Why can't we just do normal voting?

In first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting, voters select their preferred option, and whichever gets the most votes is selected as the winner. This is the "default" voting system for most people, and what you see whenever there's a Discord reaction poll. However, FPTP voting is prone to the spoiler effect - if two options are similar, a few unfortunate things can happen:

1: The unique option wins, even when not preferred by the majority

A third option can win, even if the majority of voters would prefer one of the first two options.

Let's say there's a hypothetical vote for which Pokémon is the best: Pumpkaboo, Phantump, or Trubbish.

Fans of Ghost Pokémon might split their votes between Pumpkaboo and Phantump, resulting in a final vote that looks like this:

• Pumpkaboo: 35%
• Phantump: 25%
• Trubbish: 40%

In this situation, Trubbish wins the vote, even though many Ghost-type fans of Phantump would likely prefer Pumpkaboo over Trubbish, and would have voted for it if Phantump was not in the poll. This risk leads into the second side-effect of first-past-the-post voting.

2: Voters feel obligated to strategically vote

In our above example, some Phantump fans, knowing that Pumpkaboo is ultimately more popular, may switch their vote to Pumpkaboo to avoid the spoiler effect. While this can circumvent the spoiler effect if enough people strategically vote, it means those voters do not feel empowered to express their true preference, and it's a risky strategy - perhaps more voters truly did prefer Phantump, but the Phantump voters just didn't think they had the numbers, and now a spoiler effect situation has occurred where it otherwise might not have. (This is called a failure of the independence of irrelevant alternatives, if you're curious in learning more. You do not need to know this to understand ranked choice voting.)

If this is confusing, don't worry. Social choice theory is a whole field you can get a degree in, and there's a ton of high-level math behind it that I don't understand either. The important thing here is that first-past-the-post voting has a tendency to obscure the true preference of voters when more than two options are available.

How do we fix this?

A popular alternative voting system is ranked choice voting (RCV), and it's what we use in Switch Pokémon Speedrunning. In RCV, voters order their preferences from most preferred to least preferred, rather than simply selecting a single option.

As a voter, you don't need to understand how the math works behind the scenes to participate in ranked choice voting. All you need to know is that if your top choice is unpopular, your second choice is considered your vote instead, and this process repeats until an option wins with a majority of the votes.

In our example from before, ghost-type voters that prefer Phantump would list their choices as:

1. Phantump
2. Pumpkaboo
3. Trubbish

In our above example (where Pumpkaboo has 35% of the votes, Phantump has 25%, and Trubbish has 40%), none of the options are the first choice of the majority (that is, over 50% of the votes). As a result, the ranked choice mechanism comes into play.

The option with the fewest votes is eliminated, and the voters that selected it as their first choice have their second choices "lifted" to become their new choice. In this example, because Phantump is eliminated:

• Anyone who voted for Phantump and selected Pumpkaboo as their second choice becomes a Pumpkaboo voter.
• Anyone who voted for Phantump and selected Trubbish as their second choice becomes a Trubbish voter.

At this point, if one of the options has a majority of the votes, it is considered the winner. Otherwise, the process repeats. (In this example, there's only three options, so we'd be done here, but RCV works with any number of options).

You don't need to fully understand this to participate in ranked choice voting. The important thing to know is that it lets you express all of your preferences, and thus results in a more accurate representation of the community's opinion.

Is ranked choice voting perfect?

no all voting systems suck (warning: complicated set theory)

First-past-the-post is generally considered pretty darn bad, though, and the enemy of good is perfect and all that.

Where can I learn more about this?

Ballotpedia's article is good (I referred to it a lot while writing this).

Wikipedia also generally has pretty good articles on social choice theory.

And if you want to go totally overboard and/or love set theory, Collective Choice and Social Welfare (Sen, 2018) is considered, like, the book. At least that's what I've been told, idk I'm not a political scientist or a mathematician I just think they're neat.

Let's Go Pikachu Any% but Good This Time

Last year I realised that I'd been running Let's Go off the SD card the entire time, which if you don't know, is slow and bad. My 3:10 run has way better execution than my current 3:08 PB, but the PB is on digital and had a better Starmie so it won out. Let's Go is really frustrating to me in a lot of ways – it's got all the nightmare RNG of other runs but I have to actually think during it gross – but I'm gonna try to get a sub-3:05. Or maybe I'll just get frustrated again and not.

o r a s

3:07 pls ty

Kalos Roller Derby

X/Y movement fun. Probably not gonna grind this too much since the early game is a nightmare but so far I'm enjoying it so we'll see?

Corvimae in Mathemagic Land

A lot more people are using Ranger than they were even a few months ago, and there's a lot of stuff that I want to improve about it.

• More quality of life features for the experience router. Also, auto-saving in local storage so that you don't have experience-route(55).json in your downloads by the time you're done.
• Rolling deploys and fallback in Kubernetes (this should be easy why haven't I done this already honestly).
• legends arceus math oh no pls help
• Video tutorials on how to write routes. I honestly feel like I did a good job with the documentation, but routefiles are complicated. The main barrier to this is that I'm historically an awful teacher, so I might try to get some help with this.

Hat?

when i fall asleep my dreams are haunted by dsjs. i see visions of a front-flip followed by a second front-flip, a ghastly portent of times long forgotten and yet await. sometimes the second front-flip is not a front-flip at all, but rather two jumps, a total of three harrowing increases of y position. such thoughts are best left unmentioned, lest the madness take root.

Something Else?

idk I'd like to learn something shorter this year. I keep buying stuff to run and then just going back to what's comfortable so, uh, we'll see.

The Not Speedrun Section

Thank you to everyone who watched this year, I absolutely would've burnt out had it not been for my wonderful community! I've said many times that I'm not a fan of offline runs, and it's because talking with chat keeps me from getting bored playing the same stupid eight minutes of ORAS over and over again. I'd say I have big plans for the following year but that would imply that I don't just do stuff when it pops into my head on a whim.

The Hollow Knight Award for Best Metroidvania with a Major Glaring Flaw

Metroid Dread

Samus Returns was good, and Samus Returns 2: This Time It's Harder and On the Switch is also good!

HOWEVER.

