Advent Calendar 09: Praying To RNGeezus (And Giving Him Some Help)

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!

Speedrunning video games has grown from a niche hobby in the mid-90s to a thriving e-sport today, with thousands of amateurs training up their fingers on Twitch, and the real pros performing for an audience at Awesome Games Done Quick. Real money can be involved these days -- not as much as, say, basketball, but enough for people to make an actual career out of it.

And, like any other professional sport, speedrunning has had its own cheating scandals.

The great granddaddy of all controversial speedrunners is a guy named Todd Rogers. Rogers made a name for himself back in the Cretaceous Era, by getting a better time in the Atari 2600 game Barnstorming than anyone else, ever. It wasn't "speedrunning" yet, you couldn't make a job out of it, and you didn't get anything for beating everyone else unless you were playing an Activision game (which Barnstorming was), and you mailed them a Polaroid of your score on the TV in exchange for a cool iron-on patch. Rogers was slightly famous for holding the longest-standing video game world record for his 1982 time of 5.51s in Dragster, which stood until 2018, when someone pointed out that this wasn't actually possible in the game as written. At which point Rogers became slightly more famous for having all of his records removed from the leaderboards on Twin Galaxies, and the TG officials banning him from the site. Karl Jobst, a YouTuber best known for covering the Doom and Goldeneye speedrunning communities, has done a few exposés thorough enough Rogers has started trying to sue. 

Rogers is accused of cheating the old-fashioned way -- by straight-up lying -- but when you're dealing with technology there are more sophisticated angles to take. Billy Mitchell, also accused of lying, took it a step further by also not technically playing the game he said he was. Generally in both high-score and speedrunning records, there is a distinction made between playing the game on the original hardware, and on a software emulator like MAME. Both sets of records are valid, but because no software emulator is 100% the same as real hardware in every instance, they're not considered equivalent, and the leaderboards are kept separate. Some games are considered slightly easier on hardware, some slightly easier in emulation. Mitchell, although a skilled player who has set legitimate high score records live in front of an audience, has been caught submitting at least one emulated Donkey Kong run as a real-hardware record, and has pulled various other (less directly relevant, but still shady) shenanigans during public appearances.

Yet another layer of fuckery is introduced when you consider that most speedrun records are verified through screen recording. Video can be edited, and people have tried. Particularly for longer games, speedrunners can submit what's called a 'segmented speedrun', where the runner does not have to complete the game by playing straight through from beginning to end, but can retry individual levels as much as they like, and splice together their best times. Like the split between real hardware/emulation, segmented and continuous speedruns are both considered valid, but kept separate on the boards. People have tried to submit segmented runs as continuous; generally they're caught the same way any video editor is, with continuity errors and glitches in the video or audio. Msushi presents the interesting case of Phoenix4K and the sloppy attempt at cheating his way to the Celeste world record.

And then sometimes, people just... tinker with the game. If you've ever met someone in the Minecraft fan community, you know they are, er, passionate. Minecraft speedrunners are just like that, only more. The game does have a story mode, which gets both interesting and frustrating pretty quickly, since a large amount of the game is based on the whims of a random number generator. (Hence the jokes about praying to "RNGeezus". RNGeezus saves! But you should too, because RNGeezus also sometimes hates you and gives you useless vendor trash nineteen battles in a row, when you need just one more goddamn rock.) Nevertheless, people do speedrun it, and some of them cheat. The most infamous case I know of is Dream, who created such a tempest in a teapot that someone literally hired a PhD to sit down and mathematically prove that he was way, way too lucky.