A Case of the Post-GDQ Blues

Every time a Games Done Quick (AGDQ/SGDQ) event comes to a close, I feel a certain kind of melancholic sadness that reminds me of the end of summer break as a schoolkid. The GDQ events are week-long marathon showcases of video game speedruns, raising millions of dollars for charity each event. It’s a celebration of video games, philanthropy, and niche online communities coming together in real life for uniquely special video gaming moments.

It’s a wonderful time that I look forward to each year, but on the final day of each event, I start to feel sad and bummed out. Even though I miss dozens of runs each event, providing me with more speedruns to watch after it ends, I’m still sad that the “event” is over. The act of donating to charity, which should (and does) make me feel good, isn’t enough to perk me up. This feeling of melancholy ultimately stems from a vain wish that these events could go on forever. 

Why Games Done Quick Events Are Important to Me

The two main Games Done Quick events each year have served as informal holidays for the past few years in my life. I spent the night at Epilogue streamer ExKreations’ house a couple years ago, where he left the event running on his television for the entire week. In the middle of the night, I would wake up and hear unfamiliar game soundtracks and goofy commentary. At one point, I lay awake in his living room, listening as the donation total rose to $1 Million for charity. That insomniac moment created an indelible impression on me that the Games Done Quick events were a formidable presence for good in the gaming world. 

I often find myself in conversations  with people who think video games are a childish waste of time. Games Done Quick events are one of my favorite counterexamples to that misconception. Even if you nullify the question of the artistic, educational, and storytelling capacities of specific video games themselves, there is an undeniable altruism embedded into Games Done Quick events that only can be channeled through video games. 

Every so often, video games are dragged by the chariot through the news regarding anti-social behavior in young people, and once again, Games Done Quick events serve as magnificently helpful antidotes to that idea. Games Done Quick also brings together tons of people into one convention, many who know each other online but are meeting for the first time, and many who have been returning to these events for ten years. The camaraderie demonstrated at the events themselves, as well as online in the Twitch chat, is irrefutably positive and relievingly wholesome. Video games and charitable causes are evidently a fertile intersection for communities to build.

What Makes Games Done Quick Events Exciting

Part of what makes Games Done Quick events exciting is the live, unpredictable nature of the event itself. The event is masterfully run by a team who somehow keeps a million moving parts (i.e. audio/visual engineering, furniture movement, game setup, etc.) running smoothly together over the course of an entire week. That being said, there are inevitable technical problems and runner mistakes made over the course of the event – and the event must go on. Unfortunately, the schedule of the event is so tight that some runs may be cut off, especially if a competing speedrunner fell behind in a race and goes over the estimated time. Conversely, I’ve seen world records beaten in real time during a GDQ stream. Whatever the outcome, the “up in the air” nature to each run’s potential is captivating even for games I don’t care too much about. 

On top of the already above-average entertainment value that each Games Done Quick provides annually, every year there are one or two runs that are outstandingly fun or impressive. One of my favorite runs was completed by a Tool-Assisted Speedrunning Bot (TASBot), zipping through Celeste and collecting all red berries in under 44 minutes – a task that I haven’t even been able to complete as a human, regardless of time. Coincidentally, in the same event, another one of my favorites was the Super Mario World blind relay race by One Tile Men and Lunar Magicians in 54 minutes, in which two speedrunning teams rotated around a controller for an hour.

Each event stays true to some classic games that appear each year with familiarity, garnering a kind of campy nostalgia into them due to the speedrunning community’s history. And each event, new games are added into the lineup that have never appeared before. What makes this distinction special is that those “new games” aren’t always new in terms of release year. This January’s AGDQ event featured a game on the final day called Kuru Kuru Kururin, a Gameboy Advance game that was released in 2001. It had never appeared in a Games Done Quick event before. This event also featured 2019 hits like Control and Untitled Goose Game, which were showcased for the first time as well, and will certainly evolve speedrun routes in future events. The openness and diversity of titles that each Games Done Quick event displays is always a delight.

My Favorite GDQ Live Moments

My favorite moments of Games Done Quick events, however, are when charity donations influence the event itself. Certain speedrun games are locked behind donation milestones that must be met in order for that game to be showcased. Certain tricks are only shown off if a specific rolling donation milestone is hit before the run ends. Characters, save files, and so on can be named. Endings can be chosen. There are so many cool ways that the Games Done Quick runners incentivize people to open their wallets for a good cause. 

I love Games Done Quick events with all my heart. When it’s GDQ season, time stops. I hope to attend an event of theirs in the near future. I might even feel compelled to submit a run to their event one day – though the only games I’ve ever tried to speedrun are Jak and Daxter and Untitled Goose Game, and I’m not very impressive in either category. I would love to dedicate a week of my life to staying in a hotel with a bunch of passionate people who love games as much as I do, celebrating some of the most impressive and competitive elements in contemporary gaming communities. 

The Post-GDQ Blues

But every time I sit at home, watching the lineup slowly come to a close on the final day of the Games Done Quick event, I start to feel a little like I’m mourning. There’s a phenomenon that some of my close friends trade around as “post-GDQ blues,” kind of like the Sunday blues, where the afternoon sun reminds you that you have to return to work the following day. This feeling is always a reminder of how special these events are, how important they are to both the gaming community and those on the receiving end of the charitable donations. Somehow this feeling always gets my wallet open one final time.

When I started to feel this year’s post-GDQ blues, I decided to celebrate the event by writing this article rather than worry about how soon the event is ending. When I’m feeling down in the future, wishing this event would go on, I’ll translate my feeling of post-GDQ blues into a mnemonic resolution that no matter where I am in life at the moment, I’ll remember this: Whether through video games or through charity, I can contribute more than I currently am to make the world a better place.

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