Abstract
The field site observation assignment was by far the most enjoyable experience for me. We were given the opportunity to choose an online community and observe its interactions and behaviors. As you can imagine, we had a lot of creative freedom and could choose any community that we were interested in. My focus was on a video game speed-running community. My essay focused on the concept of “were speedrunning communities healthy environments or toxic environments”. From an outsider’s perspective, my concept might seem bland or uninspired. However, speedrunning itself is a complete outlier from all other forms of gaming media. It is a competitive sport in which the main competition is oneself and their patience. Throughout my essay I describe the interactions that occurred in a speedrunning community that I silently observed; how these interactions affected players, what role they played in the grand scheme of gaming media, and how the community felt about hyper toxicity.
An Obsession With Time
The world of speedrunning is a phenomenon in itself. What would create a passion within people to complete something as fast as possible? Especially something that is meant to be enjoyed slowly. Not to mention that it would take years of time to master “speedrunning” it. Speedrunning is the concept of simply completing a game as fast as possible. There are many subsections of speedrunning such as “any percent runs” which translate to beating the game without 100 percent completing it (collecting all items or beating every non-essential stage would not be required in an “any percent run”). Due to how wide and varied speedrunning is, many communities were formed through the concept. The main difference between these communities is the games involved. There are some communities that incorporate all and any video games while others only focus on one video game. An example of this would be the “SM64SR” discord community which focuses on speedrunning the video game “Super Mario 64”. Speedrunning has created hundreds of communities, but are these communities filled with healthy and kind people, or are they just as toxic as most gaming communities usually are?
The speedrunning community “SM64SR” is one of many. As mentioned before, this community focuses its speed runs on one game. However, while the community seems to be healthy and non-toxic, there does seem to be an air of toxic competitiveness and favoritism that hovers over it. To answer the question of whether these communities are good or not, we must first discover why they were created and why did the players who joined these communities stayed in them. In a survey done by “Qutee”, a data-led program, they questioned nearly 1000 players about their experience with gaming and gaming communities. The results were interesting, 40% stated that gaming/gaming communities aided their emotional well-being, 66% stated that they formed close friendships, and a whopping 33% stated that it inspired future careers (Anderton, K. 2018). The numbers state the obvious; gaming communities have countless positive benefits, but that doesn’t mean that these communities are entirely healthy. While most gaming communities tend to seem healthy within themselves, their interactions with outsiders and other gaming communities tend to expose their true colors.
As I observed my community, I noticed that there was a lot of comraderies. The players were friendly with each other, they shared pictures of their lives, personal achievements that didn’t even relate to speedrunning, and some had even made friendships so strong that they would meet in real life to hang out. The first negative thing that I noticed was the standard that the moderators were held at. The mods of this server were basically its leaders, and even though this community was formed over 3 years ago in discord, the mods have stayed relatively the same. To put it bluntly, most of the moderators do not need to follow the rules, and while they don’t abuse their power or act inappropriately, it does seem unfair and strange that they don’t hold themselves accountable. This was showcased when one user named “egg” posted their personal speedrunning record, only to be criticized by a moderator named “rosheeki”. The accosting became so severe that “egg” left the server after “rosheeki” removed his personal record from the server “shout-out page” which acted as a sort of trophy room for its members. Now on paper, this may not seem shocking, so what if one player made some jokes, it can’t be that big of a deal right? The server has a handful of rules but one of the main ones is, “No instigating drama, harassing other runners, dogpiling, or complaining about other Discords/streamers.” This rule was clearly broken by the moderator but nothing was done to them. Eventually “egg” returned to the server where he was met with an apology and his record was reinstated, “rosheeki’s” morals were the only thing that remedied this conflict. In all honesty I doubt that he would have needed to apologize. A quick side note, players in almost all speedrunning communities simply refer to each other by their usernames or abbreviated versions of them. Someone whose username is “TheLegendDoopster ” might be referred to as “Doop ” or “Doopster ”, I have rarely seen anyone refer to each other using their actual names, even if they met in real life. This is most likely because these people met through their gaming aliases. If you meet someone online then you tend to associate their identity with their online alias or profile picture. Whenever I see the name “Povanis”, I immediately think of one of my friends who uses that alias in discord, despite me knowing that his real name is not “Povanis”.
One of my biggest fears was how the community would interact with members of LGBTQ+. People that play online games tend to be very loose with their lips, casual F-bombs and other derogatory terms get thrown around a lot. Most of the time, these terms are used simply for the sake of using them, not for any actual malicious reason. However, there are times where this is not the case. My uneasiness was caused by the actions of two speedrunners in 2018, who at the time I was a fan of. The speedrunners were quite famous and were known as RWhiteGoose and Graviton. Goose made disparaging comments about a female user in his chat who he claimed had slept with “about 70 dudes” and how it was “disgusting”, while Graviton frequently used the term “tranny” while negatively referencing the disenfranchised group (Colin, N. 2018). Thankfully, the majority of the speedrunning community disapproved and downright disowned these two individuals. Personally, I was distraught and disappointed but I knew people that simply ignored their actions and chose not to care. I was curious as to how the people in my observation would react in this situation. In the “SM64SR” community there was one LGBTQ+ member that I noticed, who went by the name “gothiclogic”. Another user named “drogie” had a whole conversation with “gothiclogic” about their identity and it was a pretty heartwarming and amicable interaction. Sadly, only half an hour later, three users were banned from the server. Two of the users were banned for faking speedruns and spamming the moderators, whereas the third user was banned for saying toxic things in relation to the transgender community. This interaction confirmed two things, the speedrunning community was mostly filled with people who disapproved of hate, and that those who were hateful, were now afraid of stating it publicly which is why they targeted someone in private messages. Both of these ideas are positives. From my perspective, this discord community does not care about anyone’s identity, they only start caring if it is attacked. In all fairness this is a pretty good mentality to have, no one should be treated better or worse for who they are, and neither should any unfair treatment be tolerated; regardless of whether it is positive or negative.
There are groups of people that dedicate hundreds, if not thousands, of hours to achieve the fastest completion times in video games. Playing the same video game over and over and over again may sound like a lonely Sisyphean task to some observers. But the truth is that there are many positives to be found in the world of speedrunning (Xander, T. 2019). Speedrunning has created servers which in turn has created communities. These communities tend to have very healthy interactions and the people in them usually form long-term friendships. When a new person joins the community, there is often a mentor/student relationship, wherein a more experienced runner will take a newer runner under their wing (Andrew J. H. 2018). This is why most speedrunning communities stand against hate and toxicity because they try to be as inclusive and helpful as possible, even to someone who just joined the server and might not care about it all. Speedrunning communities are a gem in the gaming world, they are filled with compassionate and helpful people, who just want to share their passion and form bonds.