![speedrunners game starts and then closes speedrunners game starts and then closes](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Facebook_Africa-Population-Density-Map.gif)
- SPEEDRUNNERS GAME STARTS AND THEN CLOSES MANUAL
- SPEEDRUNNERS GAME STARTS AND THEN CLOSES SOFTWARE
- SPEEDRUNNERS GAME STARTS AND THEN CLOSES CODE
Most games have bugs that enable the player to skip whole sections of the game and take out hours from the total run time. But this gives a clever gamer the opportunity to complete the game way faster than originally intended. And most of them have not even been found yet.
SPEEDRUNNERS GAME STARTS AND THEN CLOSES SOFTWARE
Unfortunately (but fortunately for speedrunners!) all software and video games especially have a lot of bugs. If there were no bugs in video games, all the games would have to be played from the beginning to the end according to the way the game creators intended. And that leads us to the headline of this post – how similar is speedrunning to software testing?
![speedrunners game starts and then closes speedrunners game starts and then closes](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/F4gqGDf9-WQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
Some want to use their brains and completely break the game. Some want to beat games that give them a tough challenge. Some want to be the best at their childhood favorite video game. Speedrunners usually choose games that have a special place in their heart. Every time a new World of Warcraft expansion is released, all the major guilds in the World compete fiercely to be the first to raid a new dungeon. Another category is World’s First, where people compete for achieving something for the first time. Another popular category is the segmented runs where the speedrunner is focused on completing a part of the game, maybe a single level, as quickly as possible. One example of extra challenge criteria could be to complete the game without dying, collecting all the collectables or completing the game without using a particular item. Many popular games have their own competition categories and completion criteria. This is very close to test automation, where we know the requirements (how to beat the game), what steps does this require (game character movement and skills) and are executed by another program controlling the commands (tool-assisted execution). Tool-assisted speedruns use emulators to simulate the game and a pre-programmed set of commands for the emulator to execute.
SPEEDRUNNERS GAME STARTS AND THEN CLOSES MANUAL
You could think that this is very close to manual testing where the focus is on the mechanical execution. Normal speedruns focus on beating the game on the original system using the gamers memory, reaction time and hand-eye coordination skills. Two of the most common are normal speedruns and tool-assisted speedruns (TAS). There are multiple different speedrun categories.
SPEEDRUNNERS GAME STARTS AND THEN CLOSES CODE
Speedrunning is a cousin of esports, but whereas esports focuses on competitive games with other human players, speedrunning focuses on beating the game code itself. The best speedrunners get their name to the top of the leader boards and the bragging-rights to say that they are the best in the World in playing it. There is a strong speedrunning culture around popular video games where gamers are playing their favorite video games for hours, trying to perfect their run and make a new record time beating it. You can go right now to the popular streaming service Twitch and watch hundreds of speedrunners completing their favorite video games in record times. I’m of course talking about speedrunning, the art of playing through video games as quickly as possible. I want to write about a part of the culture that has been alive since the 90s but has within the last few years truly broken into the mainstream and is now a big part of today’s youth culture.