And what makes the speedrunner and the close reader analogous is that, rather than merely identifying a glitch and determining its potential cause, they instead try to capture its potential energy—to harness the unexpected spark toward new ends.
About 15 years ago, a debate flared up across the blogosphere, stoked by the viral question: Are videogames art?
Roger Ebert lit the match with a definitive answer: No. Not now, not ever—a scorched line in the sand that sent everyone scrambling to one corner or the other.
Those who sided with Ebert tended to rally around the idea that, when it comes to video games, “beauty and goal oriented participation work against each other.” In other words, videogames are not art because of the crude telos of high scores and final boss battles—too motivated by polygonal carrots on virtual sticks.
I’ve never found this point fully persuasive, especially if we compare “videogames” to modes of fiction we readily accept as art forms. For every twitchy first-person shooter propelled by a final kill count, there are a thousand novels, films, and plays that string us along with little more than wedding bells jangled in the distance, or “whodunit?” whispered at the start of each act lest we forget to anticipate the Big Reveal: the solution to the mystery, to the puzzle, to the game that’s been afoot this whole time.
Suffice to say that “videogames,” like every category of popular entertainment, is a loose term encompassing a massive variety of creative works, many of which affect the aesthetic experiences we tend to associate with art. The idea that win-conditions categorically negate these experiences only holds if one imagines every videogame as nothing but a blinkered sprint toward the finish line.
…But what if they were? Or rather, what if we played them as if they were? What if we embraced the assumption of Ebert and his fellow naysayers and treated every videogame, no matter how artistic its aspirations, as a breathless race to the final credits? What if we played every game with our sights laser focused on the end goal, button-mashing past every character interaction and cutscene, sprinting through every virtual space without wasting a second or even first thought on its interactive mise-en-scène?
Well, then we’d be speedrunning.
Speedrunning is not art, but it has helped me understand art better. More specifically, it’s improved my grasp of a particular way we engage a particular set of artworks. In short, by way of imperfect analogy, speedrunning helps me articulate what we do when we close read literary texts and why it matters. It’s also completely fascinating in-and-of-itself.
In the internet age, countless fan communities and subcultures have emerged around shared interest for specific films, book series, TV shows, etc. The online speedrunning community, however, centers not on fandom for any one cultural object, but on a method of engaging with videogames as medium.
At a glance, the method is very straightforward: to speedrun a videogame is to attempt to beat it as fast as possible in a single sitting. These attempts are often filmed or live-streamed, and competitive runtimes are submitted to websites like Speed Runs Live, which tracks the quickest runs across thousands of games, some of which have seen consistent shake-ups at the top of the leaderboards for over two decades. Take a second glance at the world record time for nearly any game, though, and you’ll realize that there is more than fleet-fingered play at work. Super Mario 64, for instance, was released in 1996 and marketed as a 25 hour-long game, though critics noted that most players could beat it in about 15 hours—maybe ten if they really booked it. The current speedrunning record for Super Mario 64, set in November of last year, is just over 6 minutes. The reason this is possible is because the filmed attempt to speedrun a videogame is only the tip of the iceberg, the final step in a long, iterative process whereby runners not only pathfind and perfect the fastest possible route through a game, but also uncover glitches used to forge mind boggling shortcuts, allowing runners to warp past huge chunks of a game and reach the final credits in a fraction of the usual runtime.
In practice, hunting for these glitches requires speedrunners to intimately explore every nook and cranny of the game world, poking at its edges and testing the parameters of its virtual reality. One of the most revolutionary glitches in all of speedrunning came about in 2019, when a runner known as Glitches’n’stuff tested the reality principles of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. One such principle is that the player is equipped with a boomerang which, once thrown, will always return to the player and can be used to pick up small items at a distance. If the player stands near the exit to a room, throws their boomerang, and leaves the room before it returns, the boomerang will pause in mid-air and disappear as the room unloads. If the player continues on their way, the boomerang will simply reappear in their inventory. But if the player quickly re-enters the exited room, the boomerang will instead reappear in its last-known, mid-air position and complete its return flight back to the player. Knowing this, Glitches’n’stuff was exploring one of Ocarina’s dungeons when he came across a coin within spitting distance of an exit; he wondered what would happen if he left the room while the boomerang was not only mid-flight but also carrying this coin. Upon re-entry, would the boomerang still have the coin in tow? Or would the coin disappear and then re-appear in its original position, leaving the boomerang to resume its return-flight empty handed?
