I’m not embarrassed that I play video games. I’m not. I’m really not. Okay, I kind of am, by which I mean I am. And I know that this doesn’t sound like a big thing to confess in a platform like YouTube, but you know, life isn’t YouTube and I’m a dad with a mortgage. And even though it might sound silly, every time I play a new game, there’s always this voice in the back of my head that’s telling me that I probably shouldn’t be doing this anymore, because unlike music and movies and TV and books, video games are an activity that you’re supposed to age out of. Even though you can probably hear from the way that I’m saying this, that I don’t really think that’s true because, who decided – anyway, this is a long way of saying that I love video games. I like the idea that there’s an art form that is entirely about designing an experience for others, which is basically what it means to design a game. And because I play video games and the margins around my actual work on religion and technology, I can’t help but see the ways that the ideas that show up in video games also show up in religious contexts.
So, I wanted to make this video because there’s this one very specific part of gaming culture that I’m mildly obsessed with because for me, it unlocks something in how I understand religion in general and rabbinic Judaism in particular. That idea is speedrunning. And what I want to do here is make the case that Judaism, or at least the Judaism that’s practiced today, is basically a kind of elaborate speedrun. And that religion at its best is a kind of speedrun of its own past.
So, I want to argue this, but before I do, I know I need to take a step back because you may not know what speedrunning is. And even if you do, you may not understand how deep the community around speedrunning really goes. And either way, speedrunning videos just happen to be a really fun thing to watch and talk about. So, first, let me give you like a little capsule history of speedrunning. And from there, we’ll go on to talk about other stuff.
What even is speedrunning?
So, what is speedrunning? To explain it, I think it’s helpful to consider something that’s not speedrunning, but which is a kind of spiritual cousin, which shows up in the first third of Ready Player One, Steven Spielberg’s movie adaptation of a book about a society that’s given itself entirely over to games. At the beginning of Ready Player One, there’s this race that you need to complete in order to get started on the main quest of the movie, but nobody has ever actually been able to complete it. The first time you see the race, you see that it’s basically impossible to finish. The whole course is designed to kill as many players as possible. There’s no way to reach the finish line without a literal King Kong smashing your car to pieces. In other words, if you play the game the way it’s designed to be played, you’re always going to lose. And then Wade, the movie’s protagonist, has an epiphany. What if the challenge isn’t about the race course, but about the person who designed the race in the first place? What if the whole course is besides the point?
The next time the race starts, Wade immediately puts his car in reverse, discovers a hidden path that takes you underneath the entire race course without a single obstacle getting in your way. And as a kind of confirmation that this route is correct, taking this underground path also allows them to see the race course from behind the scenes, so to speak, the way that it would appear to developers rather than to players.
The message here, which is repeated over and over again throughout the movie, is that you can play games the way they’re designed, but the real way to win is to think like a game designer. The reason for this, I think, is that when you play a game, you’re purely playing inside of someone’s fantasy. But when you play the designer, you’re playing inside a structure that has reality in it. And for many people, that feels really important. And this is where speedrunning comes in because speedrunning takes the idea of Ready Player One and kicks it up one important notch. In Ready Player One, the way that Wade wins the game is still part of the game’s intentional design. It just happened to be that the game is designed to be subverted.
Speedrunners, on the other hand, often play the game in ways that it was not designed to be played, often in ways that the games designers didn’t even realize were possible. You can actually find videos on YouTube of game designers watching speedrunners basically break their games. And these videos – I love watching them. They’re one of my guilty pleasures.
If you’re new to speedrunning, I know this probably sounds a little abstract. So, let me back up for a second and talk about how this works within a specific game. Speedrunning communities develop around many games, but let’s talk about Super Mario 64, a beloved and still-very-playable game from when I was growing up. Now, I wouldn’t say that Mario 64 is a particularly hard game, but it is a decently long game. Parenthetically, the length and difficulty of games are strongly connected because if Nintendo sells an expensive video game and people finish it in two hours, they’re going to get upset. Previous consoles had been too weak to support games as big as Mario 64. So, the only way to make the game take longer was to make it much harder. But the Nintendo 64 was powerful enough that you could create a fulfilling experience without making people feel like they were breaking their teeth over it. Nintendo basically figured out the perfect balance of difficulty and quantity – and it’s the reason that people still play the game today. According to the website howlongtobeat.com, it takes about 12 hours to finish Mario 64‘s main story, and another eight hours if you want to complete literally every task. Uh, it took me around 10 years, but that’s because I didn’t have a console. Not blaming anybody. Most people who play Mario 64 spend their time on the game. They finish it. They feel a sense of accomplishment. Maybe they play it a bit more, but then they more or less move on with their lives. That’s all there is to it. However, there is a small but very enthusiastic set of people who don’t just want to beat Mario 64. They want to demolish it, to be the faster than anybody ever intended.
