Most people in the Speedrunning community won’t know me, but I’ve been working tirelessly behind the scenes for the past year, on a project called Speedrun Academy, alongside Global Speedrun Association (Check out their Twitch channel if you haven’t seen it!).
Speedrun Academy is a community content hub with the hopes that we can reduce the barrier of entry into the space and expand the size of the community.
Video games have always been a huge part of my life. I began making indie games when I was 9 years old using a tool called Gamemaker and it’s shaped the trajectory of my life ever since. I’m not a Speedrunner myself but the art has always had a special place in my heart.
My main focus now is on creating healthy digital social spaces that cater to the needs of those inhabiting them. I strongly believe in community ownership, data portability and the ability for communities to vote with their feet.
If you’d like to see some more of the work I’ve done in the Humane Technology space check out the panel below:
A splintered community
Speedrunning is a huge space that is splintered across many different sub-communities. Each of these communities are self-organising and has quite different needs.
The kinds of content that a Minecraft community produces is extremely different to that of Super Mario 64. On a surface level, the games themselves are not very similar, the resources, levels, mechanics, and scoring mechanisms vary wildly. On top of that, the ways people speedrun them are different too.
Minecraft is heavily dependent on runner’s abilities to adapt to uncharted territory within the game, in Super Mario 64 however, the levels are static so it’s much more dependent on memorisation of level layouts.
Even more complicated is the differing social contracts and conventions that each of the groups has. What is normal behaviour in one community may be frowned upon within another.
This poses a huge issue with consistency when you’re trying to create a social knowledge hub to bring together all of the separate communities.
Unifying these disparate communities would allow for a rising tide that benefits all of the separate groups by increasing the traffic through cumulative effects.
Trust
Outside of the logistics issues, there’s a larger issue of trust. Many members of the Speedrunning community have asked me why they should trust Speedrun Academy with the content they are creating? Other sites in the space such as Speedrun.com profit immensely from the world records, guides and streams hosted on the site and nobody contributing that content gets any financial recognition for the work that they put in.
Even if you put the financial aspects to the side for a moment, the communities need to grapple with a whole host of other issues. What happens if they invest a huge amount of time in Speedrun Academy and then the site ends up shutting down cos nobody uses it?
Even if it remains a long term hit, how can they trust that the platform won’t become exploitative as the platform increases in popularity? You see this happen all the time; sites increase the advertisements they display, it becomes more invasive or they limit the functionality unless you pay.
The issue of trust extends beyond the platforms themselves as well; currently, communities are mostly hosted in Discord channels which have highly centralised moderation processes. The communities need to trust that the admin’s/moderators managing the space won’t just delete the space that you’ve grown to love or change it in ways you don’t agree with.
True community ownership
In order to fix these issues of trust, better systems of governance need to be introduced so that the spaces themselves can be shaped by the communities rather than a small group of people who may have different interests to the collective.
Social channels need to become more democratic and the platforms which distribute the content need to become more competitive and open.
What I propose is a platform I’m building called Spaces which is a collaborative, democratic community hub for content creation and distribution. (Follow the link for a more in-depth explanation of the vision, including privacy and open-source).
Spaces enable you to collectively create the content once and choose which services that content is distributed to. If you don’t like the direction a particular platform is taking the community, you can choose to pull your content from their site with the click of a button.
Websites such as Speedrun Academy will act as centralised hubs and search engines over content that communities choose to share with it.
Spaces will act as the backbone to create an open and fair ecosystem for community-centric content creation.
Community leaders will have the ability to create different content types to meet the specific needs of the communities. For a regular member, creating new content will be as simple as filling out a form in Google Forms.
You will then be able to collaborate with other members of the space and provide feedback to one another.
Moderation
A big part of being a member of a community is understanding the social norms of what is ok and not ok within a space. Baked into the solution will be in-depth moderation tooling to fit the specific needs of your community.
Inadequate tooling & network effects
To speedrun.com’s credit, they have an open API that allows anyone from the community to pull content from the site and build websites and applications which interact with that data. The problem is, this data is inherently tied to speedrun.com, if members want to leave the platform and migrate to somewhere which meets their needs more adequately, it’s a very difficult process to do so.
Communities currently have no say in the shape of the platform that they are spending so much time supporting.
Separating the content and community from how the content is being consumed makes resistant communities that can stand the test of time regardless of how the ecosystem and technologies change.
Currently, if communities want to build alternative sites which are feature-rich it’s a huge undertaking. They either are required to do enormous manual data entry or invest a huge amount of time creating a platform with rich features such as moderation, content creation, search, reporting, rolling back histories, social features so that members of the community can communicate with one another, etc.
Spaces would provide a rich toolset for creating the community space you need; it would also lower the barrier of entry for creating distribution sites as they would just need to create the visual layout and do a few API calls and populate the site with content.
Communication
Many people find that the current solutions don’t have adequate communications channels built-in for members of the community and the moderators/admins. People creating content need the ability to have a direct line of communication with one another to discuss changes to the content being distributed.
Beginners in the space require a place to ask questions and suggest additional tutorials and content that they’d find useful to learn the craft.
Monetisation
Baked into this solution is an ability for communities to optionally monetise the content they create and charge the services which the content is distributed to. Thus allowing communities to be financially rewarded for the content they are creating.
Discoverability
Discoverability of smaller communities is a huge problem in the Speedrunning space as popular sites get the most coverage.
Opening up the ecosystem how I’ve proposed will allow a whole range of different sites to prop up that can support the needs of niche communities. Whether that’s through displaying random games each week through a games showcase, publishing news stories about what’s going on in the space etc.
What can I do to help?
Sharing your thoughts
I don’t know all the answers - I’d love to hear any feedback you have! Love it? Hate it? All feedback is welcome. Have a specific use case you’d like to use it for but aren’t sure if it will fit your needs? Reach out and we can discuss it. :)
Help get the word out
Spaces can’t exist without the communities that use them. If you know a community that would benefit from the platform, please let them know.
Collaborators
If you’ve got design, development or community experience, I’d love to chat. The more hands that can get involved, the more likely the vision will be realised.
Financial support
Earlier this year I left my corporate job to pursue the development of Spaces but I don’t have very deep pockets, so my current situation isn’t sustainable.
If you believe in this project, donations of any size are appreciated.
All donations will go directly towards supporting its development. If I can garner enough support, the funds will go towards hiring other developers to help flesh out the platform.
If your business or community benefits from the open-source tools I create, donations will improve the quality and quantity of them.