Editing Glitch

The main reason for a glitch existing is that the player created a specific situation where the game does not know exactly what to do, resulting in unusual behavior. Glitches were either never encountered during a game's testing, or were simply not addressed before a game officially released. The larger and more complex a game is, the more likely glitches are to exist, simply due to the increased difficulty in testing every possible situation and finding what part of the source code is causing the problem. Glitches are not to be confused with [[exploit]]s, which involve multiple gameplay elements working as intended, yet yielding unintended results. Glitches are the game specifically not working as intended.

 

By definition, glitches can cause basically anything to happen. The effects that glitches cause can vary. Glitches can be harmful, with such side effects as freezing the game, causing a level to be unplayable, or ruining the experience of others if a game has multiplayer. Not all glitches, however, have negative side effects; some are ultimately harmless and sometimes humorous, like altering character models or forcing prompts to trigger at weird times, while others can even allow players to access content they were never supposed to, like a [[Debug menu]] or swapping to non-playable characters. Depending on the game, some glitches are considered a net positive, such as glitches that expand gameplay options and act as roundabout quality of life improvements. Content that mostly work as intended but have strange characteristics are usually called “jank” (i.e. Mario’s dash attack in ''Smash 4'' stage spikes opponents on the ledge, or Pokémon Stadium’s odd collision detection during the Fire transformation).

The subsect of the ''Smash'' [[community]] that partakes in [[speedrun]]ing takes a different approach to handling glitches. Typically, the any% category allows any and all glitches while the glitchless category does not allow any. That being said, a glitch is sometimes discovered that cuts down so much time that it completely invalidates all runs that came before. In order to prevent said previous runs from falling into obscurity, a branch of the any% category is often created that disallows this newfound glitch and potentially others. That way, the main any% category can continue to innovate while those that want to continue the "traditional" way still have the option to develop an insular community. There are some extreme examples, such as the [[pause glitch]] in the original ''Super Smash Bros.'', that are discouraged from use due to being considered degenerate to the integrity of the speedrunning community and runs that utilize them are often not recognized on leaderboards when submitted.