I watch speedrunning like my dad watches sports

destructoid.com:

When I was growing up, the sounds of sports were always all over our house. My dad likes pretty much every sport imaginable, from football to baseball to track and field. A lot of the time I had no idea what was going on, but having a game on in the background made for the perfect backing track to take my Sunday afternoon naps. Sometimes when I want to feel extra cozy, I’ll find an old NFL game on YouTube to put on while I fall asleep.

These days, the closest thing I get to watching sports is esports. It’s an entirely different world, as I’ve learned from my friends who work on that side of the industry, but there’s also a lot of crossover there.

For one thing, esports took a lot from traditional sports when it comes to the way they set up their broadcasts, particularly when it comes to commentary or how they introduce players. As someone who was around sports my whole life (I have really athletic siblings), it’s been fascinating to me to see how we’ve moved competition to a digital space, and how we choose to relay that information to those who are watching.

Moreso than esports even, I’ve recently taken a liking to speedrunning.

At this point I’m pretty sure everyone is familiar with the concept, but in case you’re not, the basic idea is that players have competitions to see who can play through a game the fastest, and the rules can vary depending on whether speedrunners want to do a run that doesn’t take advantage of bugs (known as a glitchless run), if they choose not to use certain items, if they choose to only race to a certain part of the game, and so on.

Speedrunning as a concept was widely popularized in the mid-1990s by players who would do runs of Super Metroid, but these days, you can speedrun just about