The industry of people watching other people play video games is serious bucks—and for many people, it’s still seriously confusing. Game-streaming has become a pop-culture line dividing one generation from the next. It separates kids who subscribe to PewDiePie’s YouTube channel from people who have no idea what a “poo-dee-pie” is.

I think of myself somewhere in the middle—a young-ish man who is savvy about game-streaming services like Twitch and Beam but rarely logs into them. Typically, I’d rather play games than watch them being played, but my major exception is classic gaming. Sometimes, I like to load an old, known game being played by a whiz kid, perhaps as background noise while cooking or getting ready for bed. I like the quick-hit fix of digital nostalgia without having to re-learn the tough classics.

More and more over the past few years, I have watched a particular niche of Twitch and YouTube streamers dedicated to these games: speedrunners.