Goodness is this game linear. After playing Hollow Knight, which is a very, very good game with a very, very terrible map system that is generally non-linear in how it presents the world to you, it's disappointing to essentially be railroaded down one path. I spent a lot of time in Dread trying to figure out what the one room that would let me progress was, which, y'know, not great. Overall the game was fun though. I liked it.

The Spore Award for Best Glorified Tech Demo

Bowser's Fury

whoa it's like odyssey but without motion controls!!! forced time cycle stuff annoying!!! was still fun!!!

The Slay the Spire Award for Please Copy This Game

Loop Hero

I think I ultimately found Loop Hero a bit disappointing. The game moves slower than I like it to (though I believe they've since patched this? not sure), and the central mechanic of "put tile next to other tile to get third contextual tile" is super cool, but could be fleshed out more I feel.

That said, I love tile placement board games and this is just a video game version of that and so it's fun.

The Mass Effect 2 Award for Best Mass Effect of 2021

Mass Effect (2007)

I commentated a speedrun of this and it was fun. mako my beloved.

The Boxie Award for Best Cat

Boxie

The Pokémon Sapphire Award for Best Pokémon Release

New Pokémon Snap

I honestly never really cared that much for the original Snap. It's a novel thing and all, but I never had an N64, and so I have no nostalgia for it. By the time I did play it, I just felt the whole thing was a bit thin.

New Snap fixes that by having WAY more Pokémon and also being gorgeous. Holy moly are there some PRETTY POKES IN THIS GAME.

It's just cute and pleasant idk. There's only two other real competitors for this category: Pokémon Unite, which is surprisingly fun but also very one-dimensional when it comes to its macro gameplay, which, as a reformed Dota 2 addict, really limited its longetivity for me; and Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, which are hot messes that I did enjoy casually but are 6.5 out of 10 games at best. I could write a whole article on my problems with BDSP honestly.

The Pokémon Alpha Sapphire Award for Pokémon Alpha Sapphire

Pokémon Alpha Sapphire

The Dragon Age: Origins Award for Game I Was Looking Forward To But Just Wasn't For Me And That's Okay

Darkest Dungeon II

The original Darkest Dungeon is one of my favorite games ever. I love a roguelike, and I love a turn based RPG, and I love a game that lets you name your death fodder beloved party members after your friends. For years I was convinced Darkest Dungeon's quirk system would get copied by, like, everything, and yet it never was. Please copy the quirk system. It's very good.

Darkest Dungeon II is a Slay the Spire-like without decks but with Darkest Dungeon's combat. It's a run-based game. Despite loving both Slay the Spire and the original Darkest Dungeon, II just didn't do it for me. The first game had its flaws – the "treadmill" of grinding various parties up to eventually take on the titular Darkest Dungeon is often cited as a huge barrier to sticking with the game – but one of it's strongest aspects for me is how attached I got to my party members. Deaths in the original game felt meaningful. I'd watched these characters grow from level 0 to the combat monsters they are today and goddamn stupid shambler encounter I swear to god awjeirojaweriwerwer PLEASE.

II suffers from the same "flaw" as XCOM: Chimera Squad: by replacing emergent storylines with pre-written ones, it takes away some of the charm. I put "flaw" in quotes because it's not inherently a flaw; there's obviously a lot of games with storlines that I quite like. Something about giving me that and then taking it away, though, just never works for me.

The animations are gorgeous though. They look SO GOOD. The combat is better designed, as well, so I honestly still recommend the game. It's a really good game, it just didn't do what I wanted, and again, that's okay.

The Game of the Year Award for Game of the Year

Psychonauts 2

I liked the original Psychonauts well enough, but never finished it. That's not a judgment on the game, I'm just bad at finishing games.

It's very hard to talk about Psychonauts 2 without spoiling all the cool and/or hilarious shit it does, so just play it. It's on Game Pass. It's so goddamn good y'all. They somehow made a PS2-era game in 2021 and it's incredible.

The Control Award for Second Best Game of the Year That You Should Also Play

Deltarune: Chapter 2

I didn't play Chapter 1 until Chapter 2 came out because I forgot about it. Chapter 1 is very good. Chapter 2 is just a long-form shitpost and it's great. Go play it.

The "I'm sorry, my companion, but no. We all have our own destinies, and yours cumulates here. I would not rob you of that." Award for Best DLC That Is Really More of a Sequel

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

My 2019 Game of the Year was Outer Wilds because it's incredible and awe-inspiring and thought-provoking and if you haven't played it, go do that now. This year they released a DLC, and it's, like, good? It's not as good as the base game, but it does some cool stuff.

It's not really connected to the base Outer Wilds, though. And that feels weird when you consider how tight Outer Wilds is as a narritive experience – you discover information all over the solar system that all pieces together to solve the puzzle. You can't just stick a DLC into that framework without entirely reworking the game, and so they didn't, and, yeah, that makes sense. Echoes of the Eye is essentially a paralogue that you can work on instead of the main plot, and it works, it just feels weird as a DLC. I dunno. I think I just got sick of flying to the same place over and over again, which was a bit annoying in the base game but was at least understandable.

It's a genuinely unnerving experience, though. Play with the lights on.

The Burnout Paradise Award for Best Forza Release of 2021

Forza Horizon 5

It's more Forza Horizon. It's rad. Highly recommend.

Other Games I Played This Year (This Is Not an Award)

Back 4 Blood

Left 4 Dead with more interesting progression. The dialogue in this game is horrible, but the game is overall pretty fun.

Moonglow Bay

Winner of the Worst Default Control Scheme award. Didn't play much of this because it was very buggy on release, but I might go back and try it more, cuz it's cute.

Monster Hunter Rise

Wirebugs good. Not being able to play on PC at high frame rate bad. Capcom's online services remain a nightmare. The tower defense stuff is horrible. Overall fun game. Bring back the delicious look food, the mochi is not as good.

Apex Legends

Winner of the Best Movement award. It's still fun!

Caves of Qud

Neat game, I'm really, really bad at it. Also fuck off I don't know vim controls.

Puzzle Pirates

hell yeah

Update (2021-08-21): I clarify a bit in this Twitter thread, which you can read if you're interested. I'm not gonna transpose it here because today has been very long and I'm tired.

