Inside gaming’s most thrilling feats

Good morning! Two gamers did something unthinkable in the past couple of months. One beat Tetris, a game that had remained unconquered for a very long time, and another set a “speedrun” record. Both are seen as almost superhuman feats. Human dedication to gaming and the desire to spend long, gruelling hours on games has led to the gamification of everything. Now a new concept of “gameful design” is catching on. Where gamification focuses on useful outcomes, gameful design focuses on fulfilling experiences. It’s a fascinating read. Plus, the best long-form stories of the week.

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James Dawes

After 13-year-old Willis Gibson became the first human to beat the original Nintendo version of Tetris, he dedicated his special win to his father, who passed away in December 2023.

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. Before Gibson, the only other player to overcome the game’s AI was another AI.

For any parent who has despaired over their children sinking countless hours into video games, Gibson’s victory over the cruel geometry of Tetris stands as a bracing corrective.

Despite the stereotypes, most gamers are anything but lazy. And they’re anything but mindless.

The world’s top players can sometimes serve as reminders of the best in us, with memorable achievements that range from the heroic to the inscrutably weird.

The perfect run

“Speedrunning” is a popular gaming subculture in which players meticulously optimise 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.

Success requires punishing precision, flawless execution and years of training.

The major speedrunning milestones are, like Olympic races, marked by mere fractions of a second. The urge to speedrun likely sprouts from an innate human longing for perfection – and a uniquely 21st century compulsion to best the robots.

A Twitch streamer who goes by the username Niftski is currently the human who has come closest to achieving this android-like perfection. His 4-minute, 54.631-second world-record speedrun of Super Mario Bros. – achieved in September 2023 – is just 0.35 seconds shy of a flawless TAS.

Watching Niftski’s now-famous run is a dissonant experience. Goofy, retro, 8-bit Mario jumps imperturbably over goombas and koopa troopas with the iconic, cheerful “boink” sound of his hop.

Meanwhile, Niftski pants as his anxiety builds, his heart rate – tracked on screen during the livestream – peaking at 188 beats per minute.

When Mario bounces over the final big turtle at the finish line – “boink” – Niftski erupts into screams of shock and repeated cries of “Oh my God!”

He hyperventilates, struggles for oxygen and finally sobs from exhaustion and joy.

The largest world and its longest pig ride

This list couldn’t be complete without an achievement from Minecraft, the revolutionary video game that has become the second-best-selling title in history, with over 300 million copies sold – second only to Tetris’ 520 million units.

Minecraft populates the video game libraries of grade-schoolers and has been used as an educational tool in university classrooms. Even the British Museum has held an exhibition devoted to the game.

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.

So what can you do in the Minecraft playground?

Well, you can ride on a pig. The Guinness Book of World Records marks the farthest distance at 414 miles. Or you can collect sunflowers. The world record for that is 89 in one minute. Or you can dig a tunnel – but you’ll need to make it 100,001 blocks long to edge out the current record.

My personal favourite is a collective, ongoing effort: a sprawling, global collaboration to recreate the world on a 1:1 scale using Minecraft blocks, with blocks counting as one cubic metre.

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 galaxy’s greatest collaboration

The Halo 3 gaming community participated in a bloodier version of the collective effort of Minecraft players.

The game, which pits humans against an alien alliance known as the Covenant, was released in 2007 to much fanfare.

Whether they were playing the single-player campaign mode or the online multiplayer mode, gamers around the world started seeing themselves as imaginary participants in a global cause to save humanity – in what came to be known as the “Great War.”

They organised round-the-clock campaign shifts, while sharing strategies in nearly 6,000 Halo wiki articles and 21 million online discussion posts.

Halo developer Bungie started tracking total alien deaths by all players, with the 10 billion milestone reached in April 2009.

Game designer Jane McGonigal recalls with awe the community effort that went into that Great War, citing it as a transcendent example of the fundamental human desire to work together and to become a part of something bigger than the self.

Bungie maintained a collective history of the Great War in the form of “personal service records” that memorialised each player’s contributions – medals, battle statistics, campaign maps and more.

The archive beggars comprehension: According to Bungie, its servers handled 1.4 petabytes of data requests by players in one nine-month stretch. McGonigal notes, by way of comparison, that everything ever written by humans in all of recorded history amounts to 50 petabytes of data.

Gamification versus gameful design

If you’re mystified by the behaviour of these gamers, you’re not alone.

Over the past decade, researchers across a range of fields have marvelled at the dedication of gamers like Gibson and Niftski, who commit themselves without complaint to what some might see as punishing, pointless and physically gruelling labour.

How could this level of dedication be applied to more “productive” endeavours, they wondered, like education, taxes or exercise?

From this research, an industry centered on the “gamification” of work, life and learning emerged. It giddily promised to change people’s behaviours through the use of extrinsic motivators borrowed from the gaming community: badges, achievements, community scorekeeping.

The concept caught fire, spreading everywhere from early childhood education to the fast-food industry.

Many game designers have reacted to this trend like Robert Oppenheimer at the close of the eponymous movie – aghast that their beautiful work was used, for instance, to pressure Disneyland Resort labourers to load laundry and press linens at anxiously hectic speeds.

Arguing that the gamification trend misses entirely the magic of gaming, game designers have instead started promoting the concept of “gameful design.” Where gamification focuses on useful outcomes, gameful design focuses on fulfilling experiences.

