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Back in October/November of 2022 I began learning how to speedrun Hollow Knight. I picked a particular category and created a goal for myself: 40 minutes. In terms of competitive times it wasn’t even close to the top, but in the grand scheme of things it felt like a solid time to get.
Speedrunning has a lot of ups and downs, and I shared some of those a while back. I took a couple of hiatuses from running because it’s easy to just get burnt out. Trying and failing to do better, making mistakes on sections that you’ve done just fine numerous times before, all of those foibles that are perfectly understandable still feel bad. You can’t really help feeling annoyed, you can only decide to keep going.
And let’s not ignore that taking breaks comes with an interesting conundrum. While taking a break is a useful way to deal with stress, it also creates additional stress when coming back. Because getting better requires practice. And taking a break means, of course, time is being spent not practicing. But overall these breaks are important for getting into the proper headspace. At some point, if you put too much effort into something, if it becomes too frustrating, then you wind up making more mistakes.
Anyway, I bring this up because I finally reached that goal.
And in finally hitting that marker, I wanted to take some time to reflect on some of the things that helped me get there. Because speedrunning is a difficult hobby to engage in, but also a rewarding experience. And understanding how to approach it is helpful.
The Goal
I’ve reiterated this a few times before, but having a clear goal is good. This is true both in the sense of a long-term goal (my 40 minute goal, or getting into the top 3, or holding the world record), as well as short-term goals. Being able to chop up a project into smaller chunks helps keep your mind focused and lets you feel like you’re making progress.
As an example, let’s say you start speedrunning a game. It’s “supposed to” take you 30 minutes to complete, but when you start out it’s taking you two hours. If you keep thinking about your runs in terms of that 30 minute finish line, then while you might make continual progress, it will still feel a long way off. Long enough that you might find yourself not progressing fast enough. You may get burned out because you think you’ll never reach 30 minutes.
Comparatively, setting smaller interim goals helps you feel successful. If you’re starting at 2 hours, then perhaps your current goal can be getting it down to an hour and a half. When starting out, you can generally set pretty big goals because you’re likely to make those big jumps. And with practice, you’ll eventually hit that mark. And then you start over – let’s go for an hour, or an hour and fifteen minutes. As you get closer and closer to the end goal, you set smaller and smaller leaps for the sub-goals – 30 minute jumps turn into 5 minute jumps. One hour to 50 minutes, 50 minutes to 45, 45 to 40, and so on and so on.
Those smaller goals help you feel like you’re making progress. Even if you’re getting better at the exact same rate, the very fact that you are conceptualizing each smaller goal as a victory helps keep you motivated. You have basically tricked your brain into thinking you’re making more progress, and that keeps you going.
Of course, it’s also important to temper these goals in various ways…
Real Speedrunning
In identifying a goal, it’s easy to get caught up in the competitive nature of speedrunning. Runners are measured by their times, and those who hold world records in their categories are deemed worthy of a special awe.
But this respect and competition fosters a sense that “real” speedrunning involves having a record. That you’ve only “made it” once you have a truly competitive time – or maybe even the best time.
There are ways in which this competition can help. If you know that you can get the best time, if you know that you can improve, then that can be the drive you need to keep practicing. Perhaps that competition is with another runner, as you trade the record back and forth between yourselves. Perhaps that competition is against yourself, seeing if you can beat your current best time.
But the competitive aspect also creates a sense of gatekeeping – particularly “internal” gatekeeping. A gatekeeping that negatively influences behavior. On the one hand is, as I said, a belief that you can’t really be a speedrunner until you’ve hit some external goal – whatever that goal may be. On the other hand is the practice of seeking out games and categories to run specifically because you can become a top runner. These might include categories with few competitors, or even just making up categories for the sake of holding the world record.
These practices ignore the nature of the respect that is accorded to speedrunning – it mistakes the formal “world record” with the actual practice and dedication that are involved. The knowledge acquired and shared as part of a community to discover tricks and skips, to push the game to its limits.
