A comment came up in my direction this past week that I felt like I need to refute: “you need to stream on Twitch to do well at speedrunning”. This response was troubling as it came from someone that the speedrunning community needs more of: women.

Women and non-men are less common participants in the speedrunning world. There are a lot of reasons for this, but a reason is that streaming can be daunting. This may be due to concerns about safety, the cost of streaming itself, or just having little to no desire to have a public face when engaging in the hobby. However, this should not be a limiting factor and there are a lot of options to get in on speedrunning and I want to write about them here.

Firstly, you can speedrun a video game even if you have a loose interest in it. Getting a world record should never be your goal. I enjoy speedrunning Super Mario World when I can and I am only somewhere in the 700-800th place range in the category I like to run. My goal is to beat my last best time and keep getting better than what I did before. Everyone else is just people I am passing on my own journey.

This attitude I feel is healthy and important. Nobody should have solely “compete” with other speedrunners, but instead just best themselves. It’s no different than picking up an exercise routine and besting your 10 KM runs.

Secondly, streaming gear is expensive but you don’t have to go all out on recording your runs. If you’re streaming a game that is emulated or running on your personal computer, you don’t have to do much other than record your game locally using just OBS. And yeah. You only have to record your speedrun if you want to track it on a website like [Speedrun.com](https://web.archive.org/web/20250102001603mp_/https://www.speedrun.com–most if not all of the leaderboards require you to record the run in its entirety. If you just want to use a tool like LiveSplit to just time it and never record it, then so be it!

If you’re dealing with a console that you wish to record, you have the option to just use your laptop’s webcam or your cell phone! Pointing a camera at a screen and playing the game the most kick butt way you know how is perfectly valid. Should you wish to make a better recording than whatever your camera outputs, capture options are out there that won’t break US$50. It doesn’t need to be expensive or high-quality to make it useful.

I have one argument against streaming speedrunning: it’s distracting to interact with anyone watching you. When you stream on Twitch, you are for a lack of a better way of describing it an entertainer–that is what the Canada Revenue Agency claims I am at least. Speedrunning offline is perfectly fine and I want to encourage you to do it even if you want to keep it low-key!

Speedrunning is for all.