Gameful design prioritises intrinsic motivation over extrinsic incentives. It embraces design elements that promote social connection, creativity, a sense of autonomy – and, ultimately, the sheer joy of mastery.

When I think of Niftski’s meltdown after his record speedrun – and Gibson’s, who also began hyperventilating in shock and almost passed out – I think of my own children.

I wish for them such moments of ecstatic, prideful accomplishment in a world that sometimes seems starved of joy.

James Dawes is Professor of English at Macalester College.

This article is republished from https://theconversation.com under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article at https://theconversation.com/from-besting-tetris-ai-to-epic-speedruns-inside-gamings-most-thrilling-feats-220620 

ICYMI

Dance like everyone’s watching: Bijayini Satpathy, 50, is doing something transgressive: the Odissi exponent is incorporating the poetry of Kabir, an ode attributed to Adi Shankaracharya to celebrate the feminine and masculine in a girl’s body, and the Carnatic thillana (common in Bharatanatyam, not Odissi) in Abhipsaa, her first piece of solo choreography. This is transgressive when you consider how India’s eight classical dance forms came to be. In this beautiful review of Satpathy’s US tour, The New Yorker rewinds to a newly-independent India. In the late ‘40s and 1950s, Indian authorities set about codifying “classical” dance styles—starting with Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, Manipuri, and Kathak—and in the process stripped them of their multi-hued philosophical and religious histories. Did you know that the gotipua style in Odissi emerged during the Mughal Empire, and that it was traditionally danced by young boys who cross-dressed to perform as women? The piece contains many more such nuggets and details how Satpathy is going where few classical dancers dare to go. A must-read for lovers of the Indian arts.

Paradise falls: Oahu, Hawaii. Population: around one million. A lush, mountainous island so small, it takes four hours to cover the whole area by car. It’s also the epicentre of the Hawaiian Syndicate, a criminal empire whose current underworld figurehead is undergoing a dramatic trial for ordering the hit of his son’s best friend. Alleged drug kingpin Michael Miske has been charged with meth and cocaine distribution, kidnapping, murder, assault, bank fraud, and even using a chemical weapon. He’s a man so terrifying that jury members in his trial have expressed concern for their safety, and that of their loved ones. This feature in Bloomberg Businessweek pulls us into the mob underbelly of a tropical paradise and its connection to the disappearance of (the then) 21-year-old Johnathan Fraser.

Europe’s own Valley: Rare is the company that has left peers so far behind that the industry’s peak is where the company is. Dutch builder of chipmaking machines, ASML, is one such. It has taken chipmaking to a level of sophistication where it has dials on its machines to adjust to gravity depending on where they are installed. Such precision is found only in atomic laboratories for scientific experiments. But then ASML is the only company in the world making lithographic machines that can write “nanoscopic chip patterns onto silicon wafers”. The market values ASML at €260 billion ($285 billion) with 2022 sales of €21 billion and profit of €6 billion. The Economist reports that the company has created a supplier and partner ecosystem that is similar to Silicon Valley’s in the US. ASML’s success is as much a function of its design and engineering prowess as a federated ecosystem where information flows freely and people work so closely together that sometimes it is difficult to figure out who works for whom. 

The number 2: In the dozen years he has been steering China, President Xi Jinping has consolidated his power and ensured a longer, hindrance-proof reign for himself. Xi is now seen on par with Mao Zedong, with “Xi Thought” guiding the party and country. In the process he has also broken custom to promote trusted loyalists to key positions. One of them is Cai Qi, Xi’s chief of staff, deputy chair of the National Security Commission and a member of the seven-member Politburo, the ultimate decision making body in the country. Cai came to the position without even serving on the larger Central Committee. Bloomberg reports that Cai, born into an elite ruling family, owes his rise to his long association with Xi, with whom he began working closely in Zhejiang province. Now he sits in Xi’s meetings with heads of state and attends global summits with him. 

To test or not: To say that American universities are in trouble would be understating things. Adding to their misery is the long battle over standardised tests. During Covid-19, many elite universities across the country halted requiring standardised tests like SAT and ACT. That temporary ban seems to have become permanent. Universities point to an increasing public frustration with test scores and their lopsided advantages for the privileged as the reason behind it. However, data shows otherwise. Despite its imperfections, standardised tests are shown to be a great predictor of academic performance of students in college. Not only that, a study at MIT found that standardised tests actually help diversity. With data and perception running contrary to each other, the universities are in a fix. To know how they’re handling this situation, read this insightful piece in The New York Times.

Pencil pusher: TikTok spent its first few years reshaping what social media means. Now it wants to sell, sell, sell. John Herrman in this story in Intelligencer details his experience of buying and selling goods on TikTok in the US. His experience selling a used mechanical pencil from his desk shows TikTok’s massive advantage over rivals like Instagram and even Amazon. It also exposes TikTok’s weaknesses. Herrman’s nearly-dead TikTok account attracted hundreds of viewers when he went live to sell his pencil, showing just how massive a reach TikTok Shop can provide a new seller. Yet, he made pennies in profits, while TikTok probably made a loss on the transaction. TikTok’s shipping, payments, and other crucial cogs in the e-commerce machine still need vast improvement. But even if it fixes them, how much can it grow as an “endless dollar store” selling useless trinkets and questionable supplements all while losing money hand over fist?