I think that's the question at the center of all my interest in speedrunning. I've been watching a lot of different speedgames lately (mostly thanks to JacoboTheChocobo running a lot of games recently), and I've been surprised by how equal my interest seems to be in all of them. And these aren't just different games; these are totally different genres. 3D platformers. Turn based RPGs. A football game for the NES. You name it, I will probably think it has an interesting speedrun. And I think that all just comes back to this question I keep asking. "What does it mean to be good at this?"
People get into and stay into speedrunning for a lot of different reasons. All of these reasons are valid. In fact, most people have several reasons for it. This is something I think about a lot. I love talking to people about what motivates them in this hobby, because it tells me a lot about them, about what they value.
I often think of myself as somebody who enjoys enjoying things. When I'm watching a movie that mostly isn't very good, I try my best to think about what it's doing well. Not in some effort to be "fair" to the movie, but because it fills me with happiness to appreciate good choices someone made. When the acting feels unnatural, and the dialogue is clunky, but this one shot is just brilliant and makes a scene or even just a single line work so well, then that shot is what I'll be thinking about days later. Maybe the project as a whole didn't come together great, but someone working on it had a moment of great creativity, or got a chance to show off their mastery of their craft. And when I appreciate those bits of greatness and beauty, I feel the same sense of joy that I get from other great works of art. If art is an attempt by an artist to communicate a feeling they had, then I want to open my ears to hear them, and in some sense, to relate to them.
But this extends beyond the arts! People express themselves in all kinds of ways. When someone chooses to master a skill, it's because they see something valuable in that, and I want to see that something too. I don't care much about being the best at things, but it's a lot easier to appreciate the effort, the practice, the passion that someone has for something when I understand a little bit about it myself. But to really understand a skill, the first question I need to answer is "What does it mean to be good at this?"
What are the optimizations that people need to practice to play a video game quickly? What are the details someone is looking for when trying to make a trick work? Questions like these are also what get me excited about other hobbies too. This is what got me interested in speedcubing. This is what got me so invested in competitive Scrabble! People put so much effort into their passions. My goal is just to appreciate that effort as much as I can.