The Speedrunning museum of accidents

Abstract

This paper discusses speedrunning, the practice of completing a game as quickly as possible without cheats or cheat devices and how it relates to Paul Virilio’s Museum of Accidents. Speedruns are shown to be an example of what the author calls ‘curatorial play’, or play that is intentionally preserved and organized with a view to being shared. Speedrunning in particular is shown to re-curate a game by exhibiting glitches (accidents) that allow the game to be viewed in a different light by player and spectator alike. This notion of player as curator is then used as a lens to examine various developer responses to speedruns that the author has observed.