When will the novelty arms race end?

I enjoyGames Done Quick, an organisation that raises money for charity (this year is the Prevent Cancer Foundation) by playing games at peak efficiency. If you’ve never watched it before, I recommend loading up theTwitch streamat about 1am and sort of gently dissociating while someone plays an 80s NES game you’ve never heard of. Speaking of, one of the headline acts for this year’s stream - which is running through to this Sunday 21st - was Peanut Butter, a shiba inu trained to press buttons on command, “playing” a NES game that came out in 1985. Although Peanut Butter obeyed his training, some technical issues colluded to snatch a world best time from him - but he raised many thousands of dollars, so good for him.

Peanut Butter is the latest high tide line in the efforts to put more weird and difficult hurdles between you and the controls of games when speedrunning or streaming them. And I must ask: where next? A cat? A snapping turtle biting pressure sensors? A Grey parrot to play a game without any input from you at all? Where will this madness end!?

Peanut Butter seems like a lovely dog, and he and JSR_ are clearly very close, but this is a ladder we started climbing a while ago, when that guyplayed Untitled Goose Game dressed as a goose, and I dunno if I want to keep climbing much past “man spends year getting dog to concentrate”, because we’re already atfish v Elden Ring. At a certain point you get into monkeys and typewriters territory. Humans are not a species above locking dozens of cats in a room with NES controllers and a webcam.

Flippant jokes aside, I do hope that speedrunning dogs don’t become, like, athing. I can genuinely very easily see a world where a bunch of fame-desperate young adults buy shiba inus, and then abandon them when it turns out to be hard work. And look, I realise I’mprobably ontologically evilfor not liking the meme dog stream as much as everyone else. The meme dog stream raised loads of money for charity, and I was a bit sad that Peanut Butter didn’t get his record (an enemy screen-wrapped from the left side to the right side, and appeared right in front of a level exit). Aside from me being a massive curmudgeon about this enchanting piece of internet-targeted doggo whimsy, I do enjoy GDQ as a thing, and you shouldcheck it outanddonateif you’ve a mind to.