I personally don't speedrun much I'm more of a glitch/trick hunter.
When I do speedrun it's because I think a game with limits is boring...
If a games limits what you can do then you break those limit and create a whole new style of gameplay for that game almost. But only you can do this, the games isn't gonna hand out unintentional mechanics, you need to find them.
Personnaly, i speedrun mostly because i like the games i take care of. For Initial D, it's mostly because of that.
For Boktai, that's a different story, i love the boktai games, but at the same time the boktai community has been dead for decades now, and i'd like that to change. I'm hoping it will, so i try to route the game correclty and not make it too complicated at the same time, in hope peoples join.
But yeah, at the same time, for me, games were always a part of the culture, and i think that's why i'm that interested in watching mostly, i like what i see, the games, the communities (even if sometimes they're... well, shit), and most of all, the passion.
I started speedrunning a month ago and I choose a game I like and enjoy playing, so on first it is the fun of it. My current other reason for speedrunning this game is, I wanna see how far I can go and where I hit my limits to a point that I can't progress any further and is the end of the line. I'm still very inconsistent and I wanna train it this way to be a consistent runner of that game and have well thought way of beating it.
I don't really know why i speedrun, i like it but i never found any game that made me wanting to get better at running it, i continue to search every day, if anyone have ideas of games that are original to run : http://www.twitch.tv/janorio/profile (mp me). I also like routing and finding glitches, that's why i don't like that much speedrunning a game that is already optimized at his better potential.
I started speedrunning more or less because of the way I play games and because I enjoy watching speedruns. I already tried to skip parts of different games when I still was a child around 10 years old. Usually that I tried to jump across distances you're not ment to, or tried different other things. ^^
I started speedrunning on Portal, because I could b-hop to go very fast, and it was fun. Then I speedrunned Mass Effect because I love the game so hard. Right now, I'm speedrunning Toren because the game is relatively short and it's very enjoyable to watch and play !
I love routing, and the community is very friendly and chill. The competitive aspect really brings back a lot of good memories of Pokemon before the community got all e-sports toxic.
If speedrunning ever gets that bad, I'm posting a challenge run for "chug a bottle of draino".
...remember the SRL category for "2L of coke" on a funnier note? That was so fucking stupid.