Interesting Research: Speedrunning as Practiced Practice

[MrPopo]

Well, in the Deus Ex example it causes you to not need to skill up your lockpicking and electronics skills. The way locked stuff works is it has a strength from 1-100%. You have a number of disposable lockpicks and multitools (one for mechanical locks, one for electronic locks) that will reduce the strength of a locked door/keypad by a certain amount based on your skill, but it does so over time. Essentially, when you use a lockpick it spends the next three seconds reducing the strength by a constant amount per second. When you open the inventory the strength keeps being reduced but the time a lockpick is active stops ticking down, so you can leave the inventory open for a good 20 seconds and open any strength lock at the weakest skill. The weakest skill reduces 10% strength per pick, second is 25%, third is 40%, and fourth is I think 70% (no one gets it because it's in a bad spot for breakpoints where you need the same number of picks for half the locks between skill three and four). So a normal runthrough would get skill two or three in both lockpicking and electronics, while if you're willing to exploit this bug you leave both at one, saving a lot of skillpoints that can be spent on other things like weapons or computers.

[marurun]

Exploiting a bug would be a glitch run, because it's breaking the narrative rules (as opposed to the game rules).

Think of it like the spirit of the law and the letter of the law. The latter is much more easily exploited.

[Ivo]

Well, in the Deus Ex example it causes you to not need to skill up your lockpicking and electronics skills. The way locked stuff works is it has a strength from 1-100%. You have a number of disposable lockpicks and multitools (one for mechanical locks, one for electronic locks) that will reduce the strength of a locked door/keypad by a certain amount based on your skill, but it does so over time. Essentially, when you use a lockpick it spends the next three seconds reducing the strength by a constant amount per second. When you open the inventory the strength keeps being reduced but the time a lockpick is active stops ticking down, so you can leave the inventory open for a good 20 seconds and open any strength lock at the weakest skill. The weakest skill reduces 10% strength per pick, second is 25%, third is 40%, and fourth is I think 70% (no one gets it because it's in a bad spot for breakpoints where you need the same number of picks for half the locks between skill three and four). So a normal runthrough would get skill two or three in both lockpicking and electronics, while if you're willing to exploit this bug you leave both at one, saving a lot of skillpoints that can be spent on other things like weapons or computers.

That seems quite clearly a glitch to me, otherwise why would the designers have implemented a skill point system at all? It looks precisely like an oversight in programming apparently, even though it won't look as jarring as someone going through the wall. The devs would probably patch it up in a following build if it was an MMO.

It is not as easy as developer intent because, as mentioned in the paper, I doubt Nintendo intended the original SMB to be completed in less than 10 minutes. This is like those parkour / freerunning displays you can see where very skilled athletes can navigate an "obstacle course" of public spaces much faster than a normal person. Whereas glitches have no real analog in the real world apparently, but would be like in the Matrix where Neo can glitch the heck out of it and fly around.