Last September, I wrote an essay about my issues with the Pokemon speedrunning community, and since then, things have gotten a bit better! I talked about it more in my follow-up video, but the short of it is: the PSR split has helped make marginalized people feel more welcome in PSR!

...as long as they're running a 3DS or Switch game.

As a whole, the server pushed the problematic elements of PSR into their own little corner, which is better in that it does open some avenues to speedrun the literal most successful media franchise in history that appeals to pretty much anyone ever regardless of background, but failed to fully address the issue. I'm not surprised by this - it's a difficult issue that we're struggling with on a societal level, and I did not expect it to be quickly solved by way of creating additional Discord servers. What I did hope is that people would read what I wrote originally, empathize with the complaints of marginalized community members, and do what they can to foster inclusion and diversity.

The central thesis of Exarion's essay is the most common backlash to the movement for social justice in our society as a whole – sure, bigoted language is bad, but they're simple mistakes that we should use as an opportunity for learning and rehabilitation.

This line of thinking always feels like laundered victim blaming to me. It places the responsibility on the marginalized to "rise higher" than their oppressors, and should they not do that, shifts the blame from the individuals creating a hostile environment by way of respectability politics. If you haven't had to calmly explain that you deserve to exist before, let me tell you, it is exhausting. It takes a lot of emotional labor to stay calm in the face of someone denying your achievements, merit, or even humanity, and marginalized people are expected to do this over and over again, lest they fail to "take the high road".

It is not the responsibility of minorities to explain that they exist and belong. The golden rule is something we teach to kindergartners. Verbalized bigotry causes actual trauma to real people, and to ignore that damage and insist on creating a "teaching moment" for the oppressor reveals a belief that the oppressor is more valuable than the oppressed, that their comfort is more important regardless of their behaviour.

By pushing the narrative that these instances are nothing more than momentary slip-ups – heated gamer moments, if you will – you ignore the lasting damage done to the community in the process. Every single time a woman or person of color is told they didn't earn their spot through their own merit, every time a trans person gets misgendered and told that they're being unreasonable when they get upset, every time a gay person is forced to watch their sexuality used as a synonym for "bad", it pushes them away, if only a little. Eventually, they leave. There was no "teachable moment". The bigoted learn nothing, because the pushback goes away. If the community wants to protect it's most vulnerable and truly foster diversity, then a conscientious effort must be made to show that there is no tolerance for intolerance – and this must be done without pushing the burden of responsibility onto those who already have to fight harder to "prove" their worth.

Attempting to further handwash this by saying neurodivergent people are somehow not responsible for their actions does not help, and is deeply ableist. Many, many members of the community are neurodivergent in some way, and manage to treat others with the respect they deserve. There is research to suggest that gender-nonconforming individuals display more autistic traits than the general population, and yet despite a higher-than-average presence in the Frame Fatales discord, it manages to be a wonderfully inclusive place. Neurodivergent people still have agency, and positing that autism takes that away robs them of that and further contributes to the concerns I raise above.

If you haven't been the recipient of hatred for immutable truths about yourself, it might be easy to write off the genuine anger felt in response as an overreaction. I assure you, as someone who buried parts of herself for years in response to the shame levied at her for simply existing a bit differently than those around her, it is not.

Nope, I'm running on an New 3DS with an internal capture card from Delfino Customs.

Why Mudkip over Treeko or Torchic?

Mudkip can learn four HMs that we need to complete the game, and generally wrecks house once we get Bulldoze in Mauville City.

Why do you keep resetting on Rival 1?

Most Mudkips don't have high enough IVs to survive the route. At level 6, we need at least the following stats:

14 Attack
10 Defense
10 Special Attack
10 Speed (9 is okay with a minus Speed nature)

please enjoy this guide to good mudkips

What are IVs?

Individual strengths (Japanese: 生まれつきの強さ innate strengths), abbreviated IVs from its more commonly known fan term, Individual values (Japanese: 個体値 individual values), are the Pokémon equivalent of genes. They are instrumental in determining the stats of a Pokémon, being responsible for the large variation in stats among untrained Pokémon of the same species. In the context of Generations I and II, which have a different IV system, IVs are also referred to as determinant values (DVs).

Each of the six battle stats has an IV associated with it, with that IV coming into calculation alongside the Pokémon's base stats, Nature, and EVs to determine the actual stat number. A Pokémon's IVs are fixed when it is generated by the game (i.e. when it is encountered in the wild or given to the player by an NPC), and cannot be changed (although Hyper Training causes stats to become values corresponding the maximum IVs).

– https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Individual_values

What is that grid of numbers at the bottom of the screen?

As Pokémon level up, I enter their stats into a custom IV calculator program. As the program gets more data, it narrows the range of possible IVs for those stat values. Once I'm happy with the level of precision, I stop entering stats.

If a stat has a red name, it is boosted by the Pokémon's nature (+10% to its value).

If the stat has a blue name, it is reduced by the Pokémon's nature (-10% to its value)

Why don't you just manipulate a good starter?

It's not feasible to manipulate RNG in Generation 6 Pokémon games without hacking your 3DS, as there is no other known way to determine what RNG seed you are on.

What are the differences between Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby?

The Alpha Sapphire route uses Latias and Kyogre, while the Omega Ruby route uses Latios and Groudon.

Latias is much worse than Latios for speedrunning, as its base stats are geared towards defense instead of offense. This makes the midgame much less reliable.

However, Kyogre is better than Groudon for the Elite Four, so the time to beat either game is generally about the same. (Update Jan. 2022: I no longer think this is true. Omega Ruby is faster except in the most optimal of situations, and even then...)

Team Aqua and Team Magma also use slightly different Pokémon, with Aqua having Sharpedo, Carvanha, and Grimer and Magma having Camerupt, Slugma, and Weezing. Sharpedo is far more dangerous to Mudkip than Camerupt and Slugma as it has Swagger, but Weezing is easier to deal with than Grimer as it doesn't have the Levitate ability.

If Alpha Sapphire is worse than Omega Ruby, why do you run it?

Because I make bad life choices.

