Speedrunning is an Emergent Property

Speedrunning culture fascinates me. Speedrunning, where people try to clear games as fast as possible, does not. But the community that has developed around it hit all of the right notes to draw my attention. The videos by Lowest Percent do a great job of highlighting what makes it so special:

Witnessing these discoveries and oddities in speedrunning evoke the same thrills as monumental moments in science. We can never witness the joy of Faraday and his motor, we can never experience playing with magnets for the first time again, but every new game brings opportunities for luck, skill, and determination to bring about these sparks. There is a special joy to discovery and speedrunning sets the stage for this to be brought forth again and again.

I draw these parallels not just for the humor of it. Both of these arise from the discovery of emergent properties - those special moments when the sum has transcended its parts. Everything is an emergent property of some more fundamental principle Mostly.. Temperature is the kinetic energy of a collection of molecules. Rainbows are just the diffraction of light. Weather is applied thermodynamics. What's fascinating is that emergent properties are difficult to predict. Coulomb's Law doesn't clearly lead to circuits. Intermolecular forces don't obviously cause friction. Programmers don't intentionally create glitches. These outcomes are (usually) discovered instead of derived; first principles can imply some grander outcomes but the cause-and-effect of these things are found in reverse.

I need to remind myself that some of the beauty of creating things is the loss of control. You can't plan for every possible outcome of a program, it wouldn't be worth using if you could! In education we are constantly seeking out "teachable moments" but the grand irony is that the best lessons are born in spontaneity. When planning for specific goals, that can be frustrating. Instead of focusing on specific objectives, I should make sure I provide my classes with the resources to make their own discoveries. Incentivize students to try and break the game and find the gaps in the programming. If I can set those pieces in motion, I can create a more fulfilling experience for my students and myself.