You’ve probably seen it before: a streamer pulls out MS Paint to try and create a little illustration, usually as a simple visual aid or to help tell a story. These drawings are often simple, rough, unrefined, but they’re not trying to be anything else. These kinds of drawings were the inspiration for a new multi-week Minecraft speedrunning event: SKILL ISSUE.
AntIsGazing, or AnAntMakingArt on X, originally put their idea out to the community June first of this year via a tweet. They were inspired to unite two sides of the MCSR community, the artists and the high level runners, and make them teach each other their skills. Ant had never run an event like this before, but the more experienced event organiser Sivianox offered to help make it happen, together with Rosebeams.
“In general I really enjoy producing events, and Ant has been a friend of mine for about a year now, so when I saw their tweet I wanted to work with them. The idea sounded super fun to do,” Sivianox tells us.
While SKILL ISSUE is conceptually similar to events like Midoffs, it is structured more closely to competition TV shows like Cupcake Wars or Fashion Runway, which use a weekly challenge format.
“You’re following the same core cast of people from week to week, focusing on specific disciplines or skill areas. We thought that would be a lot better for a low comp, chill event,” Ant tells us.
The format allows the participants to put a lot of time into teaching their skills and learning new ones, but also spreads their practice out over time rather than having to commit dozens of hours to the event in a single week. “Even though it looks like a longer time commitment, one of the main reasons I wanted it to be a long-lasting competition is so that there’s less pressure on the day-to-day basis.”
In the first week, the paired up speedrunners and artists were asked to attempt to draw or speedrun respectively without any training or instruction from their teammate at all. “It was a lot of cringe failure all around,” Ant tells us. “Everybody was terrible. I think one artist made it into the stronghold, and a lot of the speedrunners’ art was very simple”.
Since then everyone has made incredible improvements. “Even with just two weeks worth of coaching, the speedrunners can now do 3D forms, have figures that are posed, and have actual expressions. It’s like night and day,” Ant says. The artists also showed a lot of improvement in their speedrunning. “You could just see they were so much more confident in their movements. It’s the coolest thing just watching them get better.”
While the hope is that by the end of SKILL ISSUE the speedrunners have learned how to draw and the artists have learned how to speedrun, the mission of the event was never to create prodigy artists or speedrunners out of thin air; it was to unite the community. “I’m hosting this event to show people the love of art, community, and learning. Despite all the stress, it is achieving that goal.” Ant tells us.
Most of the participants have found a lot of joy in this event. “I swear Fenniq and Yuuji were in VC almost every night practicing stuff. Hunnypuffs and JackoWacko are always just goofing off in their team chat. They’re both having so much fun and feeding off of each others’ energy.”
“MCSR is really unique compared to other speed games because it has this secondary sphere of content creators, some of whom have never touched Minecraft in their lives,” Ant says. With this they refer to the content creators that make for example art or funny posts about what others have put out via streams or videos, but who don’t stream or make videos about Minecraft speedrunning themselves.
Sometimes those two parts of the community can feel disconnected, but they are both essential for the community as a whole to exist. SKILL ISSUE was created in the hopes of closing the perceived divide between different parts of the community, even if it was just a little. Ant likened the relationship to the cardiovascular system: “The speedrunners are the blood of the community, and the artists are the heart that’s keeping it pumping”.
Besides the artistic side of the community, Ant wanted to highlight as many people as possible when making SKILL ISSUE. “I think it gets too easy to forget that for every one streamer, there are fifteen to twenty people doing invisible work behind the scenes, making that stream possible. A lot of those people are queer, a lot of those people are minorities in some way. They’re working in volunteer positions because they care about it. That’s so special and I want to do my part to celebrate all of that work.”
Some of these volunteer positions are of a more advisory style. “Getting to be in the booth with people like DesktopFolder during week zero was a good way of learning how to cast because you’re just doing it alongside somebody who’s really good at it. I’d never done commentary before. I had done adjacent things,like D&D games and theater, but live commentary and hosting an online event was very new.” Ant explains.
Many of the other casters are also new to the task, since each week a new speedrunner and artist are brought in to commentate the challenges and many of them have little to no experience. They make it work with help from the community, like from Rosebeams, who commentates for the MCSR Ranked playoffs games, and Fenniq, who is a participant in SKILL ISSUE as well as a commentator for several MCSR tournaments.
One of the past challenges was to draw an important moment from MCSR history. Some of the speedrunners decided to send their art to the person from the moment that inspired the work.
“I think that’s my favorite part about being an artist in MCSR,” Ant says. “The fact that you’re not just putting art out into the void. You are doing something creative and then basically giving it as a gift to somebody who did something meaningful for you. I’m so happy that the speedrunners are getting to be a part of that and the artists are getting to be on the giving end of that dynamic.”
SKILL ISSUE will be live again for its sixth and last week this Saturday at 3pm EST. Artists will be attempting a full run for the first time since week 0, and the speedrunners will be doing art of the other teams. If you don’t want to miss it, tune in on Sivianox’s twitch channel.
About The Author
