From besting Tetris AI to epic speedruns – inside gaming’s most thrilling feats
From besting Tetris AI to epic speedruns – inside gaming’s most thrilling feats
From besting Tetris AI to epic speedruns – inside gaming’s most thrilling feats
By James Dawes
January 10, 2024
Summary
The Oklahoma teen beat the game by defeating level after level until he reached the "Kill screen" - that is, the moment when the Tetris artificial intelligence taps out in exhaustion, stopping play because its designers never wrote the code to advance further.
"Speedrunning" is a popular gaming subculture in which players meticulously optimize routes and exploit glitches to complete, in a matter of minutes, games that normally take hours, from the tightly constrained, run-and-gun action game Cuphead to the sprawling role-playing epic Baldur's Gate 3.
In top-level competition, speedrunners strive to match the time of what's referred to as a "TAS," or "Tool-assisted speed run." To figure out the TAS time, players use game emulators to choreograph a theoretically perfect playthrough, advancing the game one frame at a time to determine the fastest possible time.
Minecraft is known as a sandbox game, which means that gamers can create and explore their own virtual worlds, limited only by their imagination and a few simple tools and resources - like buckets and sand, or, in the case of Minecraft, pickaxes and stone.
At their best, sandbox games like Minecraft can bring people closer to the joyful and healthily pointless play of childhood - a restorative escape from the anxious, utility-driven planning that dominates so much of adulthood.
The Halo 3 gaming community participated in a bloodier version of the collective effort of Minecraft players.
It giddily promised to change people's behaviors through the use of extrinsic motivators borrowed from the gaming community: badges, achievements, community scorekeeping.
Reference
Dawes, J. (2024, January 10). From besting Tetris AI to epic speedruns – inside gaming’s most thrilling feats. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/from-besting-tetris-ai-to-epic-speedruns-inside-gamings-most-thrilling-feats-220620