I know that this is most probably not a very popular opinion, but I would kindly request that if people want to reply, they express their opinions in a civil and pragmatic manner. I would really not want this to become any kind of flamewar. Disagreeing is completely fine (and in fact welcome), but please express your opinion in a reasonable manner.
I have started noticing a trend in speedrunning techniques that I really don't like. I'm referring to unassisted speedruns here. You might know what kinds of techniques I really don't like in tool-assisted speedruns (because I sometimes can become quite vocal about it), so you might guess the kind of techniques I'm referring to.
Over the last few years I have really grown to appreciate the completion of games via skillful gameplay. In other words, using the inputs that the game offers to control the playable character and to advance the game. Movement, jumping, shooting, pressing in-game buttons and switches, and so on and so forth. I believe that you know what I mean without having to be too nitpicky about it.
What I do not consider gameplay are the "meta" features that a game offers for practical reasons. These are things that often need to exist in other to manage your game data, so to speak, but are not gameplay in itself. These include things like saving and loading the game (necessary because of practical reasons, but not part of gameplay, and please don't nitpick about the half-dozen exceptions that exist from the millions of video games out there; please understand what I'm trying to say), and fine-tuning graphical settings, controls, sound volume, etc.
Essentially, non-gameplay "meta" features are the things that you don't need to complete the game, and exist solely to allow you to continue your playing later, to adjust the visual quality of the game, and so on. Optimally, a speedrun would never use those things, because they are not playing the game. (Segmented speedruns can use saving and loading in order to start a new segment, of course, but only for that purpose, not for the purpose of affecting the actual game.)
Personally, the more a speedrun uses those non-gameplay features to somehow make completing the game faster, or even glitch the game, the less I like it. It's not completing the game purely via gameplay. Instead, it's abusing non-gameplay elements to interfere with the game, or even glitch it. (Glitching itself is not the problem. If you can glitch the game via gameplay, that's A-ok in my books. The problem is when it's done via non-gameplay means.)
What is worrying me is that I see more and more non-gameplay techniques being used, especially in games I like and love. Techniques that were not discovered nor used years ago.
For example, in recent years Half-Life 2 speedruns have started abusing saving and loading to glitch the game. I don't really like this, nor consider it completing the game by playing it. What is worse, a newer abuse is to go to the game's menu, delete a save file from there, and then try to load it. This is most definitely not gameplay.
It's not even a question of "if it's supported by the game, it's ok." Everything supported by the game is not ok, not even by the speedrunning community. What non-gameplay techniques are and aren't allowed is quite arbitrary. Why is it, for example, allowed to go to the game's save menu and delete a save file from there, but it is not allowed to, for instance, to go to the game's menu and load the next chapter (without completing the current one)? Or why isn't it allowed to open the game's console and write cheat codes there? After all, everything mentioned is supported by the game itself. So it's not a question of "if it's supported by the game".
(And the above was a rhetorical question. I'm not asking for an answer to this situation in particular. It's a way to open up discussion.)
In some games you can go to the game's menu and select "restart checkpoint" (or similar). In some of these games this can be abused to make completion faster. (In some cases it only saves a few seconds, but in other cases it can skip an entire long level, when coupled with certain out-of-bounds glitching.) I'd say this is a bit borderline, but personally I still don't like it. It's once again not gameplay; not really. It's not something that's an integral part of playing the game, nor do you need it to complete the game (with good gameplay).
One trick in The Talos Principle speedruns requires the game to be running at 20 frames per second. It won't work if it's running faster. "Luckily" the game offers such a setting in its graphics menu. Uh... no. Just no.
Perhaps the most extreme and obnoxious example I have seen was a Minecraft speedrun where the runner alt-tabbed to Windows, started the task manager and killed the game from there, and then restarted the game. That's most definitely not gameplay. I most certainly do not consider that a valid completion of the game. You could just as well launch a hex-editor and modify the savefile; not much of a difference.
As said, I'm seeing this trend more and more. The "purity" of completing a game as fast as possible by actually playing it is being marred more and more. If you can just mess up with the game's save files from menus, of even the system, that's just not speedrunning anymore.
Will I ever see, for example, a HL2 speedrun that uses the most recent gameplay techniques to complete it as fast as possible? Or will every single run be ruined by the abuse of non-gameplay techniques that are arbitrarily allowed for it? Is that famous HL2 speedrun a few years back that did not use any of those non-gameplay tricks the last "pure" speedrun of the game that I will ever see?
I don't like this a bit.
