BoredomBusted — Find Your Next Favorite Thing To Do
Discover hobbies, activities, places, and ideas that spark joy. Whether you're looking for something creative, active, social, or relaxing, BoredomBusted helps you find your next favorite thing to do.
Browse our hobby guides, things-to-do collections, and place ideas to never be bored again.
Speedrunning isn't just about memorizing glitches—it's a deep dive into game mechanics that rewards problem-solving and community insight from hour one.
Learning speedrunning as a beginner involves understanding the mechanics of the game and discovering strategies to complete it in record time. – often exploiting glitches, skips, and frame-perfect inputs to beat it in ways the developers never intended.
Unlike casual gaming or competitive esports, the opponent isn't another player.
It's the clock, the game's own code, and every runner who posted a time before you.
In speedrunning, hobbyists repeatedly play video games from designated starting points, executing precise sequences of inputs to complete games or segments as quickly as possible, focusing on techniques like frame-perfect jumps and exploiting glitches.
Speedrunning induces a flow state through escalating technical challenges that align with skill levels, providing instant feedback loops with in-game timers that track progress, fostering a sense of accomplishment and social belonging through community engagement and shared milestones.
You think speedrunning is memorizing a game until your thumbs bleed.
You picture some guy in a basement skipping cutscenes and exploiting glitches for a world record nobody cares about. That's the hobby nobody would pick up – and it's also not what this actually is.
Speedrunning trains real-time problem solving under pressure – every run tests if your mental model of the game matches reality.
The glitches aren't cheap shortcuts; understanding them demands unraveling how the game's engine thinks, which is closer to reverse engineering than button mashing.
The community builds and shares knowledge obsessively – you're not grinding alone. You're inheriting hundreds of hours of collective research the moment you pick a game.
Take Celeste, a platformer most people know as a meditation on anxiety. Speedrunners turned it into a physics laboratory – documenting frame-perfect movement tech that the developers themselves didn't fully anticipate.
The runners aren't breaking the game. They're reading it more carefully than anyone else.
If that sounds like something only a particular type of person would enjoy, consider this: your first hour is packed with small victories that hook you in surprising ways.
The next section is all about experiencing that initial thrill firsthand.
Watching a speedrun is clean and precise, like a perfectly rehearsed performance.
Trying it yourself feels like fumbling around in the dark, misplacing your keys, with the added pressure of a timer.
The difference isn't skill.It's seeing only the polished end of someone's endless practice sessions.
After you try it, you realize you lack the muscle memory. The routes contradict your instincts, and mistakes seem amplified by the ticking clock, challenging your perception of the game you thought you knew.
In the first week, you'll spend more time reading the route document than actively running it. That time isn't wasted.
By week two, you'll complete your first full run. It's awkward and feels slow, but finishing gives unexpected satisfaction.
Week three introduces a new milestone: resetting mid-run. Suddenly, you recognize a poor split on your own.
In week four, one clean segment goes smoothly, revealing why players stick to this pursuit for years.
Before starting, find the "beginner route" for your game's community. Avoiding complex techniques from the start prevents early burnout and quitting.
It's slow, frustrating, and a bit embarrassing.
Then one room is executed perfectly.
It's not that the game gets easier – it's that you shift the chase to beating your past attempts, not just playing the game.
When to start: Early morning
Duration: 1 hour
Cost to try: $0
Success criteria: If you finished without beating the level perfectly, do session 2.
The category feels exciting, but a 40-hour RPG will burn you out before you understand a single mechanic.
Start with a game under 30 minutes at full speed – something like Celeste Any% or Getting Over It – so you see a complete run loop inside a single session.
World record videos look clean, but runners skip explanations and make execution look obvious – you end up copying movements you don't understand.
Find the community's route document or pinned beginner guide on their Discord or SRC forum, and read it before you watch anything.
New runners treat any mistake as a ruined run, which means they never actually finish a run and never learn what the back half of the game even feels like.
Commit to completing your first ten runs no matter what happens – your first goal is finishing, not time.
Livesplit templates and gold splits feel like progress, but chasing split targets when your execution varies by 30 seconds is just noise.
Run the same category 20 times before you touch split comparisons – let consistency show up first, then measure it.
Runners assume the leaderboard crowd only cares about top times, so they grind alone and miss the actual knowledge base.
