[jogu]

Speed running is so bizarre to me, the rules seem so arbitrary. I struggle to see how any form of hardware level modification that results in a meaningful deviation in the behavior of the game would be allowed. At that point what's the difference between smudging your disk and using a GameShark, etc?

Similar thoughts on things like shiny hunting in the Pokemon community.

[account42]

Are you also confused about kids playing outside making up arbitrary rules for their games? The point to have fun by challenging yourself in a competition with others. That means allowing things that make the competition more fun/challenging and disallowing those things that trivialize it. Sometimes that's a subjective thing.

[x187463]

What's 'allowed' in a speed run is decided by the community who do the speed running. Further, run leaderboards are broken into categories based around defined parameters. So, perhaps there would be a category unique to hardware manipulation such as this. For major speed running games, the rules are often very well defined and enforced.