zac makes a good point that I didn't think of: speedrunning videos can actually occasionally be helpful for figuring out how to quickly clear difficult parts of a game
but other than that, I'm pretty uninterested. I don't have time to watch them so I don't... and what that really means is "they aren't a priority"--sure, I could watch them instead of good anime, but... I'm not going to, because I find them relatively boring =P this kinda goes for LPs in general and I've stated this before, so this probably isn't too surprising
that being said, people who can legitimately speedrun a game in such a way that they play it really well are awesome. exploits and the like are... sometimes cool, and sometimes not--it can kinda be cool but in another way it's like,man, you're just kind of using bugs int he game to go by it faster, are you really playing the game or is this just a farce to see who can get to the end first? like, speedrunning to me should be about player skill/strategy, not skipping parts of levels or entire levels or something. but that's not what the actual "speedrunners" think so eh, that's nothing but my own idea.
it's just like, imagine you have a a race where you start in one corner of a square and have to go the other corner of the square. My idea of speedrunning would be: run along the edge (i.e. the path) and reach the other corner. But what we actually see is one person trying to cut across the middle, another person teleporting to one corner and then running the rest of the distance, and a 3rd person hopping into a car and flooring it along the main path as fast as they can. but the guy who just ran super fast along the path is the best to me. maybe there's an old lady who needs help along the way, no they don't have to do that, it doesn't have to be a completionist run, I'm just more interested in skill than gimmicks.
in the end though, it's not like I watch speedrunners, at most I just respect good ones in the back of my head, so... meh. my opinion doesn't really matter XP