That, in essence is the goal of speedrunning – to take a game that isn’t designed to be a race, and make it a race anyways. And if there are speedrunning fans watching this, I’ll just say I know there are other kinds of speedrunning, like the people who beat Mario 64 while blindfolded or don’t press the A button. Yes, we’re going to talk about this stuff a bit, but for the sake of simplicity, we’re mostly going to stick to beating games quickly. The shift from “win the game” to “win the game quickly” doesn’t sound like much, but once you’ve made that shift, you fundamentally change your relationship to the game and also to all the other people who are playing the game with you. If you’re playing Mario just to beat the game, you’re doing something that’s fundamentally asocial. And you’re probably doing it by following the sort of subtle design rules that Nintendo has been so expertly crafting for decades. When you speedrun Mario, on the other hand, your real competition is no longer the game. It’s all the other people who are also playing the game. And the way you play the game is no longer based on how the designers are trying to get you to play, but instead on anything and everything in the game that can shave your time down by even a fraction of a second.
To understand how this changes the way you play, consider something like the simple act of walking. In Mario 64, the main character – I’m blanking on his name right now, I’m sure it’ll come to me later – he mostly gets around by walking with occasional breaks for when he needs to jump, wall-kick, or shimmy up a pole. But it’s usually fairly clear when each of these moves is supposed to be used. You may not always be able to do what the game wants you to do (if you could, then it wouldn’t be much fun), but you always have a pretty clear sense of what is expected. And most of the time, what’s expected is walking.
Now, how does a speedrunner move around in Mario 64? Well, very early on, players realized that walking is actually one of the slowest ways of moving around the map, and that any player who stuck to walking had basically no chance of getting a world record. Instead, most speedrunners today get around by chaining together long jumps, because as it turns out, Mario’s speed while long-jumping is just the tiniest bit faster than regular walking. Playing the game this way may look a little bit crazy, but it’s also very effective. And this is really just a start. Jumping around the map may look strange, but it’s only slightly unconventional. That’s not true for a lot of other speedrunning strategies – like rapidly jumping backwards up a long set of stairs so you can skip a huge portion of the game. Strategies like this work by exploiting hidden bugs that the developers either didn’t know about, or didn’t think were worth fixing.
Over time, speedrunners turn bugs like this into the foundations of a speedrunning strategy. Mario isn’t supposed to be able to scoot up a staircase backwards, but speedrunners have made the backwards long-jump (BLJ to his friends) such an integral mechanic that it’s hard to imagine playing the game without it. Today, when you watch someone speedrunning a well-worn game like Mario 64, part of what you’re seeing is just someone playing the game well, but most of what you’re seeing is a chain of exploits that were never intended to be part of the game at all. These mechanisms didn’t come from the developer. They came from a speedrunning community.
If this all sounds astounding to you, it actually goes one level deeper. The most daring form of speedrunning is something called arbitrary code execution, or “ACE” for short. ACE isn’t possible in every game. And to really take advantage of it, you need the help of a computer, but the things it can do are truly mind-boggling. One of the most well-known games where ACE is used is a different Mario game – Super Mario World, for the Super Nintendo. Rather than simply exploiting holes in the way that the game is designed to move more quickly or become invulnerable to enemies, ACE allows the player to actually write new code into the game while it is running – basically turning the player into a programmer without even the assistance of a keyboard. This means, like in the example here, that a person can tell the game to simply jump to the “Congratulations, you win!” screen at the end of the game, and it will do exactly that. Instead of winning by defeating a boss, you win by simply informing the game that you’ve won. It’s like the player has decided the real final boss is the game’s own coding.
But with ACE, winning the game actually isn’t the most impressive thing you can do. With the assistance of computer time control inputs, a player can issue code so precisely that they can reprogram the game itself. It’s hard to underestimate how crazy this is because it’s basically the gaming equivalent of taking a fishbowl and turning it into a bicycle. Watching someone use ACE this way feels like magic, because it doesn’t seem like it should be able to do anything interesting, yet somehow it does.
In this video, for example, you watch the player jump around Super Mario World chaotically for around 100 seconds, then the screen starts glitching and when it stops, you find yourself looking at a menu that contains not one but two entirely different games, Pong and Snake – neither of which is contained anywhere within Super Mario‘s actual coding, [but] which exists because the player has literally supplied their code in real time using nothing but controller presses. This transformation of a game is so advanced that the only evidence you’re still playing Super Mario World at all is that the graphics used in Pong and Snake are reused sprites from elsewhere in the original game.