Neither, it turned out. Instead, when Glitches’n’stuff re-entered the room, the coin had been replaced with a full-sized, free standing door that flew toward him atop the boomerang until coming to a sudden stop a foot or so off the ground. Stranger still, the door was functional. It didn’t lead anywhere, but when Glitches’n’stuff pressed the “open” button, the floating door swung on its hinges. The surreal image turned out to be apt, for this odd glitch would eventually open up radically new routes for speedrunning Ocarina. By studying the causes and parameters of this glitch, speedrunners discovered ways to manipulate it such that—instead of accidentally conjuring a door—they could intentionally summon any item in the game, including items that essentially allow them to warp from the starting area to the final boss in mere minutes.
The process of discovering these glitches and putting them into practice as shortcuts is where speedrunning is most analogous to close reading. In a narrower sense, speedrunning is especially resonant with the interpretive practice Rita Felski advocates for in The Limits of Critique, in which close reading is described as a method of “plac[ing] ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible” such that we recognize the text as its own actor and approach close reading as “a coproduction between actors rather than an unraveling of manifest meaning, a form of making rather than unmaking.”
The speedrunner aligns with the close-reader in approaching videogames as co-actors—as semi-autonomous texts they creatively engage to generate new modes of play. Likewise, close reading allows us to recognize a literary text as something more than a passively received plot, something akin to the virtual, explorable space of a videogame—a field of inquiry. The text remains its own actor insofar as it delimits that field, lays claim to particular themes, expresses its own theories, and carries its own history as a cultural object. And yet, it also remains open to the close reader as a co-actor who not only observes the field but also cultivates surplus meaning, insight, and pleasure by working its particular soil.
Speedrunners desire a similar surfeit from their game-texts, and gaming theorists often describe speedrunning as a metagame: a form of play conducted at a certain remove but parallel to the normative gameplay experienced by the average player. Notably, the metagame of speedrunning generates the same sorts of formal questions we often pose to literature. As Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux point out, “the speedrunning community not only changes the way games are played but also questions the very ontology of videogames. When does a game start and end? What is the definitive version of a given title? How do software and hardware technically operate?” Moreover, while most videogames offer a range of options and abilities, they’re usually designed to funnel the player toward singular solutions to a pre-set number of challenges that limit or gate the player’s progress. The glitch-actions performed by speedrunners creatively surmount these limits and supplant given solutions for world bending alternatives that are often ridiculously difficult to pull off, adding layers upon layers of fresh challenges to the game.
From one perspective, this might seem to place the speedrunner in an antagonistic relationship with the game, in that the glitched shortcuts are not what the player is supposed to do. But from another perspective, speedrunners play their videogames more honestly than anyone else. The FAQ page of Speed Runs Live includes a question about why glitches aren’t considered cheating; the response states: “Generally glitches are allowed… The game merely executes the code in the way it was programmed to do…If you start trying to get at ‘developer intentions,’ then you start a game of guesswork trying to figure out what exactly was intended.” In other words, the developer is dead and speedrunners avoid their own version of the intentional fallacy. When they run a videogame, they play the game itself—not the game as it was envisioned by the programmers, not the game we’re instructed to play by official guidebooks nor even in-game tutorials, but the game as it actually exists, complete with felicitous quirks in its code, gaps in its geometry.