What are the dangerous run-ending fights?

Pretty much every other fight in this game can go badly.

Aqua Grunt in Petalburg Woods

Sand Attack can result in a long fight, and a critical hit on Tackle can kill.

Roxanne

A critical hit on Tackle or Rock Tomb can kill.

Aqua Grunt in Rusturf Tunnel

Same problems as the Petalburg Woods Grunt, but with Bite instead of Tackle.

Black Belt Hideki in Brawly's Gym

If we get hit by Low Sweep twice, we likely die. If Low Sweep crits on the second use, we always die. This is the worst fight in the game.

Ace Trainer Tessa in Brawly's Gym

Confusion has a 10% chance to confuse, which breaks our Echoed Voice chain if we hit ourselves and often results in a reset.

Leader Brawly in Brawly's Gym

Sometimes he just decides to kill me because he is a jerk.

Aqua Grunts in the Oceanic Museum

Crits can kill, missing Rock Tomb can get us killed, and we have no way of healing confusion if Zubat's Supersonic hits.

Brendan 2

A low Speed Marshtomp acts after Grovyle, which kills us if it uses Giga Drain. Alternatively, Slugma's Incinerate and Ember each have a 10% chance to burn, which can drop Marshtomp in to Grovyle's Quick Attack range, though this is very rare.

Archie 1

Can die to crits. If Mightyena doesn't use Swagger or it misses and we don't have an extra X Attack because we had low Special Attack or Speed, the run is dead.

Ace Trainer Mary in Norman's Gym

Delcatty knows Attract, so if our Mudkip is male (as 7 out of 8 Mudkips are) we can fail to break through Attract and die a slow, painful Double Slap death.

Ace Trainer George in Norman's Gym

Linoone's just does a lot of damage idk this fight can suck.

Norman

This is the second worst fight in the game. If the first Slaking gets a critical hit on Retaliate, we die unless we have full health. If the second Slaking gets a critical hit on Retaliate or Chip Away, we die no matter what.

Shelly 2

If Ice Fang crits, we sometimes die. This is also not a guaranteed 2-shot kill except at very high Sp. Attack, and a third turn makes this fight a lot dicier.

Brendan 4

Sceptile can kill us if it feels like it. With the PP Max strategy I use now, this is a lot less likely than it used to be.

Archie 2

We need to use a Guard Spec and 2-4 X items. If Mightyena uses Embargo before we're done setting up, the run is over.

Elite Four Sidney

In almost all cases, if we are at full HP on Sidney's Ludicolo, it will use Fake Out, giving us a turn to set up the rest of the fight. I pretty much always play this fight with that assumption; occasionally it attacks me instead, which can put me into a situation where Kyogre dies.

Elite Four Glacia

Walrein knows Sheer Cold, which has a 34% chance to instantly kill (30% plus 4%, as Walrein is level 54 and Kyogre is level 50). Unless I use Primal Kyogre (which is slower), this is a possibility and ends the run.

There's a couple other fights that can go badly, but those are the main offenders. Suffice to say, this is not a safe route.

Why do you play as May instead of Brendan?

May and Brendan have different natures on their Pokémon, and Brendan's are easier to deal with. Also, I am also May, so you'd best bet I'm playing as her.

Why do you watch the credits at the end?

There is a post-credits fight with Brendan that is required by the current rules to be accepted as a valid run by the ORAS community. We do not have to win this fight, so we intentionally lose it, and time ends when the game fades to black after this fight.

What stats make a good Mudkip?

The higher our HP, Attack, Defense, Special Attack, and Speed are, the better. We do not care about Special Defense.

Higher HP and Defense make the Norman and Hideki fights much safer. Higher Attack makes the route faster after Brendan 2. Higher Special Attack makes it more likely to get past Hideki and makes the route faster before Brendan 2.

In general, I prefer Mudkips with high defenses and speed, as they are more consistent.

What stats make a good Latias?

The higher our Special Attack and Speed are, the better. We do not care about Attack and preferably want it to be lower. All legendary Pokémon in ORAS are guaranteed to have three perfect (31) IVs, and we'd like those to go to Special Attack and Speed if possible. Defensive stats aren't important, but higher is better.

What stats make a good Kyogre?

The higher our Special Attack and Speed are, the better. We do not care about Attack, for the same reasons we don't care about Attack on Latias.

We want HP and Defense to be as low as possible, as it makes dying to the post-credits Brendan 5 fight quicker.

Why do you drag Kyogre into the box and then back into your party sometimes?

Putting a Pokémon in the box heals them and restores all PP in all games before Let's Go.

Which bike do you pick?

We use the Mach Bike for the entire run, as the Acro Bike is never required to complete the game.

Why do you name the trainer "!"?

It's the fastest name to input.

What is the world record?

The world record is 3h 04m 48s by truely.

Alpha Sapphire Any%

I'd really like to hit sub-3:12 in AS. That's 10 minutes off my current PB, but my current PB is also pretty bad, thanks to two Archie 2 deaths plus a ton of rust on pretty much everything after Mauville. I think I'm close to a sub-3:15 time if I just get the RNG, and would love to get sub-3:10, but I'll be satisfied with my progress at 3:12.

btw I hate this game but it's really fun but also I hate it wtf.

Alpha Sapphire E4R2

I plan to start mixing this in with Any% soon, as it's not super different than Any% anyways. Don't really have a time goal for it, since I have to run it a couple times before I know how much time I want to devote to it. Longer runs are hard for me since I can't responsibly stream for more than 4-5 hours on weekdays and ORAS has so many early resets, so we'll see how this goes.

Let's Go, Pikachu! Any%

Sub-3:10 please. I have fun with this game when I run it occasionally, but grinding it burns me out a lot faster than Alpha Sapphire for some reason, so I'm just going to reserve it for when Hideki crushes my soul and I need a break. Let's Go is pretty easy for me to pick back up after not playing it for a bit, so I'm hoping I can slowly work my time down.

Let's Go, Pikachu! Diploma

Diploma rules and I love running it. I'm really happy with my PB, even if it's not quite sub-5:00, so I don't feel any urge to grind Diploma at all. If I get a better time, that'd be great, and if not, that's fine too. I just hope I get the opportunity to run Diploma with more of my friends in the future, and maybe get some of my non-PB times down.

