I think a lot of this confusion has come about because we've split the categorization of movies into three different axes, but have yet to explicitly name the resulting quadrants before we talk about them. So we're talking about ideas not even made concrete.
To me, the splits are as follows: Entertainment vs. Technical (speed) vs. Goal. Games can have high or low entertainment values, high or low technical merit, and popular or esoteric goals.
If you excuse the poor Visio 3D diagram,
I've made visualizations of the resulting categories.
Note: I made my own names for the categories that make sense to me, and I'll detail them below. Most important, I've reevaluated what I think a "Moon" movie should be, so don't let that throw you off.
Please don't read the rest of this post until you've read the above-linked visualization page.
-----
Now that that's out of the way, we can talk about which categories belong on the site. Obviously Grue isn't published at all.
Star and Moon are two halves of the same coin (highly entertaining, higly technical), just with different goals, obviously both are published. I think Superplay and Superspeed belong as well: Superplay being effectively what voting was prior to this entire proposal, and Superspeed being originally proposed as "Vault". We all agree that people want entertainment and speed; just not all agree to what degree of each. This solves that problem.
As the discussion went on it was clear people would still like to have technical glitch runs (not belonging on the primary goal side of things), which is where Demo comes in.
The only one unsure (to me) is Freerun. People make freeruns all the time of various games (especially SM64, for example), and I don't think they belong on the site. Not that they're bad like Grue is, but without an obvious goal a freerun is
purely entertainment, unlike its counterpart Superplay which, while intended for entertainment, is still working towards a fairly popular goal. In other words, if technical merit (speed) isn't an issue, then
any run could effectively fall back to "Freerun" status, including the dreaded Monopoly runs. (That is, the only thing that keeps Demo in but Freerun out is that it has the highly objective goal of technical excellence. This provides a meaningful-enough ranking.)
To answer the problem of "but I don't like Superspeed movies" or "but I don't like Superplay movies", we start by agreeing to show Star movies on the front page. Everyone already agrees these movies are truly the goal of the site. (And maybe fewer Moon movies mixed in.) But then if someone asks to see more by clicking Movies or otherwise navigating to the "main" movie storage, they need to be able to select, independently from their navigation through the site, what categories they would want to see. I envision something like this:
Where the top options are independently toggleable, and all selected by default. If I know I don't like Superspeed, I just untoggle it and those movies aren't displayed to me as long as the cookie survives.
---
I think that voting is a separate issue. If we were to have an ideal voting system (regardless of feasability), I would change the current "Yes/No" approach to publishing and instead make it a ranked vote. That is, display the following
rankable options:
- Superplay
- Superspeed
- Demo
- Grue
So for example I could say "(1) Superspeed (2) Demo (3) Superplay" as my preference to how the movie is published. That is, I really consider the movie a Superplay, but if not enough people agree then I think it should be published as a Demo, and if that doesn't pass then a Superplay. I don't rank Grue because I think the movie
should be published regardless, and I don't want to give weight to it being denied. (Though obviously that doesn't stop others from voting Grue.)
If instead I think it should either be Demo or nothing, I'd vote "(1) Demo (2) Grue".
You can use
Schulze Method to determine the final result. But again, this would require some special coding, I'm unsure how feasible that is. Regardless, I don't think leaving the voting as "Yes/No" makes sense with the new scheme, because whether or not I think it should be published depends on how the movie is trying to present itself.
Star and Moon are not options because they are just "ascended" publications, hand selected. Stars being highly-entertaining superspeed runs (or equivalently, highly-technical superplays), and Moons being highly-entertaining demos (or equivalently, highly-technical freeruns).
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter. Thanks for reading.
(Note that I think the overall rating of movies and players can be improved as well,
as is being discussed;
see this post.)
