Advent Calendar 08: Go, Speed Racer, Go!

Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games.

As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon here by December 15th for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one!

I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence!

Video games can be divided into two broad categories: Player v Player, and Player v Game. PvP has inspired living room screaming matches since the days of Pong, but PvG is a different animal. When you're playing Super Mario Bros., obviously it's you and your reflexes versus every Koopa Troopa in the Mushroom Kingdom, but what do you do when you've already beaten the game a zillion times? 

If your answer is 'put the controller down and go do something else', I'm frankly not sure how you made it to Day 8 of this Advent Calendar. Are you feeling okay? Did someone tell you you'd find out the meaning of life if you made it to the end? You're only going to find a lot of fancy rats in custom holiday hammocks out there, but I suppose that counts, if you love rats enough.

No, what you do is extend the competition from Player v Game to (Player v Game) v Player. Obviously you can beat Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! blindfolded, but can you do it faster than anybody else?

This is called 'speedrunning', and it's been around for a while. Tl;dr: People have been challenging themselves to beat games as quickly as possible since video games were invented, but id Software's 1993 game Doom included a way to record all of your inputs in a given level and play them back later, which meant you could document your triumphs. So people did, and since the internet is for bragging, they posted them to Usenet. Which lead to competition, which led to leaderboards, which led a couple of websites that have today grown to become centralized clearinghouses for legitimate world records in speedrunning. Including Doom, still.

Before people could start competing to see who could play video games the fastest, the community had to nail down the answer to one very important question: What does it mean to 'beat' a video game? Does it mean you have completed all the actions that one would normally go through in order to finish the game? (And what does that mean in a game full of collectibles whose accumulation is a goal of its own, like Donkey Kong Country, or an RPG with mutually exclusive story branches or optional dungeons/quests, like Ocarina of Time?) Or does it just mean you get to the end credits as quickly as possible? Those two schools of thought are irreconcilable, so pretty much any game that has ever been speedrun has at least two leaderboards, one for "100% runs" where you play through the entire game as fast as possible, and one for "any% runs", where you look for ways to complete the bare minimum number of actions required to trigger the end credits. 

Taking things one step further... what does it mean to say that "you" beat the game? A creatively hackish interpretation of that concept has resulted in what's called the "tool-assisted speedrun", where rather than a very talented human playing through the game in real-time, a human of slightly different talents has programmed a sequence of very precise inputs into an emulator, which 'plays' the game for them. TASes are particularly fascinating to me. Because you're programming your inputs in advance, you can set them up with frame-perfect timing, and because you don't need to physically smash buttons on a controller, you can program in button combinations that aren't possible in meatspace. 

The results are crazy. Game engines are supposed to be robust enough to handle what most players can throw at them most of the time, and then ideally a little bit tougher than that, just in case. They are really not built to cope with being smacked with split-second precision, at right angles to reality. Tool-assisted speedruns can rattle off so many unexpected inputs so quickly and exactly that, in the context of the game world, they can sail through loopholes in the laws of physics. You can, and many TASes do, take this to the level of 'arbitrary code execution', where you exploit holes in the game to the point where you can use the controller buttons to start issuing orders to the console directly. It's effectively magic.

There are a lot of TASes out there that use ACE to 'beat' the game by triggering the credits early, and lots of YouTube videos explaining what's going on, with varying degrees of technical gibberish. Bismuth does a pretty good job of explaining one of the more infamous cases of a non-TAS using ACE to set a world record, a.k.a., how to beat Super Mario Bros 3 in three minutes by throwing a bunch of Koopa shells down in just the right places.