[Hakulyte]

I think some clarification should be done in terms of how "StepMania" itself can be considered a serious contender as a speedrunning game.
I know it was a showcase to present the game, but I think it's worth taking a look at "how things work" and "how do we explain" how StepMania would fit in the world of speedrunnning.
Yes, I am writing this in hope it generates some discussion about actually making AGDQ staff consider this game just as seriously as any other game, not as a showcase, but a speedrun game. (let me dream~)

1. StepMania is the game, but it's not a game by itself.
StepMania is a program in which you can add songs and play them in it, you can't look at StepMania itself and say "I'm going to try to beat this game under 2 hours" by example.
(Of course you can technically play 3 songs and reach credits, but I think we can all agree that this doesn't mean much and is not worth "speedrunning".)

2. Each songs added in StepMania individually can be interpreted as a game.
StepMania is a fairly confusing game for the general user, I'm not even talking about gameplay, but about how the rules work.
I don't think there's anything official anywhere, but I think it's safe to say that in the context of speedrunning/playing "officially" etc.

- Every songs played should be on J4/L4
- The max score is AAAA.
- You can't use the max score as a goal on every songs because some songs will never be quadded which means that the best benchmark to look at is the scores done by the best players.
- World Records are a good example of songs that have been "optimized" which could be in theory be considered "speedruns".

3. StepMania can actually be interpreted as a game where players fight to reach a goal as fast as possible (!)
Don't get me wrong, you don't "speedrun" songs in StepMania, you "optimize" songs in StepMania.

- If MinaciousGrace AA a song on 1.5x rate and Staiain AA the same song on 1.5x rate, they're equally fast because the time = the duration of the song.
- If one of the two manage to AA the song on 1.6x rate, then one of the two somehow managed to improve "the best possible total time". (note that I'm just using "AA" as a "goal example")
- Yet, technically speaking for us, I believe it would make no sense to post scores based on total time of the song and the scores should obviously be treated with the scoring instead of the time. Ironically, I think it's a new dimension worth taking into account.

4. Modifiers have a direct impact on the game mechanic and can make it dramatically easier or harder. A very good and interesting showcase of this is EtienneSM's St.Scarhand split play at AGDQ. This is "in my opinion" what a normal showcase should be about. What Staiain did is more an example of how "speedruns" should work if they were even implemented for StepMania in the first place.

5. I believe we should try to not use "dump files" in a competitive environment, but rather try to make genuinely really hard songs that follows the notes. Since this was a showcase, I believe it was a good call, but if we were to ever try to approach this game as "speedruns", we should try to use songs that are on-sync with the notes. I'm only mentioning this because I've seen some negative feedback about dumps even though they're fun and I can see why the general audience would find these files very strange from their perspective. Basically, it's going against the spirit of rhythm games in general and I'm not sure it's the greatest idea for the future. Don't get me wrong, HEYAAYEAH was hilarious and I had a good time watching it.

6. I've seen people post in twitch chat things such as "Ruined/Reset" the moment they saw a great or a miss and it made me think that even though these guys were obviously joking, Stepmania is really not that different in that regard from other video games. I can't count the amount of times I restarted a song because I got "that great", "that miss", "that choke", you name it.

tl;dr if you think about it seriously, StepMania actually could have it's place as a speedrunning game, we just need to define properly how everything works and set an example with it.

I'm not the best for expressing this whole idea, but I think someone should be able to make some sense out of it.