www.vortiginous.com/cheating.html
He explains cheating in the best way that I've seen. I think he's too liberal on when cheating is wrong, but overall this is a good article.
There is no disputing that tool assisted players are cheating at games to make their videos.
I agree. We are cheating at games.
We are not playing the games like they were meant to.
Are we even playing?
What defines playing?
Meh, I don't like to debate on this subject. It makes fun not fun.
However, this referenced article is written well - not religiously like the others I've seen so far. I'd read it more deeply if debating on this subject actually interested me.
Unfortunately, he should underline or bold "game" in that sentense to make his point better, otherwise morons will simply join, call us cheaters (instead of cheating the game), and quote this article as saying that it supports them (when I'm pretty sure the author intended to really identify what we're doing).
Or maybe I'm just paranoid because I see it all the time...
Joined: 3/13/2004
Posts: 1118
Location: Kansai, JAPAN
I'm not going to bother reading this. I can't imagine why people who do speedruns even give a shit anymore about what we do.
I can write a scathing opinion piece about why speedrunning is a waste of time. But why would I, and who would read it?
Thanks for sharing the link, but this is a dead issue for me.
I think speed runners are pissed off because they (the ones that are pissed) care more about fame then personal achievement. The reality is there is very little fame for holding a speed run record for even popular game titles. This makes what feitclub said, "Speedrunning is a waste of time," true, but not for those who speed run for personal achievement or challenge.
Tool-assisted players are only 'cheating' when compared to realtime players. As long as people continue to try to compare these time attacks with realtime runs, you will have people who complain about it.
But, they are in a different class. Since the tool-assisted scene has set up different rules from realtime speedruns, then I don't consider it 'cheating' because everyone is playing by the same rules. Whether or not savestates and slowdown is cheating depends on the rules that a group is going by, which is why I fear this issue will never be resolved. According to us, it's within the rules, so it's not cheating. According to the realtime speedrunners, it's not within the rules, so it's cheating.
I still feel that we need to have someone work on a way to run these movies on real hardware - that should dispel all notions of them being 'faked'. Especially to the people who see the wall jumps and hat stomps in the SMB vids and scream 'OMG U CAN'T DO THAT FAKE FAKE FAKE'. I don't have the skill to start such a project, but I bet someone out there does =P
This program outputs a sequence of digits, but what digits are those actually? I can't recognize them.
bisqwit@oktober:~$ cat >tmp.c
a=1e2,d,c=994,f[988],e;main(b){for(;b--;d/=b*2-1)b?d=d*b+(f[b]+2)*a,f[b]=d%(b*2-1)-2:printf("%.2d",e+d/a,e=d%a,b=c-=7);}
bisqwit@oktober:~$ gcc tmp.c
tmp.c:1: warning: data definition has no type or storage class
bisqwit@oktober:~$ ./a.out
0016169264368978333845274239327850298320716840937411572196504458230881
6306296109998627034825342117077981158086503382306646093944609451582132
7253584180294711184403831126029384211155596445239488559204819644288010
7566583444602947564723388677326427120290904664856692346034851144432764
8051
Bisqwit, please edit your post on the previous page with the long string of numbers. It forces the width of the forum to be 293457293875293457 digits wide, and it makes reading the other posts a royal pain in the ass.
*skims through the remainder of the thread upon seeing this touchy topic again**yawns**middle-clicks the tab to close it and moves on*EDIT: The head admin causing horizontal scrollbars...now that's good entertainment there. I was wondering who broke the lack of scrolling... :p
The pic that Kilu posted summarizes my point of view on the issue. I'm too tired to read the whole thing now, but I have one comment:
Cheating is violating the rules of a voluntary activity in order to obtain the built-in goal or benefit of participating in that activity.
I assume he's talking about the rules for competative gaming, right? And I assume he's saying we're cheaters because we violate those rules? Well you can't violate rules for an activity you're not participating in. That's like saying that sdkess is a cheater because the rules of this site say that you have to use save states to keep redoing something until it's perfect, and he doesn't do that, or like saying that the people who submits a score to twingalaxies.com is a cheater because he doesn't follow a rule on cyberscore.net. Different activities have different rules.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Article starts off seeming mostly correct how the acceptability of cheating is based on where it's done. Then it turns around to say cheating in a place where cheating is allowed is wrong ???
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
I assume he's talking about the rules for competative gaming, right?
No, he's saying that video games themselves have rules built into them and anybody who violates them are cheaters. Which is fine if he believes that but that doesn't make it a fact.
Competitions have rules. Games do not. That's what I think on the subject.
Millions of competitive gamers and only a handful of tool-assisted run makers at a forum called Nesvideos. Do we really have the power to destroy competitive gaming forever? I think not. TG's representation of the entire competitive gaming community is grossly overestimated.
Some people also feel that exploiting engine bugs, or any other things that you can do ingame that weren't intended by the designers, to be cheating as well.
And also, as with here, there's one type of 'cheating' that I'd imagine would even be allowed in competitive realtime gaming - cheat codes that increase the difficulty of the game.
From A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger von Oech:
Such rule-breaking happens in sports as well. Take swimming. Until the 1920's, there were only three competitive swimming strokes--freestyle, backstroke, and breaststroke--and each had specific rules that described how it was to be performed. The rules of breaststroke stated that both arms must be pulled together underwater and then recovered simultaneously back to the start of the pulling position to begin the next stroke. Most people interpreted this arm recovery to mean an underwater recovery. In the 1920's, however, someone challenged the rules and reinterpreted this arm recovery to be an out-of-water recovery. Since this new "breaststroke" was about 15% faster, people using the orthodox version couldn't effectively compete. Something had to be done. Finally, this new stroke--now known as the "butterfly"--won recognition as the fourth swimming stroke, and became an Olympic event in 1956.
I'm pretty sure the makers of most games didn't intend for people running trough them and beating the bosses in just a few seconds.
So that makes speed running cheating, I guess.