Or take this guy who used the same technique to inject the code for Flappy Bird, a game that wasn’t invented until years after Super Mario World came out. In the hands of these users, video games almost cease being games at all. Instead, they’re more like raw materials waiting to be crafted into whatever shape the player has in mind. And you win not by saving the princess in the castle or whatever, but by transforming the game in the most radical way possible. The folks who enjoy Super Mario World by turning it into Flappy Bird aren’t that different from the folks who take the classic first-person shooter Doom and figure out how to get it to run on basically anything with a screen – including a rotary phone, a treadmill, an ATM, a Lego brick, even a pregnancy test. All of these people are still playing games, but the joy comes in the ability to circumvent and transform, to do things to the game, not despite the fact that a developer never expected it, but because the developer never expected it.
I’m explaining it this way because I think it gets to what I love most so much about speedrunning. Speedrunning is fundamentally a communal experience, not just because you’re competing against other players, but because speedrunners develop by pooling their knowledge about all the unexpected ways you can optimize your runs. In developing these strategies, speedrunners aren’t just delving into the game as was meant to be played. They’re digging into the development process itself and treating the wrinkles in that process like they’re part of the game. Normal players play the game. Speedrunners play the developers.
The communal aspect of speedrunning has another important consequence, which is that games that attract speedrunners tend to stick around longer than games that don’t. These days, a well-received AAA game can expect maybe a year in the spotlight before people move on to the next big thing. But speedrunners will stay interested in a game for years or even decades after the release.
Mario 64 is a perfect example of this. I mean, yeah, I’m sure there are plenty of millennials who boot it up on an emulator now and then because they’re nostalgic about middle school. I’ve certainly done that. But I can tell you from firsthand experience with my own kids that the game as design doesn’t really appeal to Gen Z or Gen Alpha casual gamers, mostly because it’s a little too slow and the graphics aren’t really up to today’s standards. In the speedrunning world, though, Mario 64 is still actively being played, including by people born long after it was released. As I record this video, the most recent new world record is less than a year old, and is held by a guy born almost a decade after the game came out. Like, he’s literally talking about taking his driving test while he is doing the run. My driving instructor was instructor was like weird – like, she was kind of nice, I guess.
In other words, speedrunning has given Mario 64 a multi-generational longevity that nobody, probably including the game’s designers, could have ever anticipated. To say it another way, Mario 64 lives on because people figured out how to make it their own.
And Mario 64 isn’t even the oldest game to live on through speedrunning. One of the most venerated speedrunning communities is the one that works on Super Mario Brothers, a game for the original NES that came out in 1985. What’s amazing about this community is that the game, at its center, is so old and so highly perfected in its strategy that even the slightest improvement is greeted like a breakthrough in theoretical physics. The last person to break the world record beat the previous record by a grand total of 299 milliseconds.
So, to review, speedrunning is great because it revolves around community, and appreciating games on your own terms, and coloring outside the lines, and being creative, and deciding for your own [sake] exactly what constitutes a game.
But there’s one more reason that I like speedrunning, and this is the part that really gets to why I find speedrunning helpful for thinking about religion in general and Judaism in particular. To get to this reason, I need to tell you about my very favorite speedrunning video of all, which fittingly also happens to be the shortest. The video is about this game called Getting Over It, which is one of the most difficult and frustrating games you’ll ever play. Actually, I do not think you should play this game. The controls are impossible. The premise is insultingly stupid. And the whole thing is designed so that a single false move can send you falling back to the beginning, erasing all of your progress. The game is made by demons and it’s designed to maximize feelings of despair. To be entirely honest, I don’t really know why people play games like this. But, you know, I also don’t know why there are so many games about Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill. And the whole point of that story in Greek mythology is that pointlessly pushing a boulder up a hill forever is just about the worst punishment possible.
But anyway, that’s neither here nor there. For most people, this game is basically impossible. But some people really do complete it, and a very, very small number of people like to race each other to see who complete it fastest. In the video that I’m talking about, the game’s developer, Bennett Foddy, narrates as he watches someone complete his cruel, cruel game in exactly 84 seconds.
As Foddy watches, he says one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard anyone say about a video game. He says, “I think in a way the role of the speedrunner is like the exact opposite of the role of the game designer. A game designer painstakingly carves a beautiful sculpture out of wood, first chiseling it out of raw block and then gradually rounding off any rough edges, making sure it works when it’s viewed from any angle. The speedrunner takes that sculpture and they look it over carefully from top to bottom, from every angle, and deeply understand it. They appreciate all the work that went into the design, all the strengths and weak points, and then having understood it perfectly, they break it over their knee. That’s why I love speedrunners.”
