YouTube Channel of the Week #14: Games Done Quick

YouTube is probably the greatest anthropological project ever launched. It has managed to expose the multitudes of the human condition more than any other medium ever created, and allowed people to express themselves in more diverse ways than at any point in history. This weekly column is an outlet for me to share with you some undiscovered gems, as well some very well-trodden gems, and discuss just what it is that makes the chosen accounts so intriguing.

WHO: Games Done Quick
WHAT: Archives, highlights and behind the scenes of charitable gaming conferences Awesome Games Done Quick/ Summer Games Done Quick.
HOW MANY SUBSCRIBERS AT TIME OF WRITING: 140,865
WHY SHOULD I CARE: For the past six years, in hotels across the United States (and in one instance in someone's house), people have come together in the name of charity to play video games. To help fight cancer, assist Doctors Without Borders and fund research for autism. When it began in January 2010, they managed to raise $10,531. In January of this year, by playing games on a Twitch stream, they raised $1,216,304. How is this possible? This is the world of speedrunning, its rabid fans and its fantastic characters.

Gaming events are nothing new. The Evo Championship Series, the world's biggest fighting game tournament, occurs annually in Las Vegas with total prize money of nearly $700,000. In Korea, gaming is a national sport, with stadiums filled with thousands of cheering fans, making celebrities out of the 'e-sportsmen'. This, though, is quite different from that kind of ultra fanfare. There's something oddly masculine about that world. There's a lot of hooting and jeering, a lot of men drinking energy drinks and making 'ka-pow' or 'boo-ya' hand gestures. That's not to say they don't provide great moments, but intrinsically they are competitive, and being competitive is not very #chill.

The Games Done Quick events, however, are very #chill indeed. Speedrunning is the action of attempting to complete a game in the quickest time possible by exploiting its function. This could mean exposing glitches, learning the timings of in game actions and, well, anything else you can use to your advantage. The gameplay has to be precise in order to pull off some of the neatest tricks, which takes hours and hours of practice, and the players are often at the mercy of the dreaded RNG (random number generation, causing the game to behave in any way it wants).

So it's a bunch of people playing games for hours, who gives a fuck, right? I sit at my desk and look at a screen all day, why would I want to watch some other dickheads do it? I'll tell you why: because in amongst those many hours of gameplay lie some true gems, some beautiful bits and, of course, you already knew, some unbearably uncomfortable moments.

Arguably the most famous instance of this is when a gentleman called CavemanDJC ran a game called Tomba! 2, which is about a feral child killing pigs. Next to him was a man called Chibi. Chibi and CavemanDJC did not know each other, but their on-screen relationship will now go down in history as one of the greatest of all time.

For 20 minutes, Chibi comments and jokes (poorly) on all the minutiae of the game being played, to the extreme chagrin of CavemanDJC, until he finally snaps and says the immortal words "I would really prefer it if you would be quiet." An empty room, with the sad midi flute of the game tooting on, becomes emptier. Chibi reclines in sadness, rejection. I would say it was awkward, but that doesn't do it justice. It is like an icy sledgehammer of social anxiety hitting you full force in the mouth. It's incredible.

That's an easy target, though. While the above is one of my favourite YouTube videos of all time, it's not a true reflection of what makes the GDQ events so good. Any highlight reel will display the pure pleasure derived, for player and audience, from doing something just right. The hours and hours and hours of practise, effort, thinking and concentration that goes into doing this, and using that to raise money. And yes, everyone in there is a nerd to some degree, but to use the old trope of 'it's nice they have somewhere to congregate away from the jocks' would negate how much of an appeal this kind of thing has to the everyman.

If you appreciate the joy of achievement, the drama of a race against time, then you will enjoy these videos (at least, some of the shorter ones, others can run as long as five hours, really for the heads, those). There's a great sense of community at the heart of the event, a cool friendliness pervading it. Above all, it's an opportunity for those who have skills outside of convention to showcase them, and they're just as impressive. I would rather watch someone beat Mario in 20 minutes than four hours of Olympic shot-put, just saying.

@joe_bish

More YouTube Channels of the Week:

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YouTube Channel of the Week #12: Fred Red

YouTube Channel of the Week #11: Vegan Gains