Let's Go, Pikachu! AOP

Much lower priority for me. Running AOP was alright, but the category is really long and I just enjoy Diploma a lot more. I might try once or twice more since I think I can easily get a better time - my PB was not clean - but mostly as an occasional diversion than a thing I actually focus on.

White 2 Any%

I have a DS capture card on the way! Once I meet my Alpha Sapphire goals (or get close enough to them that I feel comfortable switching between it and another game), I'm going to try White 2 to see how I like it. I'm optimistic, it looks really fun!

X Any%

I started learning X Any%, and just kinda stopped about 2/3 of the way through. I didn't dislike it per se, but I already have a RNG-heavy game in Alpha Sapphire and I don't think I can handle both right now. I might pick this up in the future, though, depending on how Alpha Sapphire and White 2 go.

Sword Alt Main Drifblim/Mantine

I don't have any interest in running Gen 8 right now, but I do love both Driflbim and Mantine, and alt mains are the kind of no-expectations nonsense that I'm here for. Once they're routed, I'm going to give them a shot.

The last half week has been exhausting for myself and so many others as we all try to build new communities that both honor the best parts of PSR and acknowledge the need for new systems of organization. I've seen more female and non-binary voices speak up since the server split than ever before, and am so excited to see so much minority interest in this hobby – both from entirely new faces, and those who are taking the chance to come back.

With all that said, I'd like to address some questions I've received. This won't be comprehensive, but hopefully it adds some context to my original writings and helps contextualize some of my feelings.

Before I start, I'd like to thank Etchy, The4thGenGamer, Swiftalu, Emray, jyash4, GretaIceVixen, and everyone else who spoke up either in solidarity or to share their experiences. None of this would have been possible without all of your support.

Why didn't you name any specific examples of discrimination?

My original essay examined PSR by way of critical theory, which argues that institutional are more responsible for societal issues than individuals. There are individuals in the community that I think are actively harmful, don't get me wrong, but I think their presence is a symptom, rather than a cause. An inclusive community protects themselves from such individuals by calling out their bigotry (once again, see the paradox of tolerance), thus ensuring that they do feel empowered to harass and intimidate others.

In my experience, PSR was not exclusionary on the surface; I wasn't getting slurs yelled at me, for example. Instead, PSR failed to be actively inclusionary, resulting in a community where minority voices were diminished through internalized biases. If you want a first hand account of this, read this thread by Emray or this post by Swiftalu.

So, everyone in PSR was bad then?

I don't think most people were aware of these issues, and this is pretty apparent given the amount of support I received for calling them out. It's easy to think things are perfectly fine when nobody argues to the contrary, and it'd be ridiculous for me to blame anyone for that.

Everything's good now, then?

Nope. I'm optimistic right now, but old habits die hard. It's going to take an active effort from everyone to remain aware of how their actions might affect others in subtle ways, but fortunately I've seen a lot of care thus far!

You just want to be a moderator!

I did volunteer to moderate the Switch Discord, but I only want to do it if community trusts me in that role. I also volunteered to moderate the 3DS Discord with the condition that if there are any more qualified minority candidates, they should be chosen over me, as I don't want to accumulate power over multiple communities. Plus, moderation is a ton of work and is relatively thankless. I want to be in a position where I can influence positive social change, but I'm also only one woman, and I feel that contributing to the Switch community is the most obvious allocation of my energy given my experience with LGPE.

You're just trying to force your ideology!

pikachu says trans rights

Are we still boycotting SRC?

I plan to resubmit my deleted times and return to submitting new times once the SRC moderators have changed to represent the new communities.

If you have other questions, don't hesitate to DM me on Discord (Corvimae#8392) or Twitter (@Corvimae). Please don't just mention me, as I prefer one-on-one conversations over the nonsense that is Twitter-at-large!

The names of some individuals have been removed to place focus on systematic issues rather than individual actions. I've kept the names of others that I quote directly.

Yesterday, PSR, the central community for Pokemon speedrunning, reinstated an admin who stepped down in July after being accused of abuse. This is the statement posted by the PSR admin team announcing the reinstatement:

As a result of the investigation that started back in July, [the accused admin] has been re-added to the admin team. To echo what was said back when this all started, we want to make sure PSR is a safe space for all members of the community, and so we take matters like this very seriously. If anyone has any geniune [sic] concerns about this decision, please do not hesitate to reach out to anyone on the Admin team via DM. We still ask that everyone respect the privacy of all that were involved with this situation, however we want to make sure that we listen to any concerns.

Shortly after that announcement, I contacted the admin team directly to receive more context. This essay is my attempt to organize my thoughts after discussing this and other issues surrounding PSR with various people I'm close to in the Pokemon speedrunning community. While I will allude to opinions shared with me by others, I don't intend to speak for anyone besides myself – if you recognize your views being shared here and feel that I did a poor job conveying them or wish to add your opinion, please reach out to me on Discord (Corvimae#8392) or Twitter (@Corvimae).

1. Running in the 20s

Speedrunning is undoubtedly a male-dominated hobby, as is the case with most online video game spaces. Even though roughly as many women as men play video games, gender-targeted advertising and the outsize influence (not to mention sexism) of men within development studios and publishers heavily influenced the demographics and social beliefs of those who engage with video gaming as a hobby, creating a male-led industry largely catering to the interests of male gamers. This is, hopefully, not a contentious point to anyone reading this; women have always dealt with undue sexism in online gaming communities, and while some communities have tackled this issue in earnest and built spaces that are open and accepting to women and minorities, the issue is engrained in the legacy of online gaming (look at the comment section of any Anita Sarkeesian video if you're not convinced).

Despite what sexists would have you believe, there is no intrinsic difference between any gender that might prevent someone from engaging with speedrunning. Even if you subscribe to the (evidence-less) idea that female-assigned people are somehow "less capable" of twitch reaction-based gaming at a competitive level, this has no effect on Pokemon speedruns, which don't feature those sort of inputs.

