Breaking the Map: Speedrunners vs. the Church of Scientology

Leaving the map, stripping the code bare, vibrating under influence. Is the speedrun the new hack against Scientology?

Tuesday evening on Earth. If you’re in Paris, let’s meet next week, on April 28, at Chaos Club.

In video game culture, testing the limits of a world is part of the ritual. Speedrunners - players who try to finish games as quickly as possible by exploiting bugs, shortcuts, and engine flaws - have built entire mythologies around this practice.

When a player goes out of bounds, the world stops holding together. Textures slip. Characters’ bodies fall into absurd poses. Space empties out. The engine no longer knows what to display. This moment fascinates because it reveals a hidden truth: the game world, however immersive it may seem, is only a finite construction, designed for obedient players. The moment someone refuses the intended path, the scenery tears open. The raw code appears.

This desire to step outside the frame no longer belongs only to video games. It is now spilling into real life, in the form of performances filmed, documented, and shared across social media. As if an entire ge…