Nature has laws, society has laws as well. They are necessary bounds for human actions, intended to prevent any undesirable ones, to keep society as healthy as possible.
But the more tight is this law, the more will to be above it raises in a human soul. And the dramatism is that some laws weren't devised to make life better, but are just a prejudice in people's heads, a superstition. So all such quasi laws do is banning some random act for the sake of itself, not to make life more interesting.
Thus, one shall be wise enough to divide these two categories, not mixing clever laws and blind believes.
The major quality of a human nature is a will to reach something unreachable, to jump over expactations, to push all possible limits. Human is always unsatisfied with what he has. Yet he isn't supposed to be perfect either. But this imperfectness just strengthens his will to reach it. Eternal yearning, impossible to satisfy totally, but not less strong because of that. Sometimes we can't even explain the exact thing we seek, but an inexplicable feeling keeps gnawing our hart and forces to PUSH THE LIMITS.
Some people are too much wallowed in their weird superstitions. They are too cold and pragmatic. They can't dream, can't create their own reality in their heads and fill it with unique stirits that they own exclusively. Because they have NO spirit to fill their life with, it's completely sterile. Unfortunately, as they still have a will to do something unusual in their life, they spend their strength on penetration of their superstitions into seciety, impose their own view of common sense, while thinking that they are setting fumanity free from superstitions.
These two categories of people, with all their attributes and environments, can be defined as cynics and romantics.
But it seems that no one has ever managed to combine peculiarities of both categories to produce something absolutely inbelievable. Or wait... There are such people! They are creators of tool-assisted speedruns. These guys are completely merciless to their laziness and weakness, to their notion on their own apprehension power and creativeness. They actually make themselves more patient than a human can be, as balanced as a chess master is, more ingenious than a film director can be, as reasonable as a programmer is.
They create video masterpieces, entrertaining films having games characters as their actors. They take game developers' scenarios and turn them inside out just to see the unexpected, to show how fantastic regular things can be, when you use a weird, yet creative approach.
They are like children. They are easily able to accept reality as it is, but don't you even try to prevent them from building their own fairy-tale world over this visible world! It's just useless, they'll build it anyway. And does anyone dare to say that their magical reaity is a lie? That the main goal of a healthy society is to free them of their spiritual fantasy? Then what's the sense of that so called health, if it kills dream ability, kills will to become more than you are supposed to be, kills interst to develop yourself?
No, on the contrary, the humanity will feel better if it goes over its superstitions, starts improving itself in all possible ways. And the easiest way to do so is to improve something eternally, both in some obvious marginal value and in a delicate value of brilliance. As TASing, while being something average between chess, programming, direction art and acrobatics performance, actually stands above each of these separately, because it requires technical exploration lust (that can be measured by concrete parameters, like time) along with skill of handling with media content (that is way more subtle and harder to compare, like entertainment).
Tool-assisted speedruns authors are both cynics and romantics towards both themselves and the games they run. They kind of say: "Nah, game, I know you can do more, extremely more than you do now. Let's explore your real abilities a bit... Okay, your own creators never expected you'd ever act like this, ha-ha. And all I'm really doing to you is just providing button presses, which are surely absolutely legal." On the other side, they always say to themselves too: "C'mon, man, I know you really can exploit your own abilities to perform crazy exploits during this famous game. Though it is felt ordinary by most people, that just get used to it and don't expect to see any impossible tricks, but you remember how you managed to produce that awesome glitch in your childhood, now you really can dive into it and study how it works! Keep on diving, man. Yes you can!"
As we can see, TASing is a science of self motivation, that (if successfully studied) provides totally unexpected result, both with a game and with human soul, expanding mental abilities just as much as one can keep diligent.
And let's finish with one beautiful quote from
TASVideos' father:
"If a child receives a box containing an expensive toy as a birthday present, it's possible that he will enjoy the box more than the toy.
This is creativity.
We're doing the same for these games.
Instead of walking on the paths created for us, we create our own paths, our own legs and so on.
And we're not listening to people who say "you can't do that!".
Just like children."
