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Comment by Almondsetat | Hacker News Reader

some speedrunners that compete in categories where glitches are allowed and who find the bugs themselves can be labeled hackers.

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It's fairly rare to see people consistently find glitches across games, only distorsion2 comes to mind.

Nope. I completely disagree.

Unless you are using tools and rigorous methods you are just playing around. Just because most games are all broken in easily predictable ways doesn't mean every new game creates a hacker.

It's more correct to say "speedrunners show that almost all game developers are bad at software engineering".

sometimes good at creating fun games, but quick to say "you are holding it wrong" when you breath on the thing and it blows up.

I think it’s a harsh interpretation to say they’re bad because a determined hacker can break their game. Games aren’t security critical software, so they’re not going to get the level of investment needed to prevent this kind of thing that, in practice, hurts nobody.

That’s to say nothing of exploits that can only be used by TAS software. That’s like saying my car is a piece of shit because it’ll not survive being driven into a volcano.

Hacking is playing around, that's what hackers will tell you. You are conflating hacking with penetration testing or "formal" disciplines like that

Even ignoring this weird definition of a "hacker", you've shown how little you know about how many exploits in games are found. They often involve stepping through the assembly of the game to understand how a glitch works and how to use it in a useful way. Not just "screw around in a game until you suddenly discover a useful trick"

I'd say that's the rarer approach, though. Yes, some arbitrary-code-execution strats go that far, but by far most glitches used in speedrunning are found by either creative use of game mechanics, just screwing around in the game, or by accident (there are a few general techniques that can apply, e.g. wedging something into a corner and spamming buttons is likely to result in a clip or some kind of high-speed ejection, due to the general weaknesses of physics engines). Only a few, older, very popular games get taken apart to the degree you describe. Watch a few GDQ runs, and see how many times the runner goes "we have no idea why that works, but it does".

> using tools and rigorous methods

Lots of speedrun strategies require surprisingly sophisticated tools. People will decompile/disassemble code to figure out what is going on. They'll run the game in an emulator and peek at memory values to figure out how the game works and how to manipulate it. They'll use these tools to set up their game state so that there's a sequence of bytes in RAM, then cause program execution to jump to these bytes, to run arbitrary code execution.

Here's a video of a speedrunner explaining some of the things he did to get two arbitrary code executions working together to speedrun Super Mario All-Stars + Super Mario World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MbaZY2DOW0 (it's about 15 minutes)

Here's the same runner using one of those arbitrary code executions to inject Flappy Bird into Super Mario World instead of just warping to end credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0 (it's about 6 minutes)

He didn't get to that point just by random pressing buttons until something interesting happened. He got to that point because he understands the Super Mario World memory layout well enough to manipulate it and execute the instructions that he chooses for it. That's vulnerability research any way you want to slice it.

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