I mention this because Pokemon, as a series, has fairly equal gender parity in its fanbase. All else being equal, we should thus expect to see at most a 5-10% gap between male and female Pokemon runners. And yet, at the time of writing, PSR has less than a dozen active female runners despite hundreds of active male runners (Note: PSR doesn't offer pronoun roles, so this is an estimate based what I've observed).

Now, I don't expect the gap to be that small. As stated before, speedrunning is male-dominated, and thus there are many more male runners than there are woman and non-binary runners. I don't expect PSR to fix this – it's a movement that has to take place within speedrunning at large, something that GDQ has led seemingly well thus far. What I do hope is for PSR to act in support of that goal, rather than foster an environment that works against it. As it stands, I don't see any reason to believe that it is.

2. Tacit Endorsement and Self Exile

Engaging with PSR is not a requirement to be a Pokemon speedrunner, but it is critical if one wants to have a voice in the decisions surrounding around the games they run. Even if the community around a specific Pokemon game is not centered on the PSR Discord, the leaderboards are, and thus all runners must choose to either engage with PSR or come to terms that they will not have input on the rules surrounding their game of choice.

This is not an issue unique to PSR by any means. All speed game communities have a governing group of moderators as a result of how speedrun.com organizes and allocates power for individual games. Whether or not this hierarchical arrangement is good or necessary isn't the focus of this essay, but it's worth recognizing to better understand some of the underlying forces behind allocation of power in speedrunning communities.

Where PSR does differ is in its position as a centralized authority of speedrunning for all Pokemon games (besides the Mystery Dungeon spin-offs, which has its own server), rather than for a Pokemon game. This is a relatively rare arrangement as far as I'm aware. Most speed games have their own community even if they are part of a larger series or at most share a community with a sibling game; I'm involved with the CrossCode speedrunning community, which lives off in the corner of the official CrossCode Discord, not in some larger RPG speedrunning Discord. Final Fantasy X speedrunning shares a Discord with Final Fantasy X-2, but they are not part of a larger Final Fantasy Discord.

PSR's hyper-centralization does, on some level, make sense at first glance. Pokemon is stubbornly itself, with each main series game following the same "eight gyms and then a final gauntlet" formula for over two decades now. Consolidating the governing forces of the community allows for standardization, which in turn makes it easier to run multiple games in the series, as the expectations you have from one game carry neatly to another. While I personally think this standardization is overly rigid and ultimately erases the differences between games, I do understand why it appeals to many people.

But opinions on rulesets notwithstanding, centralization of community power carries additional social costs. Hierarchical distribution of power is intrinsic to any community with moderators, but as a community grows, the power those moderators command increases in turn. In internet communities, those with moderation privileges dictate the environment through both the elevated status of their own speech as well as the conversations they allow to persist. If the administrators of a community are quick to suppress the expression of bigotry, the bigots will grow frustrated and leave. If the administrators leave such expression to the "marketplace of ideas" and the community is not united enough in its opposition to intolerance, those affected by that intolerance will leave until only the intolerant remain.

No matter what community this occurs in, the outcome is upsetting. A runner driven out by intolerance loses their ability to influence the rules surrounding the game they care about unless they force themselves to engage with an atmosphere that is hostile to their safety and/or existence. While this clearly should never happen, the formulaic nature of Pokemon at least presents an "escape hatch". If the community of a game in the series has been colonized by the intolerant, the runner can still run a similar game in the series that does not host a toxic community. The "consolation prize" of "being able" to drop a speed game and learn an entirely new game to escape toxicity is awful, and, as is unfortunately often the case, forces the victim to make concessions for their own victimization, but does at least allow the individual to remain engaged with a property they care deeply about, even if the scope of that involvement was forcibly altered.

PSR does not allow this. If someone is driven from PSR, they are exiled from Pokemon speedrunning as a whole –  there is no "escape hatch". Sure, you can still run Pokemon independently, but your voice is silenced. If you want to submit to leaderboards for any game in the series, you are forced to indirectly engage with PSR. In July, when the accusations mentioned above broke, emray left Pokemon speedrunning entirely, and I fully support that decision. Refusing to engage with PSR demands leaving Pokemon speedrunning in any "official" capacity. An entire series is cut off to a runner that does not want to tacitly endorse the actions of its governing body unless they accept never having a voice or submitting to leaderboards again.

There is a pressure to stay and accept the way things are, or to try to change the institution from within. This pressure is ignorable to those unaffected by the status quo (though many choose not to ignore it, and that is worth celebrating). To those of us who can't, we are forced to choose whether to accept and contribute to a community that fails to represent us, or to move on entirely.

3. Why Won't These Combees Evolve?

I got involved with Pokemon speedrunning about three months ago, and looked into joining PSR a couple weeks after. The overwhelming feedback I received from those I respect within this community was to avoid PSR at all costs – that for my own mental health I should stay away from PSR entirely, and if I must engage with it, to do so as little as possible.

PSR is the Discord linked to from almost every Pokemon game on speedrun.com. It is the arbiter of the ruleset of every one of those games. And its introduction to me was that it is an unfortunate reality of Pokemon speedrunning, a necessary evil you tolerate if you want to enjoy this hobby. The most vocal warnings came from minorities, all of whom have completely broken their association with PSR and simply accepted the tradeoff described in the previous section – that they would hold no influence on what they love, because that was a worthwhile tradeoff to avoid looking at PSR.

Before writing this, I asked in the Frame Fatales Discord (GDQ's community for women and femme-leaning non-binary people in speedrunning) if anyone had run or considered running Pokemon, and if so, whether they engaged with PSR. The responses I received were unsurprisingly negative. One runner told me they had considered running Pokemon, but the thought of involving themselves with PSR put them off entirely. Another said they just pretend the server doesn't exist. I learned the #pokemon channel exists on Frame Fatales because the Pokemon speedrunning community is so uninviting to women.

When you step back and look at the leadership structure of PSR as a whole, this shouldn't be a surprise. PSR is an extremely male-dominated space. There are no women or non-binary admins nor moderators (as far as I know; again, PSR does not have pronoun roles. If this is not the case, please let me know.) I do not know the racial and queer demographics of PSR or its admin and moderator team, or else I would comment on that as well. I recognize this is a self-fulfilling problem; a lack of diversity in the community leads to fewer diverse candidates for leadership positions, which in turn leads to less diversity. This is a hard problem to solve for sure, but a problem nonetheless.