The speedrunner, in other words, has an inherently antagonistic relationship to the game designer because it’s the speedrunner’s job to know the game better than the developers themselves – to seek out the game’s holes, not for the purpose of sewing them up, but in order to ram a car through them. The irony is that the speedrunner can only do this by really and truly understanding the game – knowing it in a way that the developer never intended it to be known. The speedrunner and the developer understand the game at the same level, but one is trying to undermine the other.
If this sounds like military conflict, you’d be right. In the classic science fiction novel Ender’s Game, the central emotional struggle is that you can’t win a war unless you fully understand the enemy. But understanding the enemy at this level also means that you end up destroying the people who you appreciate most deeply. I thought you were a teacher. There is no teacher but the enemy.
I don’t think most speedrunners feel much guilt about what they’re doing. After all, we’re still talking about Super Mario here. But there really is a tension between the developer and the speedrunner – each of whom understand the game totally, but have very different intentions with it. The developer makes the game and throws it into the world. The speedrunner picks up the developer’s torch and takes it to places that the developer could never have even dreamed of.” And that, in essence, is exactly what rabbinic Judaism does to the Hebrew Bible.
How the rabbis made their own rules
There’s this story buried deep in the Talmud that is rightly recognized as one of the most profound statements of Jewish theology ever made by the rabbis. The rabbis are sitting around. They’re discussing the law. They start arguing about this strangely constructed oven called the Oven of Aknai, which uses a loophole that I’m not going to explain here to avoid becoming ritually impure, despite the fact that it functions exactly like a normal oven. One rabbi, Rabbi Eliezer, declares that the loophole works, but all the other rabbis disagree. In situations like this, the majority usually wins out. But Rabbi Eliezer can’t let this one go, because he’s convinced that he’s objectively correct.
So instead of moving on, Rebel Eliezer stands up and declares, “If I am correct, then this tree will prove it.” And a tree uproots itself from the ground and replants itself more than 100 feet away. Now, you’d think that the rabbis would be impressed by a miracle, but all they say is that “You don’t decide the law based on what trees do. Law is made by people and by communities, not by the guy who could do the best miracles with trees.”
But Rabbi Eliezer won’t leave it alone. So, he tries again. He says that a river will prove that he’s correct, and the river changes direction. He says that the building they’re sitting in will prove that he’s correct, and the walls of the building start to collapse until another rabbi stops it. Finally, Rabbi Eliezer pulls out what he thinks is a trump card and declares that if he’s correct, then heaven itself will prove it. At which point, a voice calls out from heaven and says, “Why are you disagreeing with him? Don’t you know that he’s always right? The rabbis don’t care.” Another rabbi, Rabbi Yehoshua, stands up and quotes a verse from the book of Deuteronomy: “It is not in heaven.”
What he’s saying, as the Talmud explains it, is that God’s opinion on how to read the Bible actually doesn’t matter. Torah was given by God to the people, which means that people are the only ones who get to decide what to do with it. Sure, maybe God has an opinion about the right answer; maybe that opinion is even right in some objective sense. But the Torah belongs to the people, and that ownership is irrevocable. It can’t be snatched back, no matter how much God wishes it.
To bring this back to gaming for a second, this moment reminds me of one of my favorite online exchanges of all time between the official UNO Twitter account and some random player. In 2020, the UNO account tweeted that you’re not allowed to play a +2 card on top of another +2 card, to which a user responded, “Thank you for the cards, but we’ll take it from here.” This actually wasn’t the first time that UNO’s management tried to clarify the rules of the game, only to be shot down by players. In fact, the idea that Mattel, which owns UNO, no longer controls the rules of UNO, has become so pervasive that the company started tweeting clarifications and daring people to “go ahead, roast us” as a way of increasing engagement. They might still be the only company licensed to sell UNO cards, but the rules to the game no longer reside with the UNO Corporation – not because the company did anything wrong, but because UNO, like all games, puts players in charge. And once you’ve given players control, they don’t really ever give it up, even to the people who made the game in the first place.
Now, the UNO corporation seems to have resigned itself to being ignored. But the Talmud suggests that God actually comes to relish being defied. As a kind of epilogue to the story, the Talmud says that Rabbi Natan had a conversation with the Prophet Elijah, who in many stories is a kind of intermediary between human and divine realms. When Rabbi Natan asks Elijah what God thought about the whole exchange, Elijah answers that at that moment, God smiled and said, “My children have defeated me. My children have defeated me.” In other words, God was actually proud that the rabbi stood up to him, in the way that parents are often proud when their children grow old enough to challenge them. Yeah, it creates conflict, but it’s also a sign that your kids are coming into themselves, becoming their own people.
