Key points:
- Gaming “speedrunners” can help experts better understand software by exploiting the same bugs they use to navigate retro video games.
- Researchers analyzed 237 known glitches within the Super Mario games to see whether the bugs they use are the same ones other software gets hacked with.
- They identified seven new categories of weakness previously unspecified.
Video gamers who exploit glitches in games can help experts better understand buggy software, according to a new study out of the University of Bristol. Known as “speedrunners,” these gamers can complete games quickly by working out their malfunctions.
To understand the sorts of glitches speedrunners exploit, researchers examined four of the earliest Super Mario platforming games—Super Mario Bros (1985), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988), Super Mario World (1990) and Super Mario 64 (1996). While these games are old, they are still competitively run by speedrunners. The games are well also well understood, having been studied by speedrunners for decades, ensuring that there are large numbers of well-researched glitches for analysis. Currently, the world record time for conquering Super Mario World is an incredible 41 seconds.
The Bristol team set out to understand 237 known glitches within the games.
“By studying speedrunners’ glitches we can better understand how they do it and whether the bugs they use are the same ones other software gets hacked with. It turns out the speedrunners have some tricks that we didn’t know about before,” said study author Joseph Hallett from Bristol’s School of Computer Science.
The team analyzed existing software weaknesses (CWE)—a qualitative research method to help categorize complex phenomena. The Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) is a category system for hardware and software weaknesses and vulnerabilities. They identified seven new categories of weakness previously unspecified.
“We found that some of the glitches speedrunners use don’t have neat categorizations in existing software defect taxonomies and that there may be new kinds of bugs to look for in more general software,” said Hallett.
Now, the team is moving on to studying Pokémon video games.