My goal is not to "call out" or "cancel" the PSR admins for this, but rather to raise awareness to a very real social imbalance. It is not my belief that the admins went out of their way to intentionally create a space that is exclusionary to women and minorities, but that is the community that exists today. When the admins say they "want to make sure PSR is a safe space for all members of the community", I genuinely believe that. But creating a safe space requires making a conscious effort to identify and remove toxic individuals, or else the paradox of tolerance undermines the effort entirely.

PSR has showcased outspoken bigots and individuals accused of sexual assault in its marathons. Advocates of "leaderboard integrity" have driven valuable members from this community with their insistence on celebrating the accomplishments of those who have grievously harmed others over the comfort and inclusion of their victims. And now, a person accused of abuse is once again granted admin privilege and we are expected to simply blindly trust the investigation.

4. Trust and Fault

The decision to reinstate the accused admin is upsetting to not only myself but many others I've spoken with over the past day. The statement presented by the rest of the PSR admin team provides nothing to assure us that this decision was made in the interest of the community at large, and my private conversations with the admin team have done little to change this.

I understand the need for discretion with regards to sensitive private conversations, but that requirement acts in opposition to stated goal of making PSR a safe space. All of the women I've talked to about this understand the consequences of false allegations (though the number of false allegations is incredibly small) and want this to be resolved fairly for everyone involved. But the information presented does nothing to alleviate concerns. Everyone I spoke with was nervous and/or uncomfortable about this decision. Even after receiving more details in private from the admin team, our worries remain.

I was told that the accused was given a chance to provide additional context to the evidence presented by the accuser, but that evidence was then treated as the final word rather than giving the accuser a chance to respond. This is a major failing of the investigation that reveals the concerns I have with it; largely, that we don't know the details. There is an undue amount of trust expected of us, and when this trust is requested from the figureheads of a community that already has major issues retaining and elevating diverse voices, it's hard to accept.

I was told that the admin team interacted with the accuser through the admins of another speedrunning community. That other community has stated that the accused will never again hold power there, and this forces me to wonder why PSR did not arrive at that same conclusion.

As stated before, I don't blame anyone in particular for this. I'm glad an investigation took part, even if the investigation falls flat for me due the likely biases of the investigatory body and the lack of female voices involved. This is a difficult and stressful issue to handle for a volunteer admin team, and thus my concerns lie with the environment that lead to these decisions rather than the individuals that made them. I appreciate the admin team taking the time to speak with me and give me more context, and hope that if they read this, they recognize that I raise these concerns in good faith and out of a genuine desire to improve the community through the promotion of diversity so that this hobby becomes accessible to everyone.

5. Conclusion

My involvement with Pokemon speedrunning has been wonderful.

My involvement with PSR has been almost entirely negative.

The Pokemon speedrunning community is home to some truly amazing people that I'm thankful to now call friends, and this only makes it all the more disappointing that in order to share this hobby with them I feel the obligation to engage with a community that I feel uncomfortable in and fails to represent me.

As a new-ish runner I don't expect to make a huge splash by writing this, but I do hope that others might see this and better recognize the institutional failings of PSR and how it gatekeeps access to this hobby to the unoppressed or those willing to passively accept these issues. As long as these problems remain unaddressed, I plan to no longer submit runs to any leaderboards administered by PSR, and invite anyone with similar concerns to join me.

Thank you to the PSR admin team for giving this essay attention and reaching out to speak with me about these concerns.

Sept. 25, 2020, 4:26 PM - Clarified that the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series is centered around its own Discord, not PSR.  

1. Introduction to Bad Design

If you've been around the online Destiny community long enough, you've surely seen your fair share of posts like this:

(If you're not familiar with Destiny, think of this as accidentally throwing away a check for a thousand dollars.)

I see two common responses to this: either "yeah you're an idiot, way to go," or "yeah the interface sucks." The second is more accurate than the first; good user interfaces should prevent catastrophic, irreversible errors from happening. This interaction is a failure of Destiny 2's interface design.

Before I go on, I should say that I think Destiny 2's interface is actually pretty good in general. Aesthetically it looks pleasing, and it has a strong design language that the game applies consistently to efficiently convey information (I'll go into that in more detail in another essay).

When a user says that an interface "sucks," what they're really saying is that the interface failed to account for the way they think. No designer can anticipate the thought process of every possible user, which is why the best interfaces are products of iteration, battle-hardened through real-life interaction. Nobody designs a bad interface on purpose (well, almost nobody, at least). We remember only the negative moments, because positive interaction with software is invisible. Interfaces are tools to interact with a system, and the less we have to think about the tool we're using to carry out a task, the more we focus on the task itself and ignore everything surrounding it.

In a very long (and very interesting!) three part article released in August 2019, Destiny's game director Luke Smith responded to the criticism of the then-recently reworked Pursuits interface, saying:

[The UI team was] crestfallen. Not just because of the sometimes-harsh-feeling feedback, but because this team wanted make something sweet, exceed your expectations, and meet their own expectations. None of those things happened. We wanted to try something different with Pursuits, in the sense that we knew where we wanted this feature to end up, but that we'd take some iterative steps to get there.

It's important to provide feedback; it's the only way an interface can improve. It's immediately clear when an interface fails; you feel like you're fighting against the machine, and it's frustrating. This is why most user feedback comes in the form of "this sucks," which, yeah, fair. It does suck. Thank you for letting us know! (But, y'know, be nice about please. Designers are people too.)

That being said, I'm not familiar with the Destiny codebase. Something that seems easy to fix from the outside might actually be a nightmare - I'm reminded of a time my project manager asked me how easy it would take to build a a specific interface horizontally (ten minutes) versus building it vertically (impossible). Different frameworks handle some things well but others horribly, and a critical part of software development is properly considering those constraints. For that reason, I try not to make any hard judgments in this article about how "easy" it is to make a software change. I'm a user of Destiny 2, not a developer, and while users are really good at discovering problems, they are really bad at knowing how to fix them.

