I Love Watching Everyone Find Unique Ways To Play Elden Ring

thegamer.com:

I recently wrote about the Elden Ring speedrunning community, and how I hoped their staggeringly low times (sub seven minutes being the record at the time of writing) would make people realise that speedrunning is an art form unto itself. Beating Elden Ring in seven minutes is not just playing it quickly and being good at boss fights, it is fundamentally a different task, as divergent as a ballet of a novel compared to a play of a novel. Both are taking an existing thing and putting it on stage - just as speedrunning and regular play is booting up a game and beating it - but they come up with wildly different results that originate from opposing ways of thinking at every level. While straight speedrunners are masters of the craft though, I also wanted to focus specifically on creative speedrunners, the absurdists of the speedrunning genre.

My first look at Elden Ring speedrunners was about hoping it would lead to a greater appreciation for speedrunners as a whole, for the ways they break open games and find ways to slither between the cracks in the name of reaching the next area without long cutscenes or skipping boss battles. And then, once successful, optimising the method of slithering, plotting the most efficient crack. It's trial and error, with emphasis on the trial, and heavier emphasis on the error, which I suppose means trial isn't really emphasised anymore. Anyway, you get the picture. Every new game is a space race with top speedrunners copying and iterating on each other in order to get to the moon. Some speedrunners, though, ask 'I wonder if I could get to the moon using just a kite and bottle rocket'. They choose to do it not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

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