This is a nice story, but the thing you need to remember about it is that it’s a story written by the rabbis. That is to say, the rabbis wrote a story in which they argue with God, they openly defy God, and then God smiles and is proud of being defeated. So unless you believe that all of this literally happened, it’s hard to imagine a bigger act of – if the moral of the story is that it’s okay to forge your parents’ signature, then the epilogue is the equivalent of forging a note from your parents saying that it’s okay to forge notes from your parents. It’s just crazy. All the action, in other words, comes from the rabbis. Not only do they decide what the law is, they also decide what it means that they get to decide the law. And what they decide is that their power is asserted as an act of independence against a father god who is ultimately proud of what they’ve done. To paraphrase Albert Camus,
“the rabbis must imagine that God is happy with them.”
If this seems like a huge overreach, you’re not alone. A few hundred years after the story was written, a group of Jews called the Karaites decided that the rabbis had assigned themselves way too much authority. And one of the most prominent Karaites, a guy named al-Qirqisānī, actually points to that story, in particular, as evidence that the rabbis are not proper god-fearing Jews – that they don’t really respect the Bible. And you know, maybe Qirqisānī is sort of right, but the Judaism he practiced represents only the tiniest sliver of the Jewish population today.
These days, virtually all Jews are inheritors of the Rabbinic tradition – the very same tradition that’s totally comfortable telling God that we’re the ones who get to make the rules. And here, the speedrunning metaphor becomes useful again. Despite the fact that speedrunners are in the business of making games do things they were never intended to do, the speedrunner’s attitude towards the developers is usually one of profound respect. And on reflection, this makes a lot of sense. If a player thinks that a game is beneath them, they’re not going to play it, and they’re certainly not going to play it competitively. Rabbinic Judaism, too, may be premised on humanity’s capacity to reinterpret the Bible, but in doing so, it is also constantly affirming that the Bible remains important. It’s hard to imagine a greater sign of respect than the willingness to stay engaged with the same set of text for thousands of years.
It’s worth noting that for both the rabbis and speedrunners, all of this is possible only because of one very specific expectation. Namely, both rabbis and speedrunners are confident that the material they’re working with, whether it’s a game or a text, is in its final state and that it’s not going to change. It’s a lot harder to create speedrunning communities if you never know whether you’re building your strategy around a tiny bug that’s about to get patched.
Because of this, both speedrunning and rabbinic Judaism defy the rules for most other media, where newer is better and interest fades over time. Instead, these communities like old stuff because they can be sure that the thing that they’re working on, down to even the smallest details, is going to stay that way forever. It might not be too much of a leap to say that when it comes to media, both rabbinic Judaism and speedrunners see it as a net positive when they’re abandoned by their creators. Part of the reason that rabbis don’t want to hear God’s opinion is that their relationship to scripture, like the speedrunner’s relationship to games, is somewhat adversarial.
There are plenty of occasions where the rabbinic reading of a text is not only implausible, but exactly opposite to what the verse is clearly trying to say. One of the better known examples of this is the rabbinic interpretation of the biblical verse in Exodus that says, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand” – basically commanding the Israelites to punish people for the damage they cause to others by doing the same thing to them. So, for example, if you blind someone, you should be punished by being blinded yourself. The legal term for this is lex talionis. And I don’t think I need to tell you that it’s a terrible idea. The rabbis don’t seem to like it very much either. In their interpretations, the verse is obviously about monetary penalties and has absolutely nothing to do with physical retaliation. But of course, this is a pretty hard sell. When the Bible says “an eye for an eye,” it pretty clearly means that.
But the rabbis aren’t afraid to read the Bible against this literal meaning. And sometimes that means the rabbinic interpretation of a verse is exactly opposed to its literal meaning. For the rabbis, that’s okay. The Torah isn’t in heaven anymore. Humans are the ones that get to set the rules. I want to really emphasize that this adversarial relationship is deeply embedded in rabbinic Judaism, and it applies to things that the rabbis themselves wrote, too. Yeah, sometimes the people who study rabbinic texts are really just looking to be inspired, but a lot of the time they come to a text looking for a fight. And the history of rabbinic interpretation is full of rabbis fighting their predecessors, sometimes pretty viciously.
In one well-known story from the Talmud, two rabbis who have studied together for years have a sort of scholarly breakup and shortly afterwards, one of them dies. The remaining rabbi, Rabbi Yochanan, is recommended a new study partner. And the new guy is definitely very smart, but he’s also a sycophant, a yes man, and all he does is say that every idea that Rabbi Yochanan says is correct. This drives Yochanan crazy, because he’s not looking for validation. He’s looking for friction. In the words of a different Talmudic passage, “study partners are like knives pushing against each other, each becoming sharper in the process.”