2. Core Problems

When you accidentally delete your entire stack of masterwork cores because you weren't paying enough attention, we call that a slip: intending to carry out one action, but instead doing another. The user had the right goal in mind, but their execution was flawed. Contrast this against an mistake, where the user misunderstood the context in some way.

Generally speaking, a slip is a failure of attention, while an mistake is a failure of understanding. If I'm trying to read insightful articles on user interfaces in games and type twitter.com/Corvimae, that's a mistake; I'm misinformed as to where to find the article, and no matter how accurately I carried out the task I wouldn't find what I'm looking for. If I type myabreak.com into my browser, the browser will return an error. That's a slip; my method was correct (May writes good articles and is so humble about it!), I just made a typo. The browser helpfully informs me that something's wrong, I correct the mistake, and move on.

Errors aren't 100% preventable. People screw up. They get distracted, their brain goes on auto-pilot, or they forget a vital piece of information, and suddenly an error occurs. Good interface design aims to make it harder to commit errors, and to make the consequences less painful.

The masterwork core problem is a mistake caused by what I think is the biggest failure of Destiny's user interface: the F key.

(A note for the more console-inclined: I play on PC, so this article references PC controls. Substitute whatever button your version of the game uses, because honestly I have no idea.)

The most common interaction you have in Destiny's menus is dismantling - an action carried out by holding down the F key. Destiny is constantly giving you useless loot that you'll never use, and dismantling it gives materials that you might use someday. It creates a gameplay loop of do an activity, dismantle bad gear. It's such a frequent interaction that it becomes nearly invisible; I've deleted some decent gear because I wasn't thinking and just assumed it would be bad. In Destiny, you click on aliens, and you hold down F.

Whether you wanted it or not, play enough Destiny and you associate F key becomes associated with dismantling; you internalize the rule "press F to dismantle". If consistently applied across the application, this is great! You wouldn't hit the F key unless you intended to dismantle something, making the error a slip: "I hovered over the wrong thing because I wasn't paying attention." That's not 100% preventable from a design perspective; the best you can do is either prevent the action entirely, or give the user enough time to recognize they're making a mistake before it happens - something Destiny actually does implement for rarer gear. Rarer gear requires you to hold down the F for longer before the dismantle action is carried out, so you really have to commit to delete the rarest, Exotic gear.

(That said, exotic gear isn't random and can be retrieved at-will after deletion, so it actually needs less protection than the less rare Legendary gear - unless it's Year 3 armor, which has random stats. It's an detail that comes from a hard rule that makes sense - the more rare the piece of gear, the harder it is to break - but isn't always ideal in practice. Spoiler: this is a recurring theme.)

Except, Destiny actually has two rules for F: "press F to dismantle" and "press F to use." This provides an opportunity to commit an action-based slip: the right action was performed on the wrong object.

Those two items are in my Warlock's inventory as I write this, and they are right next to each other. When you hold down F long enough for the action to occur, it is applied to the item under your cursor. Move your mouse a hundred pixels the wrong way, boom, no more Phantasmal Fragments. You carried out all the proper steps to use a Fractaline Skimmer, you just bumped your mouse.

This issue was never made more obvious than with a bug introduced with the start of the Season of Dawn. Resonate Stems, an item introduced with the Warmind expansion (and which I think are pretty fun - until you realise they're not duplicate protected, a problem I could honestly write a whole second essay about).

Resonate Stems use the "press F to use" rule; it says Combine, but it's a Use action, trust me. When the Season of Dawn patch was launched, the "press F to dismantle" rule got incorrectly applied to Resonate Stems - despite the prompt still saying Combine.

My point is, I wasted eight of these stupid things and I want them back. But also, it's a problem that shouldn't exist. There are seven possible interactions in the items menu: next sub-inventory, previous sub-inventory, view settings, view character, discard/use, view details. I feel pretty confident in saying that the Dualshock 4 and the Xbox One controller each have at least that many buttons plus one. Change the rule of "F to use" to "click to use." I'm suggesting click because that's a rule that literally exists.

Between all of Destiny's menus, I only found three different key prompts across every menu in the entire game: left click, right click, and F. There's a pattern to these actions that lead me to the conclusion that Destiny's inventory framework only supports three contextual actions: one destructive (consuming or destroying an item), one that leads to a sub-menu, and one that equips a piece of gear. On PC, left click is the non-destructive equip, F is the the destructive "use or destroy", and right click is view details. So far, I haven't found any counterexamples for this (but if you find one, let me know!).

3. Paying Your Debts

If you're still here, first, thanks for sticking with me, and second, you're probably thinking:

"Wow, May, this sure was a lot of words to describe something that's super obvious."

And, okay, yeah. True.

But the obviousness of this issue is what makes me think fixing it is non-trivial. Because it's so obvious, right? Just reuse the "left click to apply" for Use actions; apply and use are literally synonyms, after all!

When I first wrote this article, I hadn't yet recognized the destructive/non-destructive distinction, and I made a joke about how Apply and Use are the same. But in the language of Destiny's, they're different; Equip is a synonym for "Apply to gear slot", and Use is a synonym for "Destroy one (with a side-effect)." There's a logic to this, but that logic is non-obvious and took me writing this article to recognize - something I didn't realise through over a thousand hours of gameplay.

The fact that the "intend to use but accidentally delete" slip is so common makes it a failure of design, but I'm positive it's really hard to fix in the Destiny engine, because otherwise they would've done it already. If I'm correct and Use is just an "on destroy" hook on certain items, it could require refactoring large swaths of menu code, and refactors always come with the risk of quality regressions. I think it's worth changing, but I'll always lean to the side of improving interfaces regardless of the risks - and that's why I'm a UX engineer and not a project manager.

With the release of Shadowkeep, Bungie changed the masterwork core destroy interaction so that it only destroyed one core, not the whole stack. I'm not sure why they didn't make it impossible to delete the stack entirely, since that is something we know is possible, and there's no reason I can think of that you'd want to ever destroy one. It's a workaround that doesn't address this problem, but it does drastically reduce the impact of a different slip: just straight up dismantling the wrong item entirely.

Which is good, because that means Part 2 can be about something else.