Speedrunning

My mind is sort of wandering a bit this morning.  Watched the Summoning Salt video about the Ninja Gaiden world record progression and it had me thinking about speedruns and why they interest me.

To me, the current popularity of speedrunning is not un-related to "Pac-Man Fever", which the world was in the throes of in my very young days.

I seldom got out to the arcades, seldom got the opportunity to play Pac-Man, and then not for very long because those machines were quarter-eaters and I did not exactly have lightning reflexes.  Instead I watched the cartoon, ate the cereal, listened to the record (not "Pac-Man Fever", a _different_ Pac-Man knockoff record), and read the books.

The book I had was what we would now call a "strategy guide", an in-depth explanation of How To Win At Pac-Man.  There was no "winning state" that anybody knew of.  "winning" meant to play for as long as possible with as little money as possible, to attain what we would now recognize as a "flow state".

A key component of a flow state, as I understand it, is an altered perception of time.  We cease to be cognizant of time passing.  I was reading an academic article yesterday on older trans women's experiences which brought up the notion of "trans time", the idea that trans people experience time in a different manner than cis people do.  I'm a little skeptical of the concept.  I'm not sure how one could empirically document or replicate it.  Differentiating things which are intrinsic to the trans experience and things which are not is a difficult undertaking.

But it is true that I do not always experience time in a direct manner.  I sort of assumed that this was a universal human experience, this sense of chronological disjunction.  I mean, I read "Slaughterhouse Five", I knew about "flashbacks", I knew that time was relative.  I face certain issues as a result of being, biologically, 13 and 44 simultaneously, but they don't seem all _that_ novel or interesting to me.

(Fuck it, I don't pass, why should time?)

For me speedrunning isn't a matter of "winning" or "beating the clock".  There's certainly a John Henry aspect to it, of beating a machine, but a large part of the goal of leisure for me is to bring about the irrelevance of time.  So I tend to gravitate towards very long speedruns.  The media experiences I seek out are either short or hyperextended, either a hall of mirrors or an endless corridor.  Preferably with as few events in them as possible.  Events are something for my rational mind to grab onto, ruminate on, forcibly pulling me out of the flow state.  Work which defies meaning, which defies rational analysis, is invaluable to me because it gives me permission to just exist, to just enjoy something as it is, without staying up at 3 AM wondering if that man is right in the head, if he knows something I don't.

Well that went nowhere I expected.  Hell with it, I'm posting it anyway.