What I want you to notice, though, is that this friction is learned friction. It’s smart friction. Reinterpreting the Bible isn’t something that just anybody can do. You need to know it backwards and forwards, including, and especially, all the parts that don’t seem all that important. You see, like speedrunners, rabbis are incredibly detail-oriented. Entire reinterpretations can rest on a single letter or even on a single vowel mark. The rabbis might connect two verses in two totally different parts of the Bible because they happen to share a single word. If the Bible says the same thing in two slightly different ways, they might suggest that it’s hinting at two different laws. The Talmud records that one rabbi found meaning in every instance of the Hebrew word “et,” which is just a grammatical marker and has no semantic meaning whatsoever. In English terms, this is kind of like opening the King James Bible and finding meaning in the fact that every sentence starts with a capital letter.
Again, just like speedrunners grab onto tiny features of games and turn them into entirely new mechanics, the rabbis of the Talmud grabbed onto features of the Hebrew Bible that often seem unremarkable and built whole new areas of law around them. And also like speedrunners, the rabbis are completely aware that the things they’re building are largely disconnected from the content of the Bible itself, despite the fact that they claim the Bible as a source. Take Shabbat, for example – the day of rest. The Hebrew Bible obviously considers Shabbat important, but it contains very little information about how you’re supposed to observe it. In the hands of the rabbis, however, Shabbat becomes one of the most sophisticated – and frankly, complicated – areas of all of Jewish law. When the rabbis reflect on how much legislation they’ve built on so few verses, they talk about the laws of Shabbat as a “mountain hanging by a hair.” They know how tenuous it all is, but it doesn’t bother them. Like speedrunners, rabbis are excellent at doing a lot with very little. It might not be as extreme as recoding Super Mario World into Pong on the fly, but it’s in the same ballpark.
For both speedrunning and rabbinic Judaism, the transformations that we’re talking about can be pretty radical, to the point where a game designer plopped into a speedrunning community might have no idea what’s going on in their own game. And incredibly, there’s a story in the Talmud where this more or less happens in one of the very first time travel stories ever recorded. The Talmud describes how Moshe – i.e. Moses, the guy who went up to Mount Si and brought down the Torah for the Israelites – was sent more than a thousand years forward in time to see a rabbinic study hall. Moshe takes a seat in the back of the class, but he can’t understand what they’re talking about. He starts getting agitated in the same way that Isaac Newton might get agitated if you dropped him into a class on quantum physics today. Eventually, one of the students raises his hand and asks the teacher, “The things you’re teaching, how exactly do we know this?” To this, the teacher replies, “Oh, all of this was given to Moses at Sinai.” And this finally calms him down, despite the fact that he still has no idea what they’re talking about. In other words, the rabbis know how much they’ve transformed the tradition, but they’re okay with it. They agree that it all connects back to Moshe at Sinai, and that’s enough.
Cultures are made by communities
So, to summarize, rabbinic Judaism and speedrunning – they both like old media. They both understand their source material for the purpose of radically reshaping cultures are made by communities it. They both ascribe meaning to even the smallest details. And for both, their relationship to their source material is simultaneously adversarial and highly respectful.
But there’s one more element the two communities share. And to me, this is the most important one of all. Both speedrunning and rabbinic Judaism are evolving community projects. They rely on collective wisdom to advance, and it is the presence of that collective wisdom which keeps people engaged in the process. If this video is the first time you’re hearing about speedrunning, the communal aspect might not be so intuitive, since all speedrunners are technically competing with each other. But speedrunning wouldn’t exist without it. See, the techniques that speedrunners use don’t emerge out of thin air, and almost none of them are obvious. In order to become a target for speedrunning, the game first needs a community of interested players that care about the game enough to try to break it. By discovering exploits through trial and error, and then sharing them with other players, the speedrunning community develops a body of knowledge that can then be used to shave runtimes down even further. The thrill that comes from expanding this body of knowledge is a key motivator for both speedrunners and speedrunning spectators. There’s just this incredible feeling when you discover that a beloved game hasn’t given up all its secrets.
Without this communal aspect, speedrunning just falls apart. And in fact, the reason that speedrunning is mostly about video games is that the internet makes it so much easier for these communities of devotees to come together to watch each other play. I know this is abstract, so let me give you an example. And this time, let’s move away from Mario and pick a different Nintendo franchise game, [Legend of] Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Breath of the Wild is newer than the other games I’ve mentioned, and it’s computationally a lot more sophisticated, but it was also a breakthrough, because the game’s world is completely open. You can finish missions in any order. This freedom, combined with the beauty of the game’s vast environment, are some of the reasons that Breath of the Wild is now considered to be one of the best games ever made.
The thing is, Breath of the Wild is also particularly easy to exploit. To some degree, this is intentional, since the game’s puzzles are often designed to be solved in more than one way. But Breath of the Wild is also buggy because it’s a big game. The bigger the game, the harder it is to catch all the bugs. Zelda players noticed this immediately, and almost as soon as the game was released, they began finding big and small ways to break it in the service of faster completion times. Today, there are over 100 known glitches. And while the average player takes around 50 hours to finish the game’s main mission, the world record currently sits at under 23 minutes.
