Innovation in video game speedruns

How people discover things in adaptive landscapes of video games and are able to beat their best times over and over again.

A pocket study on something I was always fascinated with: people playing video games to beat them as fast as possible, and doing that in increasingly breathtaking fashion. I work together with amazing researchers of cultural evolution: Oleg Sobchuk, Thomas Franz Müller, and James Winters. The research is mostly done, but since it is a pet project for everyone involved, it is in a bit of a limbo. Hopefully, a preprint will come out in 2023! (We also did a lightning talk about it during EHBEA 2022).

In many respects, the study was inspired by Summoning Salt’s “World Record Progression” videos.