Speedrun

A speedrun is a completion of a game optimised for elapsed time under a ruleset a community has agreed on, rather than under whatever completion the developer had in mind.

The ruleset is the real work. Any% (finish by any means, exploits included), 100% (every listed objective) and glitchless (no engine-breaking tricks) are not variations on a theme but separate optimisation problems — allowing or banning a single trick can restructure the entire fastest path — and drawing a category's boundary is closer to writing a constraint than following one, done before a single attempt is timed. Timing standards get the same scrutiny: real time versus in-game time — the axis most category disputes actually turn on — load-removed time where a community accepts it, and an exact start and end frame, because an ambiguous boundary invites disputes over the Ground Truth of a result.

Submitted runs carry video, and a leaderboard's authority rests on moderators re-checking that evidence against the category rules — a small institution held together by voluntary Provenance tracking, where a disputed run gets relitigated like any contested Reproducible Case rather than simply believed. Input logs are expected mainly on tool-assisted submissions and in the few communities that have made them a standard, not on runs generally.

Tool-assisted runs are a separate discipline: built offline with frame advance and save states, judged on execution rather than reflexes, explicitly out of competition with live attempts, and possible at all only because the underlying simulation is Determinism-dependent — the same inputs must produce the same frame every time. Routing itself is a form of Metagame evolution, refined as Datamining exposes exact frame windows and memory values, and it decays the moment a Live Service Game patches away the exploit a route was built on — a fragility that makes emulated, Game Preservation-adjacent builds the more stable long-term target for routing work.