Post your run in the beginner channel before you feel ready – the people who know the skips are exactly who you need talking to you on day three, not month three.
Speedrunning happens entirely at your desk – home gaming setup is the venue, full stop.
Some runners also compete at live events like Games Done Quick marathons or local gaming conventions.
There's no single national governing body for speedrunning – Speedrun.com functions as the de facto global leaderboard and organizing hub, so that's your starting point for everything official.
When you show up (or join a Discord) as a beginner, just say:
"I'm new to running [game], looking for a route doc and someone to ask dumb questions."
That gets you a wiki link, a mentor volunteer, and usually someone live-streaming who'll let you watch their splits in real time.
This is the "finish the game as fast as possible" category. Glitches, skips, and sequence breaks are all fair game. It's the most popular and heavily featured on Speedrun.com. Watch this first if you're curious about speedrunning's peak.
In this challenge, you must complete everything: every collectible, level, and secret. Runs are longer and require complex routing. Perfect for those who can't stand skipping content and love a longer grind.
No glitches here — play the game as intended. This category often provides the easiest entry point, as learning the game itself comes first. Many beginners start here to get comfortable.
Finish the game while collecting or doing as little as possible. This puzzle-focused challenge rewards strategic planning over speed. Ideal if you prefer theory crafting to executing perfect moves.
Community-invented challenges live here — oddball categories, meme runs, and unusual restrictions. They're unpredictable but fun. Run these when you just want to enjoy yourself without aiming for perfection.
For something adjacent, see Mobile Gaming.
Retro Gaming lives in the same world — different mechanics, similar appeal.
Most beginners grind the same route faster, shaving seconds through raw repetition.
The real bottleneck isn't execution speed – it's that they don't know what a mistake actually cost them.
The skill is split analysis – the ability to look at your segment times mid-run and make a live decision about whether your current pace is worth finishing or worth resetting.
Not "did I mess up." Not "do I feel good." A actual number-based read: am I ahead or behind my personal best splits, by how much, and does the remaining route favor me recovering it?
Runners who develop this stop wasting 45-minute runs that were dead at minute six.
Without it, you finish every run on hope – and hope doesn't show up in your time.
The real gain is reset discipline – knowing when to kill a run early so you spend more time in winnable attempts, not grinding out losses.
Commit to 12 sessions over 30 days. Plan for three sessions a week, each lasting 60–90 minutes.
If you find yourself constantly watching top runners on YouTube, that's the hobby grabbing you. Start routing seriously. Pick a category and post a run to the leaderboard, even if the time isn't your best.
If the sessions felt flat, the game choice might be off, not speedrunning itself. Try a session with a different genre – like a platformer if you attempted an RPG, or a short arcade game instead of a lengthy one – before stepping away.
Dreading each session means the fit isn't there. Repetitive practice is the core, not something to endure. If the loop didn't appeal after 12 sessions, it likely won't later.
The urge to pause a video to understand a runner's decision is the sign you shouldn't ignore. That's the itch that distinguishes enthusiasts from casual observers.
For quicker fixes, see our roundup of things to do when you're bored.
Games with shorter runtimes like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Portal 2 are ideal for beginners because you can complete full runs in 5–30 minutes, making it easier to practice and improve. Avoid longer games like RPGs initially, as mastering a 10+ hour speedrun requires significant time investment and game knowledge.
Most runners place competitively on community leaderboards within 3–6 months of consistent practice, though this depends on the game and your baseline skill. Reaching top rankings typically requires 1–2 years of dedicated training and optimization.
No special equipment is required—you only need the game, a console or PC, and ideally a timer or streaming software if you want to verify runs officially. A controller, mouse, or keyboard you already own works fine to start.
Glitches are unintended game mechanics—like clipping through walls or skipping sections—that aren't cheating because speedrunning communities establish rule categories that define what's allowed. Most games have both 'Any% Glitchless' (no exploits) and 'Any%' (glitches allowed) categories so runners can choose their preferred challenge level.
You can enjoy speedrunning casually with just 5–10 hours per week, though competitive runners typically invest 15–30+ hours weekly. Start small with short practice sessions and gradually increase as you discover what fits your schedule.
Yes, but it's much harder—speedrunners typically learn the game normally first to understand mechanics, level layouts, and enemy patterns. Jumping straight into speedrunning without that baseline knowledge makes it difficult to identify optimization opportunities and execute advanced techniques.