The whole reason that "deleting the save" etc. works is because of programming oversights.
I am still the wizard that did it.
"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata
<scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
You could say the same about every other non-hardware dependant glitch (i.e things resulting from crooked cartridge, for example). It feels unfair to claim these glitches are of similar severity.
Warp's problem is that these glitches aren't triggered in the course of playing the game normally; for example, going out of bounds in Metroid Prime. Instead, the glitch he describes relies on how the game itself handles save files to skip sections of the game.
There is a distinction to be made here, and Warp's point of view on the subject is as valid as any other that has been stated. However, as has been stated already the speedrun community is a natural democracy where the aim of the game is to get the lowest time. Since this glitch is beneficial you're going to have a hard time convincing people not to run the category.
If you want people to run a category without deleting the save, you're going to have to foster that particular competition yourself. No way around that.
The question of "normalcy" is thrown out the window when actually trying to speedrun a game. Clipping through walls is a "valid" technique but it is not "normal" to the game's play. Phasing through bricks is not "normal", but it is a recognized speedrunning tactic too.
I have admitted that I recognize Warp's point of view, and to some extent agree with it, but that the people making the speedruns disagree, and it's their opinions that ultimately matter as they are the ones competing over records.
I think we can all agree that not modifying the ROM code is a rule that we shouldn't break, a line that shouldn't be crossed, but I feel strongly that interacting with the programming in ways that it was never expected to deal with is par for this particular course.
I am still the wizard that did it.
"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata
<scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
The question of "normalcy" is thrown out the window when actually trying to speedrun a game. Clipping through walls is a "valid" technique but it is not "normal" to the game's play. Phasing through bricks is not "normal", but it is a recognized speedrunning tactic too.
By normal gameplay, I mean in the course of playing the game normally, some combination of how you control your character yields unintended results. However, the save system is outside of the scope of what your character is capable of manipulating, hence the 'meta' tag Warp attributed to that trick. It's the same category, to me, as save corruption would be if it were possible for this game, and in a separate category to tricks such as item flying.
I'd like to state however that I don't run Half-Life 2, and have no strong feelings on whether this trick should be considered good or bad. This is purely a semantic discussion on my part.
Invariel wrote:
I have admitted that I recognize Warp's point of view, and to some extent agree with it, but that the people making the speedruns disagree, and it's their opinions that ultimately matter as they are the ones competing over records.
I think we can all agree that not modifying the ROM code is a rule that we shouldn't break, a line that shouldn't be crossed, but I feel strongly that interacting with the programming in ways that it was never expected to deal with is par for this particular course.
I similarly don't run Half-Life 2, and I don't think Warp was saying specifically, "Bleh, Half-Life 2 runs have really gone downhill," just that it was a prominent example.
And the save system is an important part of the game, because it shows what the programming re-zeroes on load, and that's a valid part of the code, particularly if it gets executed before being properly (re)initialized.
Also, the Pokémon runs (in the earlier generations, at least) involve corrupting your save game right at the start. The save system is simply another attack vector for speedrunning in the current environment.
I am still the wizard that did it.
"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata
<scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
This problem is minuscule compared to the problem of speed running and more importantly, TAS validity, being based on real physics, despite how digital and conceptual everyone would like to believe it to be.
This caught my attention. What do you mean?
Lol @ all the unjustified Warp hate.
However, as has been stated already the speedrun community is a natural democracy where the aim of the game is to get the lowest time.
There lies the core issue, though. Sure, the aim is to get the lowest time, but there are still limits to what is accepted to achieve that goal, and what isn't. It's not a question of "anything goes".
The most prominent example is that of deleting the save file from the game's menu being allowed, but opening the game's own console and writing commands there is not. Both are features supported by the game itself, but one is allowed while the other isn't. There are rules and limits imposed by the community; it's not a "anything goes" situation.
Would you find it an acceptable technique to alt-tab to Windows and use its file manager to delete the savefile? If you would not, then why do you find it acceptable that the same is done from within the game itself? "Because it's something the game itself supports" is not really a good answer because the game (eg. HL2) also supports console cheat commands, which are not allowed.
I just don't feel like it's "speedrunning" if you do things like those. It's not completing the game purely by playing it, but by messing up with its data using external means. It just doesn't feel right. There's in principle little difference to simply hex-editing a savefile using an editor.
