Why not change the front page to say "List Bisqwit's recommended movies"?
I don't want me to be advertised (at least not on this site), because I'm not really special.
That said, I apologize for neglecting this thread for some time.
In any case, I'll remove the stars temporarily (as in, indefinitely until something different comes up), as they have not been verified for some time and there may be discrepancies in them that I am not able to off-hand justify.
Good call. Plus, most stars were for popular runs to begin with. Do we really need to tell people to watch a super mario 3 run, or Mario 64? That is the first place a new person is going to go anyway!
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
I'm glad the stars are gone. I never liked the idea. Though I had always thought I prime example of good use of tools was Kirby's Dream Course. For those who have played the game and know how hard it is to get gold medals, this will be one of the most amazing, yet annoying runs to watch. I loved it, but I was annoyed at how perfect it was.
I think it would be neat to have lists of games that are interesting in different distinct ways (super fast looking, crazy luck manipulation, glitchy, ?) and would appeal to different folks. Maybe even lists from individual users that people could browse, and then some sort of aggregation of that into a more general list (man this is getting complicated).
I do think it's valuable to have some sort of mechanism to help guide viewers to more enjoyable movies (to them) -- ultimately it would enhance the usefulness and therefore the longevity of the site.
Do we really need to tell people to watch a super mario 3 run, or Mario 64? That is the first place a new person is going to go anyway!
And how exactly are they going to find those?
Write "supermario" in the search field and you get 0 results. Fix it to "super mario" (assuming this occurs to the newcomer) and you get a bunch of results which have nothing to do with the super mario movies: The first results are "Super Mario Kart Luck", "Super Mario 64 Tricks", "Super Mario Land Tricks", "Super Mario Bros Tricks", "Super Mario Kart Physics", "Super Mario World Tricks" and "Super Mario Bros 2 Tricks". Judging from this it almost looks like this site isn't about movies at all, but more like a wiki where people write about tricks in old console games.
(I have told Bisqwit more than once that he should implement a priority system to the search: Movies first, then wiki pages, then submissions, but he has never done so. Maybe also implement some kind of dictionary system, so if the user writes, for example, "supermario", the search engine automatically searches for "super mario" as well.)
Ok, maybe the newcomer will click the NES/Famicom link in the front page (we assume that *everyone* knows what those names mean, which might actually not always be the case): He gets a page with something like 200 items, which takes like an hour to load. Not very encouraging, I would say.
I simply can't understand what is wrong with a short, concise list of "best of the show" movies for newcomers to try. It makes it a lot easier to get into the site, so to speak.
(I have told Bisqwit more than once that he should implement a priority system to the search: Movies first, then wiki pages, then submissions, but he has never done so.
I now changed it to prioritize movies in search results regardless of text match relevance measure.
Is it now better?
I would guess that most people that come to this site for the first time will want to watch TASes of games they have actually played. When I first discovered this site, I did look at the list of starred movies first but I still was only interested in the games I was familiar with. After I watched those I looked through the longer lists of all movies. That being said, I still am in favor of having starred movies and having a list of them, just not necessarily labeling it as a list specifically targeted at newcomers.
Also, I do think that it is ridiculous that all the movies for a given system are all on the same page. It makes the page difficult to navigate and probably wastes bandwidth resources (The SNES page and all its images add up to over a megabyte.) Perhaps there could be a page for each letter of the alphabet or something similar.
Also, I do think that it is ridiculous that all the movies for a given system are all on the same page. It makes the page difficult to navigate and probably wastes bandwidth resources (The SNES page and all its images add up to over a megabyte.) Perhaps there could be a page for each letter of the alphabet or something similar.
I agree. One of my plans for improving the site (as I have explained to some) involves reducing the movie listings into brief summaries about the movie (game name, player, maybe something else), where the focus is on finding information, not providing it all at once, and then dedicating each movie a full page that looks more like a wikipedia article than a table entry.
I just haven't got really far in implementing it yet…
By the way, as for finding TASes of a particular game, this page may be quite helpful ― http://tasvideos.org/ListAllMovies.html ― although it was designed for another purpose.
Joined: 11/18/2006
Posts: 2426
Location: Back where I belong
AKA wrote:
Instead of grouping everything by console why not group everything by genre.
Ugg, that would provide much more confusion that the current format. Also, as CF pointed out, many games fall into more than one genre, but some games are difficult to group into any genre at all. Sonic Spinball is currently listed as "Genre:Sport", and although I don't agree with it at all, I have no ideas of what genre it should fall into. I'm sure there are others that would be a complete pain to group, and providing a "Miscellaneous" grouping would do little to help.
Instead of grouping everything by console why not group everything by genre.
Genres are somewhat ambiguous. What is action, for example? Don't all movies have action? (These were a rhetoric questions.)
I think genres are not really useful.
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1977
Location: Making an escape
I remember when I first arrived movies were organized not only by system but also by "type". By that, I mean the things off to the side of each movie. I think it helped me get into the site more because I could more easily find movies that showcased various aspects of tool assistance. Things like "One player controls two characters".
