We shouldn't be trying to define or classify games one way or another, we should simply be trying to account for them all in some way. TASing doesn't have to always be this overcomplicated process, it doesn't have to set itself apart from RTA speedrunning anymore, it doesn't have to carve its own path in the niche because that path has already been carved. We just need to re-carve it into something smoother and wider, a path that more things can travel down. Like a bowling lane.
There's inherently a lot of value in widening the number of games we accept! It lessens the gap between the RTA and TAS communities because we're not telling people their games "aren't complicated enough" anymore, drawing in a wider audience and introducing more people to the idea of TASing. Like I said in my second of (INSERT FINAL NUMBER OF SELF-SERVING DISCORD SCREENSHOTS HERE) self-serving Discord screenshots, it's neat to see definitive proof that a human has actually reached the limit of the game! The mental image I get is the RTA WR holder of a game finally getting their perfect run, then going to TASvideos and finding out that it is quite literally THE perfect run, and getting a huge boost in confidence from it.
People can be passionate about any game, people can find ways of speedrunning anything. I don't really see the point in continuing to tell those people their passions are invalid.
Yes, we do need to figure out how to handle certain genres: Rhythm games, notably, come to mind for me as a huge fan of them, but there are still discussions to be had about genres such as sports games and sandbox games as well. The last thing I want is for us to remove triviality only to continue treating certain genres of games in overly complicated ways just to make them acceptable. We need to tread carefully here and ensure that there can be no misunderstandings. I feel like the best way of handling this is to find a universal definition for a game's ending. How do we want to define endpoints for certain games, particularly sandbox games that might not otherwise have a strict ending? Likewise, for rhythm games, do we want to define the ending as "finish a song" or "finish every song"? For sports games, "single match" or "career mode"?
There's still further discussion to be had from there of course, but I feel like simply figuring out endpoints will take care of the majority of outliers, and the rest can be easily handled case-by-case from there.
tl;dr hell yeah lets get trivial c:You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
But we can still have guidelines on what is most likely a videogame, and what is most likely not. For example, a videogame requires repeated player input to advance. It also has some kind of gameplay, usually posing a challenge, a way to lose and to win. What else?
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Is a TAS that presses play on a flash animation really fair use? Or are we just uploading somebody else's flash animation to youtube? EDIT: My proposal is to sorta remain within the limits of what can be considered transformative.
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
unless the software in question is clearly utility in nature (aka not really a game)
What are examples when it's clear, and what makes it clear?
How about this?
- A video game is visual. It displays its content on some kind of a video screen.
- A video game is interactive. It requires repeated user input to progress.
- A video game poses a virtual task. It requires the player to accomplish some in-game job.
- A video game suggests options. Which set of in-game options you choose defines optimality and transformative nature of your play.
- A video game is finite. It has an indication of game completion, or a hard end you can't play past, or a point when the in-game task is no longer fundamentally different.
- A video game is visual. It displays its content on some kind of a video screen.
This is probably the only one I potentially have a critique of - I'm unsure exactly what the definition of video screen is here. Does this just mean "the game appears on a computer monitor", or is the requirement here that the game itself display moving visual objects? If the latter, I'd have concerns about text adventures (as well as the few sound-based games out there designed for blind players).
For QTE games where it is mostly cutscenes, would that risk having copyright strikes in some cases if it were to be encoded and uploaded to Youtube? I would love to see a list of QTE games (actual games that get sold, not something made in an afternoon for a meme), to find out which one stretches the definition of a game the most. Something like if it had 1 single QTE, but hours and hours of cutscene. Does that exist?
First of all, this giving a general definition of what's a game, seems unnecessarily complex to me. But more importantly, it broadens the range of accepted games too much.
Not that I'm personally against it, but I think we should do it gradually, in order to avoid unexpected situations that we may not want to get.
I think we need to have a clearer vision of what we want to accept and what we don't want to.
For me, the issue is not about what games we want to accept, but about what movies. Because many games may be applicable only for specific goals, like full-completion or maximum score, but not for fastest-completion.
Also, I think that the community still doesn't want to start accepting completely trivial movies, like Rhythm games, for which there is not even the need for TASing tools in order to produce a perfect movie, and the difference wouldn't be noticeable not only when watching the movie, but not even while making it.
So my conclusion is that a movie should be acceptable if there is a minimum requirement of basic TASing techniques in order to make a movie. This would means that submissions like Duck Hunt and all Bowling games would become acceptable, while a Desert Bus movie would remain unacceptable due to the low effort required for playing it (beside physical stamina, I guess). In any case, I want to make sure that the community is happy with it.