As they exhaustively explore their game-texts to uncover the full breadth of possibilities therein, speedrunners’ efforts are precisely analogous to the interpretive mode theorized by Felski, a method of “encounter[ing] fresh ways of organizing perception, different patterns and models, rhythms of rapprochement and distancing, relaxation and suspense, movement and hesitation… ‘taking on’ and testing out new perceptual possibilities.” Likewise, the full process of routing and perfecting a speedrun forces players to reorient their perspective on the challenges the game presents; they test the simulated physics of the virtual world, develop fresh approaches to game mechanics, and work with the unique properties of each game world to generate new forms of movement, novel possibilities of play. And to take the analogy a step further, speedrunners’ approach to glitches reflects some of the most salient and difficult-to-describe sites of inquiry one encounters while close reading.
When I teach close reading to my students, I tell them that some of the most fertile grounds for developing a reading are often the trickiest to categorize. I usually describe them as tensions, moments when the text is in tension with its form, or with our expectations, or with meaning itself—moments that express the tension Roland Barthes locates between the two edges of a pleasurable text: “an obedient, conformist edge (the language…in its canonical state, as it has been established by schooling, good usage, culture) and another edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume any contours)…the place where the death of language is glimpsed.” The pleasure of close reading certain texts is the friction where these two edges meet, “the seam between them, the fault, the flaw,” a site of tension that “perforates discourse without rendering it meaningless.”
Speedrunning clarifies what Barthes is getting at here. The obedient edge of a videogame would be what most people experience in the average playthrough of a normally functioning game. Along this edge, the artifice remains intact; pixels and polygons are legibly arranged to create the on-screen illusion of depth or movement—clustered to signify individuated objects, characters, items, etc. The literary analog of the obedient edge is the coherent arc of a novel or the ‘surface level’ meaning of a poem. Like the intelligible artifice of a videogame, the obedient edge of a pleasurable text is where language properly signifies, the parts that ‘make sense’ by following whatever norms of grammar, form, typeface, etc. are necessary to communicate meaning.
The other edge Barthes theorizes is much more difficult to grasp, but we can understand it as the inverse of the obedient edge, as the ambiguous dissolution of meaning. In this sense, it’s impossible to pin down a universal definition of what this obverse edge looks like in context, but videogames offer a handy visual metaphor. In a number of classic, purely score-based arcade games, there is a practical limit to how many points the player can rack up in a single run. Exceed this limit, and the game will no longer compute, resulting in what’s known as a kill screen. When the player exceeds this limit in Pac-Man, the left-hand side of the screen remains intact, but the right-hand side dissolves into a cacophony of underlying code that’s no longer capable of producing the game’s visual interface, rendering it unplayable. Viewed from a certain angle, Pac-Man’s kill screen thus visualizes the two edges of Barthes’ pleasurable text—the screen’s left half representing the coherent legibility of the obedient edge, while the right half represents the nonsense of the obverse edge, “the place where the death of language is glimpsed.”
The key difference is that, within the texts Barthes describes, the divide between the two edges is nowhere near this stark. Rather, the pleasure of these texts lies in the flirtations between the two edges, the moments when the text playfully teeters on the fault line between sense and nonsense without fully tipping over. Speedrunners play upon the analogous fault line of a videogame; they flirt with that right-hand side of Pac-Man’s kill screen, searching along the seams of the virtual edifice for glitches that will allow them to bend the rules without completely breaking the game—to “perforate” the stable reality of the game world “without rendering it meaningless.”
The ends of speedrunners and literary critics may be different, but they share a similar approach in looking for these perforated sites of tension that open their respective texts to new possibilities, unexpected routes of traversal, novel lines of inquiry. Consider the passage in Ulysses where Stephen Dedalus thinks back on his time in Paris—an extended trip cut short by a telegram from his father: “Nother dying come home.”
