I've been planning this post for a very long time and now's as good a time as any. :) This is a happy post, albeit one that needs a bit of backdrop and one I'm writing off-the-cuff without as much tightness in my writing as I probably ought to; my apologies in advance for the rambling.
I kicked off the desire to show TAS content at
AGDQ 2014 nearly 10 years ago under the
TASBot mascot banner and it's been a wild ride ever since. There's been good, there's been bad, and there's even been ugly, but through it all we've been able to do incredible things. I have many regrets of things I'd do differently if I had the opportunity but I also have so many good memories over the years. So many people have come to the TASVideos community because of the Brain Age TAS led up by micro500 in particular and I can't say enough about how the live presentations wouldn't have been possible without the original efforts of the TAS authors.
In the last decade we've helped raise more than
$1.3m with TASBot led and organized event content at just
GDQ charities alone, a number that still staggers me today. We have a lot to be proud of, but the charity donation numbers there aren't the only win. In the last year, the number of leads taking on representing the community on their own has continued to increase and we had an unprecedented situation where three separate TASBot appearances happened simultaneously (recently with TASBot appearing at DEF CON, Long Island Retro, and Super Smash Con all on exactly the same day). That growth has led to some fascinating developments as well as some new challenges, and part of this post is addressing where we're heading as a community.
Over the years, the needs of the TASVideos (TAS creation) and TASBot (TAS presentation) communities diverged and led to a schism that didn't have to happen the way it did, but it happened nevertheless. I unwittingly made the problem worse with my behavior around rejected submissions that the site wasn't capable of handling at the time, and in particular the Discord communities headed in very different directions from the start. I'd like to pause and apologize to those who I hurt in the process of trying to figure out how to navigate those tricky times, especially those leads who felt stepped on. I made some mistakes along the way, and I'm sorry for pain I caused with missteps and poor judgement. I'll be the first to admit that I've not always managed my position on the TASVideos side as a senior staff member and Senior Ambassador well, and I've not been the perfect founder and BDFL of the TASBot community either; this process has been humbling, challenging, and at times exhausting. Still, we now have a number of major changes in play that make this 10 year anniversary of TASBot content an ideal time to heal some of the wounds and reunify the communities through several cross-pollination efforts.
There's a lot to be celebrating right now. The TASVideos channel is finally seeing some content coming from the TASBot side, such as
https://youtu.be/8UgIIzq8YlU from TiKevin83, Ownasaurus, and Handstitchedlife. We have
progress on publishing TAS presentation content on the site even if it's a slow slog getting there. There's never been more
documentation on the process of making a console verified run, and we're seeing progress on the replay device hardware side with Ownasaurus, Rasteri and TheMas3212's efforts as well as other projects. The upcoming
TASD specification from ViGreyTech and Bigbass is also an exciting new development that will help define a standard way to handle console verification data files (and I secretly hope to expand it to a streaming data format in the future, but one step at a time). I've been slowly experimenting with
FasTAS videos as shorts on
my YouTube channel to take TAS content and condense it down to less than a minute, with some experiments going better than others, but it's been a worthwhile endeavor from an engagement perspective (if not so much monetarily for me which is admittedly unfortunate as I'm still looking for work, but I digress).
We do still have a lot of work cut out for ourselves however. One of the things we lost when we moved away from using the forums to organize TAS showcase content at GDQ events is we unintentionally cut ourselves off from members that prioritize the forums over other places of engagement like Twitch and Discord. We've had a ton of new events all the same as tracked at
https://github.com/orgs/TASBotL3C/projects/1/views/3 but we need to evaluate what events to focus on next. I'll continue to focus on events like MAGFest, but I'll be looking to have more leads take on leading more events. I'll also be looking at ways to better document what's expected of a lead taking TASBot to an event and defining the process better. TASBot has become a mascot of TAS'ing in general and we've generally kept the quality of that representation high. I recognize that TASBot isn't specifically the mascot of TASVideos as a whole, but there's no reason we can't use him as a mascot either.
We now have TASBod frames (i.e. fully or nearly fully built out TASBot bodies of various levels of quality) located on the west coast and east coasts of the US as well as one in Europe and I'll be working to get things as consistent as possible, while also ensuring there's no pictures of more than one TASBot frame in the same picture at the same time such that we don't run into the same kind of unsettling circumstance that might happen if two Mickey Mouse suited individuals encountered one another in a theme park. The point of all of this is basically to have some standards around what it means to have the TASBot community presenting content at an event so event organizers know they can expect a professional experience at all times and viewers know they can expect fun TAS content with good attribution. A good example of this effort of expanding the presentations to new folks in play is the recently shown run at BSG on ESAMarathon's channel, it's not yet a YouTube video but can be seen at
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1902618242?t=10h4m30s at the moment and highlights
[871] NES Mega Man 3, 4, 5 & 6 by Baxter & AngerFist in 39:06.92 all with the help of folks like Blastermak, TinyTim78, and KillerChar representing the content. We'll need to continue working on ensuring presentations are consistently high quality but exposing TAS content (especially TASVideos TAS content) with excellence is always good.
I touched on a lot of different elements, but this post basically boils down to this: The TASVideos and TASBot communities can be best served by investing in our leads presenting content and working toward a reunification of the communities, which is going to best be accomplished starting with posts here on the TASVideos forums describing what we're doing better alongside wiki updates (both on the TASVideos side as well as the
TASBot wiki side). My hat goes off to Samsara and Memory for kicking off
Thread #23197: Wiki Maintenance, Updates, and Discussion - Wiki Restructuring in Progress (and for just rocking it in general lately). I'll do what I can to help in the effort and drag the rest of the TASBot community in as well. ;) I'm very thankful for the leads on the TASBot side for everything they've done across the board, including the admins (MediaMagnet, taters, TiKevin83, and TheMas3212) and the recently presenting moderators and leads (Ownasaurus, TheAxeMan, grav, ikuyo, Blastermak, Sauraen, and their supporting members backing them up). I have several visions of where I'd like to lead the community next, but seeing us expand into more events with more leads is absolutely a cornerstone of that vision. I'm happy seeing things move beyond me and consider it a massive win - I remember back in 2016 when I was practically begging for someone else to take on the lead and now we have plenty of folks who can competently lead an event and/or present at one independently with minimal assistance.
Question - as we approach the 10 year anniversary of TASBot content being shown publicly, what's a suitable way to celebrate? Is there a good 10 year reunion idea you may have? Post about it below!
Oh, one more question - any interest in leading / presenting at an event? Start a thread!
In essence, this rambling post is mostly me saying thank you - thank you to the TASVideos leads who didn't give up on us over on the TASBot side, and thank you to everyone on the TASBot side who put in so much effort to make all the amazing things happen over the years. Let's continue to work together to pull the communities closer while recognizing the different skillsets needed, and I can't wait to see where we end up in another decade. :) Now get out there and help with those wiki updates, TAS hard, and continue having fun playing games perfectly while raising money for charities in the process. :)
