Gotta Go Fast
Ever since I have been very interested in video games, my family and most of my friends have largely thought I've been wasting my time, mindlessly clicking buttons and undergoing no personal growth of any kind. The kind of arguments they might use seem especially applicable to speedrunning, i.e. trying to complete a game as fast as possible, while recording yourself and then competing for leaderboard times.Firstly, I think it's difficult, if not impossible, to enjoy speedrunning if you do not enjoy video games in general. While there are a handful of games I will watch runs of that I have never played before, but the ones I am really excited about are usually those that I have put a decent number of hours into myself. Having an idea of how difficult it is to achieve what the runner is doing seemingly effortlessly means the watcher can appreciate the skill of the runner to a higher degree. That is half the enjoyment of speedrunning in my opinion - the runners have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours becoming insanely skilled in their particular field - it just so happens that field is Super Mario 64.
Aside from the runners' skill, their personalities often make runs great. With a growing number of "professional" speedrunners being full-time streamers on twitch.tv, they have moved out of their mom's basement and into the spotlight as funny, informative and entertaining. That's not even including the huge potential for cringe, the pop offs, or the singing.
The games themselves are often the stars of the show, usually for being "super broken". Speedrunning has a way of completely deconstructing games, showing off glitches, bug abuse, movement tech and a whole host of "features" the dev team surely didn't intend. The dedication put into routing games is huge, and a large part of routing is essentially smashing head-first into every pixel of wall in the game to see if anything different happens. With older games, even layman can have some kind of insight into how the game works when they watch speedruns - for example, someone recently deconstructed the entire code of the 1980 Atari game, Dragster, and put it into a spreadsheet so he could calculate the fastest time possible and optimum strategy.
Having tried to somewhat justify my opinion on speedrunning, I don't know if I would be compelled by my own arguments. It is still very niche, very nerdy, and doesn't contribute to society all that much. But I still love it, so I guess none of that really matters.