You could easily equate "entering console commands" to "entering cheats", and "deleting the save file from the menu" to "deleting the save file from the menu". The first is obviously forbidden, the second is a set of intended subroutines.
I am still the wizard that did it.
"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata
<scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
I haven't read the whole discussion but I will express my view. Speedrunners, in general, like to make rules that make a fun and interesting run.
Minecraft is a pretty unconventional speedgame, but I'll use it as an example. There's an item dupe glitch that requires saving and quitting the game, and in some cases Alt-F4-ing out of the game entirely. This is used extensively whereas the in-game command system is banned. This is because, with commands, you can warp to the final boss and kill it by just typing. There is nothing fun or interesting about that. There is even a glitch that allows you enter the commands in a separate world, and upon loading a new world the commands are run automatically, so you can beat the game by doing absolutely nothing.
But back to the dupe glitch. To beat the game you generally need about 10 ender pearls, and getting them is completely RNG based. So the dupe glitch transforms a run from 30 minutes of RNG to 10 minutes of movement - much more fun and interesting. Additionally, the All Achievements category is practically impossible to do in a timely manner without the glitch because of the 1000+ ore items you need.
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
ALAKTORN wrote:
Lex wrote:
This problem is minuscule compared to the problem of speed running and more importantly, TAS validity, being based on real physics, despite how digital and conceptual everyone would like to believe it to be.
This caught my attention. What do you mean?
Zeupar asked me in a PM what I meant by that line, so you can read our conversation. I'm lazy, so I didn't want to rewrite it.
12:38:50 <Zeupar> Hi, LexSfX
12:39:09 <LexSfX> hellooooo
12:39:35 <Zeupar> "This problem is minuscule compared to the problem of speed running and more importantly, TAS validity, being based on real physics, despite how digital and conceptual everyone would like to believe it to be."
12:39:52 <Zeupar> Could you please elaborate on that? I don't quite get the point you are trying to make.
12:40:05 <LexSfX> oh
12:40:47 <LexSfX> TASing is an idea surrounding what a player could possibly do if they played perfectly
12:40:56 <Zeupar> Yup
12:41:07 <LexSfX> however, almost all TASes do things that a player couldn't possibly do even if they played perfectly
12:41:17 <LexSfX> because physics prevent it
12:41:21 <Zeupar> Oh, I get what you mean
12:41:33 <LexSfX> yeah, it's just a minor thing, really
12:41:34 <LexSfX> but like
12:41:35 <Zeupar> I think the community is long past that "super-human idea" idea though
12:41:38 <LexSfX> it affects the core of the concept
12:41:40 <LexSfX> yeah
12:41:46 <Zeupar> -idea
12:41:49 <LexSfX> like i said in my post, people just want to have fun with games
12:41:52 <LexSfX> so it's not a big deal now
12:42:04 <LexSfX> just like Warp's gripes
12:42:06 <LexSfX> not a big deal
12:42:18 <Zeupar> But you also mentioned "the problem of speedrunning"
12:42:24 <Zeupar> What are you referrig to with that?
12:43:21 <LexSfX> i meant that is also based on physics, but i forget what exactly i meant
12:43:29 <LexSfX> there was a point at the time, i swear! haha
12:43:42 <LexSfX> oh, right
12:43:43 <LexSfX> like
12:43:56 <LexSfX> it's possible to do things that are extremely difficult to replicate to get the best run
12:44:24 <LexSfX> the game could glitch out due to your particular computer you're using doing something that no other copy does
12:44:29 <LexSfX> that sort of thing
12:44:37 <LexSfX> on a low level
12:44:39 <LexSfX> within the chips
12:44:44 <LexSfX> electric surge, etc.
12:45:29 <LexSfX> like what happened to the Super Nintendo at the end of the SMW section of the TAS block at AGDQ 2016
12:45:55 <LexSfX> it glitched in a unique way that was only cosmetic
12:46:35 <LexSfX> anyway, my point was that these are all problems that don't matter
12:46:46 <LexSfX> because it's more fun to ignore them in favor of what's fun
12:48:45 <Zeupar> Well, what you are describing is really rare in the speedrunning world anyway :P
12:48:50 <LexSfX> exactly!
