This topic is for the purpose of discussing #8258: Samsara's NES Color a Dinosaur in 02:07.46

"Open the door, get on the floor. Everybody color the dinosaur!" There's enough for all...well, 16 of you at least. :)

Color a Dinosaur is quite possibly the most intriguing game out there. Think about it, the absolute nature of the coloring tool to Dinosaur ratio is immaculate. The way the coloring tool flows from head to toe, and the ability to fly around the screen had me on the edge of my seat. The color choice had me tearing up, both from the way it was used and from chuckling a little. The dinosaurs, now, don't get me started on those creatures. They stare at the screen yelling internally to be colored. The Color a Dinosaur fandom is crumbling, if you are a true Coloring expert, please pay your respects to the millions of Dinosaurs lost from the extinction years and years ago. If anybody says this doesn't deserve publication (because it does deserve it), quite possibly doesn't like Dinosaurs or Coloring them for that matter. yes the top text was satirical if it wasn't noticeable

Oh god, the new admin is attempting to seriously submit a TAS of Color a Dinosaur, lord help us all...wait, no, they're trying to submit TWO TAS's of Color a Dinosaur!

"Is White A Colour" - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate,

whenever i order a pizza online, i usually put "color a dinosaur" in the additional instructions prompt results are generally pretty decent

whenever i order a pizza online, i usually put "color a dinosaur" in the additional instructions prompt results are generally pretty decent

do you order the luncch special or is that more of a duck a l'orange thing

Any type of "fill tool" is primarily passive coloring and does not count. It was obvious from the video that you did not color each individual pixel of each dinosaur, so this will have to be a No vote from me.

"Is White A Colour" - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate,

IMO, you're very optimistic if you think that such a thread will last that many pages before getting locked. This is the Internet, after all.

I posted my thoughts about this game in the other submission, but since it was canceled, I'll paste them here for the sake of continuing the discussion.

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This was my main question with this game:

A video game poses a virtual task. It requires the player to accomplish some in-game job.

so I was curious how it's resolved in the submission, and the solution is

the virtual task is quite literally the name of the video game

While I can definitely see how this game does its best to suggest a task to the player, the secondary sentence of the definition (meant to elaborate on the first one) says "It requires the player to accomplish some in-game job" and I can't agree that there are any kinds of requirements in this game whatsoever. It gives you some tools to use, and then basically leaves you on your own. You can invent indefinite number of your own goals and definitions, and the game won't object, its tools will just retain their limits. The game does nothing to tell you what is considered actually coloring a dinosaur, and there's no explanation of what isn't. So players are on their own here, and we can already see how we can define it in several relatively natural ways. Now if we consider that TASing it about pushing games to their limits, beyond natural limitations, it would be strange to stop on what feels obvious to us after having read the title of the game. Why limit ourselves (and our creativity) with how real world is organized? We don't emulate the real world and we can't TAS it, not even as a part of a videogame. So why do we need to rely on English language when determining in-game actions? This goes further. We rely on English language literally when we interpret the game title as the only objective of the game. Then we vaguely rely on it and vaguely reinvent it when determining what should be considered coloring. And then we refuse to rely on it when deciding that coloring a dinosaur is objectively the requirement of this game. And we outright contradict English language if we say that whatever community is going to agree on, is objectively the goal of the game. The only objective reality with video games is in-game reality. All the rest is human's subjective convention. Okay so subjective human convention is not something bad in its nature. We still need to achieve community agreement on major subjects like policies, or on subjectivity-based movie goals when deciding whether a playaround is entertaining. We encourage subjective feedback on movies in general, and we work with that data as an objective fact. But we should not use community agreement as a substitution for an objective fact. We should not operate in a paradigm like "if enough people consider this color blue, then it's objectively blue". Even if we wanted, we do not have reliable sample size here. And we don't even have a consensus yet, and I'm not looking forward to a consensus picking from several logically equivalent options. White is definitely a color, and the game allows you to color everything white. But do we agree that the goal is the game is us coloring everything white? Of course not. The goal of the game is, maybe, us coloring everything in some way. But on the other hand, can we agree that us changing absolutely nothing is the goal of the game? I don't think so. The game's documentation goes out of its way to show us example pictures where dinosaurs are colored by applying different colors to them. It even has all those different colors available! Of course the game's goal is that we use those colors! But this is when we decide that we're too creative to care about the game's expectations, and we ignore them by not changing anything in the game. Yet we care about its title's wording and use it as a command. Sounds inconsistent.

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If this game ends up fitting our definition of a video game, then I don't think it will be our current definition. It will have to be changed to fit this game. And of course it's not a problem in itself, because we can't predict everything. And we only evolve if we're ready to change. But when a definition has to be changed to the opposite of the one we agreed on as a community... then why do we even need definitions? If the goal is tweaking them in a way that everything ends up fitting, why have community discussions on where to put a limit? Photoshop is a game. It gives you tools and the goal is that you use its title as a command. You just have to photoshop. Once you've photoshopped, you've completed the game. Can we have a community consensus on this one please? Wait we first need a community agreement on what is considered actually photoshopping...

om, nom, nom... om, nom, nom... nom nom

Didn't we go down this route with Pictionary? (btw, I saved another 10 frames off of that a while back) Also, did you see the poetic edition from 10 years ago? "Notice how even without colors, he is happy, for he is truly blessed with divine grace." A commenter invoked rods and cones and metamers to justify that white is a color.