Yes, this is a provocative statement. In this statement I am strictly speaking as myself and not in my position as TASVideos Staff. THis statement is a collection of my own beliefs and observations after about 3 years being involved with TASVideos and its community at large.
As emulators entered the mainstream, save states slowly became a commonplace feature. They were convenient! We can save those long games of Sonic the Hedgehog, or forget about passwords for Metroid. Similarly, movie files showed up as a cute feature to record a sequence of inputs and show them play out in the game. DOOM Demo files were a big deal, and the ease of distribution for Demos was a huge boon for the speedrunning community that was born around the game. And what about pausing? Well, some games don't even pause! I just gotta go check the door, let me pause my game of Street Fighter.
What we didn't know at the time was what all of these features would allow when used together.
As the story goes, in November of 2003, bisqwit stumbled upon an interesting "time attack video" of "super mario bross 3". The video, created by Marimoto with the Famtasia emulator, was intriguing and fun and beautiful. Look at the skill! The long bounces and 1up chains. The daredevil jumps. It was awesome! What was this anyway? Was Morimoto that much better at SMB3 than anyone else? Well, no. This was a Tool-Assisted Speedrun.
While TAS work had already existed as early as 1994 in the DOOM demo scene, this SMB3 warp run was revolutionary, and led people (bisqwit included) to discover this craft. bisqwit himself figured that work like this was worth sharing and celebrating, and created NESVideos as a site to share them, and a tool to generate AVI dumps of the movies as played back from their emulators.
The stated goal of NESVideos, as shared in
the available archive, is simple: they are art. While his views on what that entailed and the specifics on his taste on the movies itself is not something I agree with, he was correct:
TAS work is a creative endeavor. A craft worth celebrating, sharing, discussing, and maybe even engaging in. The original goal is noble: NESVideos would curate high quality work for TASing, and provide a place to celebrate their authors and demystify the creative process.
Now, as we all know, bisqwit had very specific views on a TAS should be. In the archive of NESVideos, he outlines what he believes a tool assisted movie should be, and it can all be summed up in one word:
entertaining. This decision led to him deciding on a very specific, and somewhat narrow, range of expression for what a TAS should even be, and these would get slowly codified into a proper ruleset as the system became formalized in the process of submission and publication. This system allowed him to curate the highest quality work, pushing authors to strive for excellence, and justified the large amount of work that publication would take at the time.
However, the world that bisqwit was in when he first found that movie is not the world we currently live in. For starters, as speedrunning becomes a larger part of gaming as a whole, naturally TASing has also become more culturally relevant within speedrunning and speedrun-adjacent communities. The advent of platforms such as YouTube and Twitch and new emulation techniques made both TAS creation and sharing available to just about anyone. Communities become more specialized as they push forward, with better tools and more advanced knowledge, creating extensive decompilations, trainers, replay devices and so on. As the artform developed and expanded, the goals, tools and views that different authors and communities desired shifted away from what the site was first made for. And at the time, TASVideos failed to recognize this shift. Furthermore, the site culture cultivated by its original vision made it uniquely hostile to this adaptation, and it took a long time to shake it off. We're still dealing with years, decades of bad decisions that led to many people, rightfully in my opinion, writing TASVideos off.
I admire the work of our current staff and their commitment to make the site the best version of itself it can be. I wouldn't be a staff member if it weren't for those before me and around me that work to make the site better. The love for the craft they show and their desire to make the site live up to its goals is noble indeed. But their work has now exposed a different, more fundamental problem:
The current framework of TASVideos is fundamentally unsustainable.
As the site breaks off the binds it was born with, it finds itself more and more accepting of work. After all, that is what we want. But as we expand the rulesets and make our best effort to engage with more and more work, we find the simple truth that creativity is not to be bound. Longer and longer, as a judge, the rules feel less like what we work with and more what we work around, or, in increasingly more often cases, what we have to
fight against. As the artform evolves, specializes and expands, our rulesets and guidelines feel ever less useful, ever more constraining, ever more obsolete. And we know this. Judges have never had to discuss more rulesets and changes than now. And as you would expect, different staff members have different views on what those guidelines should be, which is completely ok but also means arriving at consensus can take very long. Furthermore, thanks to the work we have already done, we have naturally been rewarded with exactly what we wanted: more and more submissions. 2023 was the single largest year in TASVideos history measured by number of submissions. 2024 so far is on pace to surpass it. The higher load on work, even if it wasn't work that particularly challenges the boundaries of our rules, has been welcome by a relatively small staff of volunteers, all of us just doing our best to help while dealing with jobs and lives and other interests. Absences are felt, burnout can be very real. We tried to enforce systems to keep us on track and contributing actively and it only made things _worse_.
While not all submissions take as long, the whole process has become significantly harder. Complicating matters, the publications that precisely push against us tend to be those that we most want to have, or at least have someone vouching for them. If we didn't want them, rejecting would be the much easier way to go. But we do, and then the process extends to the point where by the time some of these get published, the authors already shared them elsewhere. Steering the tsunami of creativity is foolish, and has led to burnout and exhaustion. Or worse: it leads to people not bothering to submit in the first place. After all, in a world where a commentated TAS that doesn't abide by our rules can gain millions of views on Youtube, why?
We cannot live like this. TASVideos will die.
... But it doesn't have to be this way. It never did.
The way the site was originally set was a response to specific cultural and technological circumstances, filtered by the creative vision of the site founders. But we don't live in those times anymore. The world of TASing does not work like it did when bisqwit stumbled upon that movie. His views, his circumstances, are not for us to follow.
As such, this is my statement:
* I believe Tool Assisted Superplays, Tool Assisted Speedruns, Tool Assisted Demonstrations and other related forms to be creative work of different kinds with unique and different goals. They turn the interactivity element of video games as a medium and build a new medium on top.
* I believe TAS work is worthy of celebration, archival, preservation, curation, and discussion.
* I believe TASVideos as a community should strive to archive TAS work and celebrate its history, development and the communities' accomplishments.
* I believe TASVideos should offer an introduction to TASing as a whole, as well as resources for those interested to both gain insight on what the craft is and how it is performed. I believe this to be fundamental for the future of the craft.
* I believe TASVideos can and should connect different TASing communities together.
* And most important to this discussion, I believe all of these goals, most of them concordant with the site's original mission, can be best accomplished without the submission and publication system currently in place.
As such, I believe TASVideos should no longer have its submission or publication process.
Now, if you ask me "What should TASVideos look like if it were to abandon its submission pipeline and rules" the answer is... I don't know. I have some ideas, for sure. I think archival of movie files and knowledge bases for both the general TASing process and specific games would definitely be part of that, and these elements already exist in the currently standing TASVideos site. But I can't say for certain, and even if I did, I don't think figuring such a thing out should be my work alone. More than ever, we need people, and people are there. We ought to listen to you, to what you think the best way to achieve the site's goals is, and how we can work towards that goal.
Morimoto didn't need to go around each airship autoscroller by jumping constantly and bouncing on everything. But they did it because it was fun, and it communicated the superhuman nature of the run. In short, it was
a creative decision. And it was a decision that worked so well that it made someone want to make a whole website to celebrate work like this. This small decision has rippled all the way into tool assisted work today, where autoscrollers, a part that commonly is derided in real time speedruns, can be some of the most fun a TASer could possibly have. They found a way to make autoscrollers fun.
TASVideos as it currently exists, shackled to its rules and guidelines, slowly inches forward, doing its best to escape the pit it dug itself into, with good intentions, but slowly consuming itself in the process.
And in the meantime, creators jump around us, gliding, collecting 1ups.
- ikuyo, TASVideos Judge.