So people asking for organization be classification: we've already been there, and it probably needs a resurrection of some kind. Perhaps the "Cream of the Crop" for each category could be added? I don't know.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
I remember when I first arrived movies were organized not only by system but also by "type". By that, I mean the things off to the side of each movie. I think it helped me get into the site more because I could more easily find movies that showcased various aspects of tool assistance. Things like "One player controls two characters".
So people asking for organization be classification: we've already been there, and it probably needs a resurrection of some kind.
That's where the Tour page would help.
"New to TAS? Take a [tour]!"
Do we really need to tell people to watch a super mario 3 run, or Mario 64? That is the first place a new person is going to go anyway!
And how exactly are they going to find those?
Write "supermario" in the search field and you get 0 results. Fix it to "super mario" (assuming this occurs to the newcomer) and you get a bunch of results which have nothing to do with the super mario movies: The first results are "Super Mario Kart Luck", "Super Mario 64 Tricks", "Super Mario Land Tricks", "Super Mario Bros Tricks", "Super Mario Kart Physics", "Super Mario World Tricks" and "Super Mario Bros 2 Tricks". Judging from this it almost looks like this site isn't about movies at all, but more like a wiki where people write about tricks in old console games.
(I have told Bisqwit more than once that he should implement a priority system to the search: Movies first, then wiki pages, then submissions, but he has never done so. Maybe also implement some kind of dictionary system, so if the user writes, for example, "supermario", the search engine automatically searches for "super mario" as well.)
Ok, maybe the newcomer will click the NES/Famicom link in the front page (we assume that *everyone* knows what those names mean, which might actually not always be the case): He gets a page with something like 200 items, which takes like an hour to load. Not very encouraging, I would say.
I simply can't understand what is wrong with a short, concise list of "best of the show" movies for newcomers to try. It makes it a lot easier to get into the site, so to speak.
I'm not totally against that, and you are right, a newbie isn't going to find those movies easily. Good improvement.
However, perhaps a 'Runs for Popular games' would stop some of the infighting on the site.
Perhaps a link that calls up all sonic, mario, link, and samus games would be appropriate. Those runs are obviously the most popular games on the site.
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
How about everyone who has a profile can recommend a movie or $number. And the movies with the most recommendations gets the spots on the recommended movie list?
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
Maybe just avoid "action". Use everything else, SRPG, RPG, Platformer, etc.
I think the list of "platformer" movies would be longer than the list of NES movies. Not very useful.
DarkKobold wrote:
However, perhaps a 'Runs for Popular games' would stop some of the infighting on the site.
That's not a bad idea, actually. "Runs of the most popular games" would be a lot less controversial than "best runs" or "recommended runs". While what makes a game "popular" is still a bit of a question of definition, it's still much less so than what can be defined as the "best" or "recommended" runs.
Joined: 6/13/2006
Posts: 3300
Location: Massachussetts, USA
OmnipotentEntity wrote:
How about everyone who has a profile can recommend a movie or $number. And the movies with the most recommendations gets the spots on the recommended movie list?
This would basically be the same as the starred list, except instead of being soleyBisqwit/some publishers, it's everyone's.
Which will unfortunately lead to a very, very high list of nominees. That, or the list will merely resemble the list of what is rated the highest. Having two separate lists for the same thing seems silly, especially since for the most part, the highest rated stuff is rated so by lots of members who know what they are doing and know if something is technically good, or entertaining for the purposes of the site.
There are of course some favorites that everyone is going to pick, but everyone has a lot of different, obscure TASes that they would personally recommend. A few members actually have their own recommended lists in their forum signature; and each one is for the most part different.
The best way to get a list for "first timers" is to get the opinions of those people, which is actually quite hard since most of the newcomers who start browsing the movies aren't joined on the site. Those that are, are mostly quiet. Occasionally you get Mr. fanboy who joins just to praise one move that gets completed, but when you think about it, for the entire history of "recommended movies" we have had a smaller group of people who know a lot about TASes deciding for others who are introduced to TASing what they should watch. And those decisions were based on what the current members thought was cool.
So, I dunno. I've always liked the recommended movies section, and it makes sense to direct newcomers to that section. But it's hard to get an objective list that gives them what they want, because we assume we know what they want, but really we don't because we are veterans, and assume that movie x is suitable for newcomers because we think it best displays a certain aspect of TASing very well. Some movies that demonstrate a TAS's ability for fast reflexes may be too fast to understand, like Sonic Advance 2, Tetrisphere, Wetrix, Biker Mice from Mars, etc. A run showing great luck manipulation may fall dead on viewers who have no clue that luck is being manipulated, or even what luck manipulation is. When I joined, I knew games where random, but I had no idea it could be manipulated. The first luck manip heavy movies I watched made no sense to me at all.
This post got too long, and I'm hungry.
I don't think it's a question of what they want, but more a question of "to get started, look if there's something interesting among these". If the majority of newcomers find a video of a game they want to see in that list, the list is a success.
Edit: Btw, Bisqwit, could you perhaps calculate some statistics about how popular the "recommended movies" link was compared to other links in the website? (If you could somehow distinguish a "newcomer" by his browsing history, identifiable by his ip, it would be cool, but that would probably be a bit laborious...)