If you’re reading closely enough, your eye will likely catch on ‘Nother’ : a freighted misspelling of ‘mother’ that might index the in-between-ness of ‘dying’— Stephen’s mother, on her distant death bed, transformed into a partial presence, a semi-negated ‘not mother.’ Alternatively, we could take the more psychoanalytic route down which ‘nother’ could signify the figure who haunts our psyche like no other; The Mother as a primordial loss/lack at the center of every subject. Reading ‘nother,’ instead, as an abbreviation of ‘another’ might suggest the exhausting constancy of death, a persistent drag on the living that leaves us too drained to fully annunciate our announcements of yet another deceased loved one, acquaintance, or perfect stranger. Or, we could take the typo as indicating the very likely possibility that Stephen’s father dictated the telegram while drunk. We might even attribute the mistake to Joyce himself and follow the lead of the French printers who, while typesetting Ulysses’ first edition, took it upon themselves to change ‘nother’ to ‘mother’—an (in)correction that remained standard, despite Joyce’s protests, until a 1984 reprint of the novel. But even without Joyce’s documented preference for ‘nother,’ the question of intent is moot according to a later passage of Ulysses wherein Stephen rejects the idea that Shakespeare made a mistake in marrying Anne Hathaway: “Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
In close reading moments like these, we peer into near-infinite portals of interpretive discovery, glimpsing the death of language in their combined abyss. Joyce’s “nother,” moreover, captures the usefulness of considering these moments of malleable tension as glitches. For a glitch does not describe an error per se (e.g. a misprinted letter, a bug in the code), but a serendipitous effect with no pre-determined cause. The term was coined by electrical engineers to denote “a sudden surge in current, or a spurious electrical signal,” which might arise from a specific design flaw, but could also be an inherent quirk of otherwise properly functioning circuitry. And what makes the speedrunner and the close reader analogous is that, rather than merely identifying a glitch and determining its potential cause, they instead try to capture its potential energy—to harness the unexpected spark toward new ends.
Where the analogy finally breaks down is in the difference between what speedrunners and close readers actually do with these glitchy tensions. Speedrunners use them to warp the game world toward the singular end of reaching the game’s conclusion ASAP. The results are plenty impressive—not just the absurdly quick runtimes, but also the superhuman feats of dexterity and timing they require, and the surreal, often balletic performances runners carry off within the virtual environments of their games.
Nevertheless, the potential gains of close reading are far more expansive. On the humbler end of the spectrum, close reading allows us to appreciate the artistry of a text’s construction, the practical alchemy through which a bit of ink on a page suspends our disbelief, arouses intense emotions, cultivates “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” But in a more ambitious sense, close reading allows us to warp not just the artificial reality of a text, but our own.
Without characterizing “reality” as a pure simulacrum, or a totalizing symbolic order, we can still recognize (perhaps now more than ever) that, alongside individual and collective perceptions of the world, human societies are structured and sustained by fictions. There is plenty of empirical evidence worth believing that approximates how the universe works on every scale of existence ranging from the planetary to the sub-cellular. “What we nevertheless overlook is the following,” writes Sylvia Wynter, “that the hybrid laws that engender our empirical reality…are storytellingly chartered, symbolically encoded, thereby self-organizing autopoietic systems.” We may not live in the matrix, nor in a videogame, but we still understand the world through language and organize our reality according to the narrative logics of scientific models, historiography, legal systems, etc.
Wynter calls upon us “to think about the way in which our world- systemic social order must itself continue to be known in the terms of a rigorously elaborated order of knowledge…a storytelling-chartered Code.” If there’s a strong case to be made for why close reading matters, it is that it makes this thinking possible. In presenting their own virtual realities, literary texts form microcosms of the storytelling-charted social order Wynter describes. While the metagame of close reading remains within the text’s microcosm, it holds the potential to reorient our perception and understanding of the macrocosm. And if we play our metagame as hard as speedrunners play theirs, we might recognize felicitous glitches in our world’s Code, malleable sites of tension that allow us to bend its rules, overcome its artificial limits, and reroute our way to unimagined possibilities.
Sam Norcross is a PhD candidate at Tufts University where he studies postmodern theories of language and the genetic code. His proudest athletic achievement happened at a 2010 quizbowl tournament, where he earned 5 extra points for buzzing in early with the correct answer: “the semaphore version of Wuthering Heights.”