The community around this game is so large that I find it slightly overwhelming, but let me give you a taste of how people did this. In addition to the buttons for movement and attack, you can also make your character whistle. This is probably one of the least important mechanisms in the game, but less than a week after launch, players discovered that if you held down the whistle button while running, you could basically run forever without becoming exhausted, significantly speeding up completion times. Two years after that, a Japanese player discovered that carefully placing a pair of bombs behind your character and then exploding one of them would hurl you into the air at astounding speeds, allowing you to skip huge portions of the game. Few years after that, players discovered an even more complicated glitch that allows you to float through the sky without needing to hit the ground at all. These techniques – called whistle sprinting, wind bombing, and BLS sliding, respectively – are now integral parts of the game as it is played in online communities, despite the fact that none of them are supposed to exist.
What I want you to see here is that the community is building something new out of these games. And in the process, it is also rejuvenating itself and keeping the games alive. People tend to get bored of games when they feel like there’s nothing left to see. But speedrunners construct new goals and new obstacles that can dramatically extend their shelf life, transforming a system with fixed mechanics and objectives into something that feels more like a blank canvas.
In fact, with some types of speedruns, you get the sense that they’ve been constructed because players just don’t want to say goodbye to the game – like the people who want to complete Mario 64 without using the jump button, which creates a whole new set of challenges and forces you to see every single course in a new light. One of the greatest examples of this community-driven longevity is the game Tetris, which launched on the NES back in 1989. Because Tetris blocks fall a little faster with each passing level, the best Tetris players ended up being limited not by seeing where the blocks needed to go, but by the time it takes to press the buttons to move the blocks into position.
Over time, experienced players adopted a technique called “hypertapping,” which basically just means you press the same button really fast. And players who adopted this technique quickly started to win Tetris competitions. This became the new optimal way to play the game. And it’s worth noting that the rise of hypertapping also coincided with a lot of younger players getting excited about the game.
And then suddenly, there was a breakthrough. In 2020, a 15-year-old kid named Christopher Martinez, known professionally as Cheese or Cheesefish, had the idea that you could move even faster if you held the button against your finger and then used the fingers of your other hand to drum on the bottom of the controller. Basically pushing the button into your finger rather than your finger into the button. Martinez started practicing this technique on camera in live streams of his Tetris games, and as he gained experience, he started doing pretty well. Soon, other players started picking up on the technique, now called “rolling,” which soon became the new optimal way of completing the game. I should say, by the way, that if you find this stuff as interesting as I do, the channel Summoning Salt has a comprehensive video on Tetris speedruns and many other speedruns, I highly recommend that you check them out.
In 2024, Willis Gibson, known professionally as Blue Scooty, used the rolling technique to do something that wasn’t supposed to be possible. He beat the game. You see, Tetris doesn’t actually have a scripted ending. You play to get a high score, but sooner or later, everyone dies under the weight of overstacked blocks. By continuing to innovate, the Tetris community figured out how to reach levels that no mortal was ever supposed to see, until one day ,Gibson, who was 13 at the time, reached such a high level that the game itself crashed. He had, in essence, gone as far as the game was capable of going.
Now, Gibson himself wasn’t an innovator like Cheesefish. He was just a member of the Tetris community. In a game about stacking blocks, maybe it’s appropriate that the ultimate victory was achieved by a kid standing on the shoulders of giants. And that more or less is what it feels like to be a rabbinic Jew in the 21st century. The central texts of the Jewish tradition are incredibly old – far, far older than almost anything else people still read. But they live on because they exist inside of communities that have taken ownership of them and built up centuries of wisdom around them. Unlike speedrunning, however, the communal energy never peters out, because the process of developing new interpretations ends up creating new texts and ideas for the next generation to own and interpret. There’s no final exploit to uncover, because the process of reinterpretation itself creates new possibilities for reinterpretation.
You can see this very clearly without knowing anything about rabbinic Judaism or even being able to read a single word of Hebrew. What you see on the screen is a page of the Babylonian Talmud – a key work of rabbitic literature completed probably sometime around the sixth century. As you can tell, the text on the page is broken up into different columns and different sizes. The reason for this is that it isn’t a single text. It’s many text written over centuries, with each layer trying to understand the layers that came before it. And actually, there are even more participants in this conversation than there are text boxes – because the core text of the Talmud (that’s the text box in the center) is itself composed of centuries of conversations between rabbis. Many Jewish religious books are formatted like this because learning Torah is rarely about studying just one text. It’s about studying a cloud of interrelated texts developed over centuries, ideally with a study partner so that you can argue about them even more.
