out there if I just keep pushing for it. So stay tuned, there’s more to come.