The Glitch Monks: How Speedrunners Became the Philosophers We Didn't Know We Needed

There's a category in speedrunning called "any%" — and if you've never heard of it, the name tells you everything. It means you complete the game by any means necessary. Glitches, out-of-bounds movement, memory manipulation, sequence breaks. The only rule is that you reach the credits screen. How you get there is entirely up to you.

To a casual observer, this looks like cheating. To a speedrunner, it's the purest possible engagement with what a game actually is — not what its designers intended, but what it actually does when you push hard enough against its edges.

That distinction is, quietly, one of the more interesting philosophical positions you can take about anything.

The Monastery Analogy

Here's a comparison that might seem weird at first: speedrunners and monks have more in common than you'd think.

Not in the obvious lifestyle sense — though the dedication required to shave three seconds off a world record through months of frame-perfect practice does have a certain ascetic quality to it. The deeper parallel is methodological. Both groups engage in rigorous, repetitive practice as a means of inquiry. Both are trying to understand something that resists easy description. And both operate within — and occasionally against — systems of inherited rules they didn't create.

A Zen monk might spend years asking "what is the sound of one hand clapping" not because the question has an answer, but because the asking is the practice. A speedrunner might spend months asking "what happens if I clip through this wall" not because they expect to find treasure on the other side, but because the answer reveals something true about the structure of the game — and by extension, about the nature of the systems we all move through.

Rules Nobody Told You About

Most of us play games the way we were implicitly taught to play them. You enter a room, you fight the enemies, you collect the key, you unlock the door, you move forward. The game's architecture guides you through an intended experience, and you follow it without much resistance because the design is good enough that you don't notice you're being guided.

Speedrunners notice.

They notice that the collision detection on a particular wall is slightly imprecise. They notice that if you jump at a very specific angle during a loading transition, the game places you somewhere you weren't supposed to reach yet. They notice that a scripted sequence can be interrupted if you trigger a second event while the first one is still running.

None of these discoveries are documented anywhere. They're not in the manual. The developers didn't announce them. The speedrunner found them by pressing against the seams of the system until something gave way.

This is, in a real sense, empirical philosophy. It's the practice of questioning assumptions that were never stated out loud — which is, by the way, the hardest kind of assumption to question.

Authority and the Intended Path

When a game developer designs a level, they have an intended path in mind. They built the obstacles, placed the platforms, scripted the enemies to create a specific experience. The intended path is a form of authority — a set of implicit instructions backed by the full weight of the game's design.

And speedrunners ask: who gave you the right to define the path?

This isn't nihilism. They're not saying rules don't matter. They're saying that the rules of any system are worth examining, and that the examination itself is valuable — maybe more valuable than compliance.

This maps onto something Foucault spent a lot of time on: the idea that power operates most effectively when it's invisible, when the rules feel like nature rather than choice. The game's intended path feels natural because the design is seamless. The speedrunner makes the power structure visible by stepping outside it.

When a runner clips through a wall and skips half a dungeon, they're not just saving time. They're demonstrating that the dungeon's authority over their movement was always conditional — always dependent on them not looking too closely at the seams.

The Community as a Living Rulebook

Here's where it gets genuinely interesting: speedrunning communities don't reject rules. They proliferate them.

Any% exists alongside 100% (complete all objectives), glitchless (no unintended mechanics), low% (complete the game with as few items as possible), and dozens of category-specific variants. Each category represents a different philosophical stance on what the game is and what constitutes a valid engagement with it.

The community didn't inherit these categories from the developers. They invented them through collective negotiation — ongoing conversations about what counts, what's interesting, and what kinds of mastery are worth pursuing. The rules are democratic, provisional, and constantly evolving.

This is, in miniature, exactly how human societies construct meaning. We don't receive rules from on high. We negotiate them, argue about them, revise them, and occasionally blow them up entirely when they stop serving us. The speedrunning community is doing this in real time, transparently, over Discord servers and Reddit threads, and you can watch the whole messy process if you want to.

Breaking Things as a Form of Understanding

There's a concept in engineering called "destructive testing" — you stress a material until it fails, not because you want it to fail, but because failure reveals the true limits of the system. The break tells you something the intact structure never could.

Speedrunning is destructive testing for game design. And the things it reveals are often beautiful.

The famous "wrong warp" in The Legend of Zelda — a glitch that allows players to skip entire dungeons by triggering a warp at the exact right moment — works because of a specific quirk in how the game handles memory when two events overlap. Understanding that glitch means understanding something real about how the game's code is structured. It's not a flaw you're exploiting. It's a window into the architecture.

The same principle applies to the systems we navigate in daily life. The person who finds a faster route through a bureaucratic process isn't cheating the system — they're revealing that the official route was never the only route. The employee who questions a workplace policy and discovers it was never actually written down anywhere is doing exactly what the any% runner does when they clip through a wall.

The rules we follow most obediently are often the ones nobody ever explicitly told us.

What the Timer Teaches

At the end of every speedrun, there's a timer. It started when the run began and it stopped when the credits rolled. That number is the whole point — or at least, it looks like it.

But watch a speedrunner react to a good run sometime. Watch the way they break down what happened, what worked, what they could have done differently. The timer is almost secondary. The real thing they're chasing is understanding — a cleaner, more complete map of the system they're moving through.

The best speedrunners aren't trying to beat a game. They're trying to know it. Completely, honestly, without illusions about what it is versus what it was supposed to be.

That's not a bad approach to anything, really. Strip away the intended path. Find the seams. Press against the walls until something moves.

The glitch is just the beginning of the question.