To put this another way, each Jewish text is simultaneously a speedrun of a game and a game of its own. And all these texts continue to thrive because they live within communities that celebrate the development of new ideas and the study of old ones.
So, I think you can tell that I really like this way of engaging with this sort of content. And judging by the popularity of speedrunning online, I don’t think I’m alone. But there is one big caveat to this entire discussion, which is that not every speedrunner is looking to massively transform the game into something else entirely. At some level, almost every speedrunner still cares about the games as they were originally designed. Speedrunners might be savages, but they still care about fidelity. Underneath all of those layers of exploits and creative destruction, there’s usually still a point when the goal of the speedrunner and the goal of the developer are aligned – which doesn’t mean that finding this point is simple, and there’s often a lot of disagreement.
Let’s go back to Mario 64 for a second. To get to the final boss, you need to collect at least 70 out of the possible 120 stars. So, predictably, there are speedrun categories for collecting the 70-star minimum and speedruns for collecting the 120-star maximum, both of which require you to basically complete the game on its own terms. But many speedrunners don’t choose either of those options. Instead, they take advantage of a huge exploit and get to the final boss with just 16 stars. And others use an even bigger workaround and get to the final boss with exactly zero stars. All of these are valid ways to speedrun the game. But the reason they exist simultaneously is that people have different ideas about what a satisfying finish to the game ought to look like. The zero-star speedrun times are definitely shorter than the others, but it also means that you’re bypassing 99% of the game, and not every speedrunner wants to do that.
You see these complicated questions about fidelity in religious communities all the time, because they’re constantly trying to figure out the balance between creative reinterpretation and fidelity to the original. If you’ve been part of any religious community, you probably know that these questions can get pretty intense. And when people have different answers, a community can split in two. In speedruns, it’s typical for a speedrunner to compete in multiple speedrunning categories simultaneously. But in religious communities, your opinion on which rules can be circumvented and what you actually need can decide who you hang out with and where you pray. Religion might sometimes function like a game, but that doesn’t mean it’s just entertainment. Sometimes it can be pretty serious.
At this point, I hope I’ve convinced you that the similarities between speedrunning and rabbinic Judaism are more than surface. That both the activities and the communities around them resemble one another in a whole host of ways. And if we stopped here, you could walk away with the idea that these two parts of our culture, which don’t typically show up in the same conversations, actually sit pretty well together. But what we haven’t answered is why. Why would a religious community behave so much like a video game? Or if you want, why would video game culture function so much like religious tradition?
The answer, I think, is that there are many times in life when we’re caught between two competing desires – the desire to fit in and conform against the desire to create and stand out. Creative work is often lonely, but conformity is often dull and stifling. So, what do you do when you want to create, but you also want a place to belong? For many people, maybe even most people, the answer is to try to do both – to create within the context of an existing structure. Being creative this way means that you’re working in a language that other people already understand and appreciate, but it makes it so much more likely that you’ll find a community of like-minded creative thinkers. So, sure, you might sacrifice a little creativity because you’ve confined yourself to an existing format or game or tradition – but you’re also much more likely to find an audience, and your creative work is much more likely to be appreciated.
Both speedrunning and rabbinic Judaism do this because at the heart of both communities is something beloved that people want to make their own. For games, this urge to gain ownership is driven by the fact that games, by their very nature, are always putting you in control. For rabbinic Judaism, the urge to take ownership is driven by a desire to find meaning in the texts that you learned from a very young age, which themselves are full of people constantly taking the mantle of ownership from previous generations of readers. In both cases, the rigid structure of game mechanics or legal codes actually makes it easier to devote your energy to innovating, since your creative moves will be easily legible to others in your community. Rabbinic Judaism isn’t a game, and games aren’t a religion, but both use the rule as a building block to construct meaningful experiences in much the same way that a painter uses paint to construct beautiful paintings.
Does this mean that speedrunning Tetris is just as valuable as a religious tradition? I wouldn’t go that far. Structured experiences come in all shapes and sizes. Some are important and some are trivial, and that’s okay. What I would say, however, is that the relationship between these two things should help people in each community appreciate the other better. Rabbinic Jews who see themselves reflected in speedrunners can understand that gaming communities can provide people with some of the same feelings of belonging and self-expression. That there’s something deeply human in what seems like frivolous activities. Speedrunners who look at observant Jews, on the other hand, can understand that a tradition that may at first seem like it’s all about rule-following has also been joyously subverting itself for thousands of years, and that the relationship between rabbinic Jews and the Bible is not unlike the relationship between speedrunners and the Nintendo Corporation. At the end of the day, both communities want a place to belong, to love something, to have their love validated, and to find meaning in something much bigger than themselves.
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