12:48:53 <LexSfX> see, that's what i mean
12:49:03 <LexSfX> it's so rare and meaningless that it shouldn't be discussed too much
12:49:09 <LexSfX> just like what Warp is talking about
12:49:20 <LexSfX> just use the right category and everything's fine
12:50:02 <Zeupar> Yeah
Joined: 7/12/2009
Posts: 181
Location: São Paulo, Brazil
Warp wrote:
Perhaps the most extreme and obnoxious example I have seen was a Minecraft speedrun where the runner alt-tabbed to Windows, started the task manager and killed the game from there, and then restarted the game. That's most definitely not gameplay. I most certainly do not consider that a valid completion of the game. You could just as well launch a hex-editor and modify the savefile; not much of a difference.
You could kill the game process by force powering off your computer. In this way, this is no different than pressing the reset button on your console.
Do you consider console speedruns that abuse resetting the console as extreme?
You could kill the game process by force powering off your computer. In this way, this is no different than pressing the reset button on your console.
Do you consider console speedruns that abuse resetting the console as extreme?
In my books I don't consider them valid completions of the game. The game was not affected by gameplay input, but by external means. Turning off the system, resetting, killing the game from the system's task manager, hex-editing the game's savefiles... it really makes no difference. Those are not playing the game. Why some of those techniques are allowed while others are not is quite arbitrary, even though they pretty much all fall into the same category of non-gameplay abuse.
(A hypothetical question would be: What if you can make the game crash via gameplay, requiring a restart, and this can be used to make the completion faster? Well, I'd say that when the game crashes, the run has ended. The game is no longer running, so it's finished. End of run. Game was not completed. I'm willing to accept individual exceptions with good reasons, but in general I would consider it ended. Which is, incidentally, why I don't really consider ACE TASes legit completions of a game. While ACE is technically impressive, once the console starts running your own code, the game has ended, and thus the run has ended. But that's another topic altogether.)
So, to summarize, what you are looking for in a speedrun is that the game's unmodified code be running for 100% of the run. Is that correct?
Edit: To that, I ask this: what about runs which reset the game (instead of powering off or crashing the system)? Are those runs invalid in your mind?
I am still the wizard that did it.
"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata
<scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
So, to summarize, what you are looking for in a speedrun is that the game's unmodified code be running for 100% of the run. Is that correct?
That doesn't summarize all that I have said in this thread. It is, however, a generic principle to explain why I'm not very fond of considering ACE TASes legit game completions. (Again, don't get me wrong: I think ACE is awesome and impressive on its own right. It shows a huge amount of work, talent and understanding of the underlying technology. However, ACE is its own completely separate category. It's not a game completion, and thus not a speedrun. At least not a speedrun that aims to complete the game. You might consider a "speedrun" that aims to run custom code as soon as possible, but that's not what's usually meant by the term.)
Edit: To that, I ask this: what about runs which reset the game (instead of powering off or crashing the system)? Are those runs invalid in your mind?
Is resetting the game part of its gameplay?
(And yes, I know there are like three games in existence where at one point you have to reset the game to continue, by design. I'm not talking about those. These fall under the category of the exceptions I mentioned earlier. And even in those I'd say that only use reset when the game requires you to, but not anywhere else.)
Joined: 8/15/2005
Posts: 1934
Location: Mullsjö, Sweden
Warp wrote:
In my books I don't consider them valid completions of the game.
So very few people have ever completed games then? Except for older games where you have no save feature. But for all other games that are designed to power on and off the console, you aren't allowed to do this in order to beat the game? It's certainly, no question about it, part of the game. Why you shouldn't be allowed to do this makes no sense in my eyes...
I think it's a matter of Warp preferring single-segment over segmented, only to the point of "If you can't do it start-to-finish in one sitting, it's not a speedrun." I don't know that this debate should be scoped outside of speedrunning simply because of inherently long games where save-and-restore is expected to be (ab)used.
I prefer watching single-segment because it shows a gestalt mastery over the game at the expense of allowing RNG beyond what's desirable, but I don't think segmented is invalid. TASes are arguably frame-level segmented runs.
Warp: Final Fantasy?
