Written by Taoan, 2021 Cohort
Recently I have been playing Elden Ring, I played a lot and also watched a lot of videos about it, one of the aspects discussed in the game community is about the speedrun of the game. For somebody who does not what speedrun means, it is completing a video game with planned routes, as fast as possible. In the video I saw, the player used a lot of glitches to achieve record time, and this remained me of my childhood, particularly, the first moment I was attracted by video games.
When I was in a game design program, one of my teachers told us that it is almost impossible to release a video game with zero bugs, so most of the studios are focused on the bugs that may cause serious problems, and some of the glitches may remain when the game releases. When I was in primary school, my friend lent me a Pokémon Silver, and I was fascinated by this pixel world. One day I bought a magazine about Pokémon. One of the sections of the book introduces bugs in the Pokémon games I played, including how to make shiny Pokémons or make Pokémons with special moves that they couldn’t get in usual, etc. I tried following the steps in the book and it worked. I was shocked at that time. Before that, I followed the guide of the game and played the way that game designers want players to play. And this attempt gave me a strange feeling that I became a hacker.
With more and more games I played, whenever I got into a game, I always searched for glitches or some hidden game mechanics that could bring me different perspectives. When I played Breath of the Wild a few years ago, I was stunned by the videos on the internet. There is a feature that players can temporarily stop objects in time, and players can give a force and direction to the object, and it will move in that direction, just like the physics in real life. When I saw the player in the video move long distances through the time-stop features and mechanical physics, I felt the immense possibility of this game. It was not just a video game anymore, it became a playground for players, where you can try everything you can, and some attempts may exceed the expectations of game designers.
Maybe because I’m not a programmer, I find these glitches fascinating rather than annoying. Aren’t these beautiful glitches part of the gaming experience?