Gamers who so called glitches Using this to their advantage can help software engineers better understand and improve bugs in software.
No matter how hard developers try to design their games perfectly, some errors always creep in, such as ‘bugs’ or ‘glitches’ (for the difference: see box). So it may be that during a round Mario Kart doesn’t get hit by a flying turtle shell, but the game thinks so. Or bow politely to the hippogriff Highwing Hogwarts Lecagy, and then the mythical creature suddenly disappeared. For most game enthusiasts, these types of situations are annoying or inconvenient, but avid gamers can control errors in the program codes.
Players who specialize in ‘speed runs’ in particular make use of this. People who make it a sport to complete a video game as quickly as possible. Speedrunners perfect this by planning the game’s route, practicing tricks, and sometimes using glitches that have accidentally entered the game. And that’s not just fun for themselves: the knowledge and skills of speedrunners can also be valuable to software engineers who track down and fix bugs. That’s what students of the University of Bristol.
Super Mario
They are based on an analysis of 237 known glitches in four of the first Mario platform games: Super Mario Bros (1985), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988), Super Mario World (1990) and Super Mario 64 (1996). These platform games all have roughly the same design: an obstacle course with different platforms, bad guys, ‘powerups’ and coins that the Italian plumber Mario must struggle through to save Princess Peach.
Bug or glitch?
Bugs and glitches both refer to errors in a program, but there is a difference. A bug is an error in software that can lead to crashes, unexpected results, or other problems. A glitch, on the other hand, is a temporary glitch or error in the system. This can be caused by hardware problems, software errors or external factors such as power outages or network disruptions. Glitches are often short-lived and disappear automatically or after a system restart. In practice, it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between a bug and a glitch. The terms are therefore often used interchangeably. The most noticeable difference is that bugs are usually called over and over again by following the same steps, while glitches are a lot more unpredictable and can occur randomly.
Old games
Although the games examined are relatively old, they are still enthusiastically played by speedrunners and new records are still being set. For example, the world record time for Super Mario World is 41 (!) seconds. To achieve this, the games must have been extensively researched – which makes the games extremely suitable for research, the students say. Precisely because speedrunners have been able to delve into it for decades.
Unknown bugs
And software developers can learn something from this, the research shows. “It turns out that the speedrunners have some tricks we didn’t know about,” says Dr. Joseph Hallett of the Bristol School of Computer Science. The researchers categorized various weaknesses of the games to determine whether they correspond to the bugs that are also exploited in conventional software. It showed that some of the glitches used by speedrunners do not yet have existing classifications in the software defect taxonomies. That also suggests that there are types of bugs that still need to be looked for in more general software.
The interest in this knowledge among gamers is important, Hallet believes. “The work of the speedrunners was not really taken seriously by the academic world before. But by studying speedrunners’ glitches, we can better understand how they do it and whether the bugs they use are the same ones used to hack other software.” The team is now studying Pokémon video games to see if gamers have tricks here that developers don’t yet know about.
