Hi, I'm very new to the speedrunning community and I'm currently thinking about learning and speedrunning games myself. Tho I have no ideas what games are good for beginners. This is also to make friends that are into the same things as I am.

I am new to speedrunning myself. I have been interested in speedrunning for a while and am constantly watching AGDQ and SGDQ on youtube. I have finally decided to try and run some games myself.

What sort of games are you into

Any game can be good for beginners (Well, except maybe Dark Souls-esque games) as speedrunning is going through a game as fast as you can. At the start you can just try beating the game the intended way, just figuring out little things to go faster, get used to the game you're playing. After that you can start learning the skips and tricks you need to start going faster.

The general consensus for picking a game is "Pick a game you love", though I honestly feel that's terrible advice. Sometimes you'll end up despising the game in the end. Instead, pick a game you can see yourself playing over and over again. If you can sit there for a long time, pick a longer game, if not, then go for something shorter that you can start to grind out instead.

Everyone will also have different opinions on what games you should play, because there are thousands of games here, and everyone plays different ones. Perhaps go and watch some speedruns and find something you're interested in. You could try just looking at random games, speedrun.com/randomgame works for that and will drop you off on a completely random game page, or you could try going to the games page, http://www.speedrun.com/games and using the filters to find games for consoles you own instead.

Honestly, if you just try out a bunch of them - you'll know when you hit the game you want to speedrun.

There's just a connection there, like what Ozotuh said about being willing to play it again and again but I think it's a little more than that. I can't think of a non-melodramatic way to put it but it's like the game "speaks" to you. Or at least that's how it's been for me, barring games I've ran as a joke. Maybe I'm just mental.

For me there's been alot of games I've ran as a joke but actually got really into running them, games like Ninjabread Man and Space Chimps, so a tip from me is you never really know which games you'll like to run, it could be a game you never thought would be fun to run for all you know.

From what I've experienced getting into speed running is that platsformers that are pretty straight forward, somewhat short and not too dependent on glitches work well to start out with.

But maybe that's just me.