Speedrunners is one of the only online game I enjoyed playing without my friends. And I kept playing it for hours. For a huge amount of hours. I usually don't do that. That's not how I do games and certainly not how I do online games.
But Speedrunners is weird. Speedrunners is special. It's not just the gameplay I like. There's something about how this game is played online. And I don't think the people who play speedrunners are different to players I encountered in other online games eithers. The game is just... Special.
Maybe I should start from the beggining: Speedrunners is a competitive racing game where up to 4 cute characters run, grapple and use weapons against each others. You need to get as much speed as you can to kill others. When someone is out of the screen, they die (Kind of like micromachine or mashed, but by foot).
Last one standing get a points. When someone get 3 points, they win the game.
The one important rule is "stay on screen".
In other words: it's a really competitive game, where you have to be more skilled than others in order to win, but can also use items to stop your opponents from winning.
As every competitive game, Speedrunners has both a classic and a ranked mode. In ranked mode, you get experience points for every opponent that had fewer points than you during the game. But you also lose experience points for every opponent that had more points than you.
This makes it very important to win, because if you don't win a single point in a game, you'll be likely to loose the experienced you got from the last 3 games. Once again, very competitive. Classic.
All of this is how the game works. How it should work.
But in fact. Player are just... Weird ?
They often wait for each others, in order not to make the other die by getting our of screen.
They often encourrage each other, while they are in competition with the people they're encourraging.
Even the fact that they actually use the chat to talk is not that common. From my experience on other games: usually this is used just to trashtalk and not to really communicate with others.
Maybe the game just has a great community. Maybe for some reasons it gathers people who has interrests in being kind to others. Or maybe it's the game that encourrages such behaviors without having the players noticing.
Kitty, do it ! ... I did :3
The way the game works encourage the player to use the text-chat a lot.
Because it's elimination-based, you're often a few dozen of seconds not playing before the next match begins. Too short to take a break and have a snack, but long enough to write some stuff to people who are Still fighting each others. Might as well encourage people. The game is really pleasant to watch, and when someone dies, the game speeds up and the screen is getting smaller, making the game super full of tensions and suspense, so you actually want to know what's happening on screen.
But this is not enough. Usually, when they die and have nothing to do but to talk, people just insult the people responsible for their death.
But in speedrunners, you often die because of yourself, there is weapon, but they'll slow you down more often than they'll kill you. You're the one to blame, you're not going fast enough.
But I've seen this kind of configurations before and player were still usually stupid and mean. Especially in ranked modes.
In speedrunners, the game ends when someone won 3 match in a game. And you get more rank-points if you beat a lot of players. You loose rank-points if lots of players beat you.
So you always have interrest in having a specific person win. If everybody has 0 points and someone has 2 out of 3 points, maybe you want this player to win the whole game because that way, there will just be one player making you lose rank-points, while, if somebody manage to win, you know that you won't win a match and the super good player will win the game anyway. Or the opposite. Maybe you want someone else to win because that means the game is not ended yet and you can still win 3 times in a row and win the game !
You always have interrest in betting that someone will win or lose. So you encourage players.
And in order to encourage players, you need to call them. In most game you'll be doing that (actually you won't because online-games encourage you to trashtalk instead) by calling people by their pseudonyms.
In speedrunners, every player plays a super cute character that is super recognisable and easy to name.
So often, you'll end up saying "go red kitty, go !"
or "you can catch them back chicken-man !", or even "fireguy gogogogo". And not "go win @regisXX_supegamer_xx".
Having these cute characters make it both easier to name the people you want to encourage, and make the encouragement feel even better. It gives a positive vibe to the community. It makes player closer to each other by creating special nicknames for each others and feel like they did something special when they used the text-chat, while actually most people use the same sentenses and nicknames. This is even more meaningful in a game where only 4 players compete with each others, making them close already, with recognisable players and meaningful competition with a "real human being".
Actually this whole thing I'm talking about changed a little with the years and now the community is getting smaller and there's not a lot of new players. Players in rank-mode are often taking things seriously. But I sometime find someone who waits for me to make it possible for me to win a match even if that's not in their interrest, just because the mood of the game has been all kind and cute, and because I encouraged them, because it's only the two of us playing, etc.
And it feels good.
Meow.
This cute buisness man is running toward my direction while I respond to them. (going in the right direction would make them win.)