That knowledge and dedication are the mark of speedrunning, and this works in multiple ways. Just playing a game in an empty category feels hollow, regardless of the achievement, because it signals nothing. But taking the time to practice tricks and learn techniques, regardless of the final time, signals something.
A run where you’ve trained for an extended period of time to cut down your personal best is meaningful, even if the time is incredibly slow. A run where you’ve just played the game normally to the end is meaningless, even if you hold the world record. Both are speedrunners, but the term holds different weight depending on what they’re doing.
So when setting the goal, it’s important to think about what you actually want to accomplish. Do you want to simply dip your toe into speedrunning? To try it out, and see if maybe you enjoy it? Do you want to try and go for a world record? The actual goal you set is less important than the mentality you bring with yourself – are you ultimately doing this because you want to do this as a hobby, or because you think you have to prove yourself?
Practice, Practice, Practice
It goes without saying that getting better at a run requires you to keep trying over and over and over and over again. But there’s a bit more that we can say than just keep practicing.
For one, it’s important to actually try to learn the specific tricks that are involved in a run. Glitches, exploits, skips, and so on. These are probably the components that make speedrunning feel most exciting, because of how they break the game. They are the parts of the game that showcase the most skill. They are not the only elements that are important, but they send the strongest signal.
But more important than just learning those tricks is to go big. To learn the ones that seem the scariest, the most impossible to do. Because the truth is that every trick seems impossible to start. Yet through learning and practice, you eventually acquire the knowledge to do those tricks reliably. Having confidence that you’ll eventually get a handle on these tricks and thus being willing to try them is important. The more time you spend practicing, the more practice you get in, the more muscle memory you acquire.
Next, it’s important to actually set aside the time to practice these tricks, and individual segments of runs. To do what you can to perfect your movement and your ability to anticipate danger and memorize movements. It might feel at some points like all you need is to do a practice run once or twice a week, but if you only set aside small bits of time, you’ll only make small bits of progress. If you only practice the hard stuff, you’ll only get good at the hard stuff.
How much time needs to be taken is a personal choice. I personally liked to spend 30 minutes each day practicing a given section or trick. Here’s where various mods to help practice – such as save states – come in handy. Load up the state, try the trick, and then load it again. Thus you could get dozens or even hundreds of attempts in within a short span of time. Keeping track of your progress – how many times did you perform this trick successfully, how many times did you beat this boss, how many times did you die on this section – helps you then see how much better you’re getting.
But it still needs to be stressed that taking breaks is fine. Missing a day of practice is fine. The point of this practice is to build up muscle memory, and muscle memory works both ways. If you put in the practice, you’ll largely retain the knowledge that you’ve acquired along the way. You may need to take some time to get back to your best after a break, but it’s not like starting over. However, if you don’t practice at all, or barely practice, then you’ll never acquire the muscle memory in the first place.
Concluding Remarks
There’s a lot more that could be said, but I wanted to share these thoughts both to reflect on what worked and what didn’t in my own journey.
I am glad that I had set a healthy goal for myself. I am glad that I didn’t get caught up in the idea that I need to be a top runner to prove myself as a “real” speedrunner. I’m glad that I put in the practice. I’m glad that I took breaks.
However, I regret that I scared myself away from certain tricks. Tricks that I thought I wouldn’t be able to do, only to find that they were actually viable. Tricks that I could have learned way earlier if I’d been willing to give them a chance. I regret that I focused only on the big stuff – the flashy tricks. That I didn’t take the time to practice the little things – basic movement optimization, specific sections that often gave me trouble. I wish I had dedicated some time to practicing all of the run, and not just some of it.
In reaching this goal I reflected on what comes next. In truth, I had thought I’d still be at this for several more months. Even as I got closer to the 40 minute mark, I was still so sure that I’d find myself getting there little by little. I did not expect to hit it when I did. And now that it’s done, I think that I want to keep going…but not with Hollow Knight. Being able to stop and do something else feels like an earned reprieve.
Abstracting Games 