One thing that bothers me in terms of considering ACE outside normal gameplay is that many games have some really weird bugs. There are cases where games have ended up executing controller presses when the ACE potential isn't what the players were aiming for, and they've had to hold certain buttons simply to insert a harmless instruction and thus prevent the game crashing.
A less dramatic example is the many games that are written expecting the player to save just before a section of the game and reset whenever it doesn't go perfectly; developers are aware of this tendency and balance around it. Speedrunners normally don't have to do this because they often have the skill to get through a section first time, but casual players reset for this purpose a lot. (In competitive Pokémon, players resetting because they lose a battle – thus causing the other player to have to wait about 30 seconds while it tries in vain to restore the connection – is, or at least used to be, a major problem. The most likely reason people are doing this is because they're used to resetting from losses during non-competitive play.)
I also agree that for example in Sonic TASes the scrolling glitch makes it less entertaining to watch, because you just glitch somewhere and the screen scrolls to the end of the level, instead of actual gameplay. Also in Suikoden 1 there is a very easy glitch ("non-gameplay glitch") to skip every fight in the game without consequences, and people use it in speedruns.
But I'm not sure you can do anything about it, because disallowing "non-gameplay glitches" is pretty arbitrary, and it can be hard to define exactly what it is.
The definition of a speedrun is to just complete the game as fast as possible, which results in entertaining speedruns, except sometimes nowadays when some games are starting to become so maxed that they consist of many boring glitches.
The reason I keep trying to figure out what Warp's criteria are for a speedrun to be valid is because the game itself has no notion of completion - that's a player-invented concept.
The game is programmed to, after X, do Y, and if the playerbase decides that witnessing event Z is "game completion", then as long as Z happens, the game is "completed". Arguing anything else is contrary to logic.
If strategies are developed to avoid a bunch of steps in the progression toward Z, that is called "speedrunning", and as long as those strategies aren't changing the ROM of the game, anything that results should be considered a legitimate speedrun.
These strategies, as games have become larger and buggier, or older and more understood (and, in some cases, decompiled), have included removing more and more steps, but still ultimately trigger Z, what the playerbase has decided is the end of the game.
(Some might argue, "But what about 'opening New Game +'? That's the game clearly knowing that the game has been beaten." No, that's just a line of code that runs after Z that gives you more options.)
I am still the wizard that did it.
"On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer." -- Satoru Iwata
<scrimpy> at least I now know where every map, energy and save room in this game is
So very few people have ever completed games then? Except for older games where you have no save feature. But for all other games that are designed to power on and off the console, you aren't allowed to do this in order to beat the game? It's certainly, no question about it, part of the game. Why you shouldn't be allowed to do this makes no sense in my eyes...
Segmented runs are fine (as long as saving and loading is used to start the segment, not to glitch the game.)
However, ACE is its own completely separate category. It's not a game completion, and thus not a speedrun. At least not a speedrun that aims to complete the game. You might consider a "speedrun" that aims to run custom code as soon as possible, but that's not what's usually meant by the term.)
This thread seems to be taken less as a thread about "worrying trends" and more about "Warp is worrying" because speed running trends are all based on the context of what speed runners and their viewers enjoy, which seems to be obvious to everyone else. At this point, the thread is meant to help you understand and not stay worried about these trends which everyone else understands better and be contented.
This problem is minuscule compared to the problem of speed running and more importantly, TAS validity, being based on real physics, despite how digital and conceptual everyone would like to believe it to be. That, though, is also not discussed too much because there's nothing we can do about it and we all just want to have fun with games together.
effort on the first draft means less effort on any draft thereafter
- some loser
To address the original post I think I understand your position, but I disagree with it. Since the developers had to write code for it and it had to be tested I'd say save features are a part of the game (though referring to the save feature and the core gameplay with different terms can be useful).
Besides that though I think this a rather difficult thing to generalize and obviously opinions vary wildly. Personally I think this agreement is much better handled on a game by game basis. Also I think the idea of categories serves this argument very well (e.g. save corruption category vs a no major glitches category)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2794
Location: Northern California
I don't see this thread going anywhere salvageable. The best we're probably going to get is "I understand, but still disagree" coming from both sides (if you can count "Warp" and "everyone else" as sides, really). I'll be locking the thread if it starts going further south from here, so if anyone wants to keep it open for some unknown reason, now's the time to try to come to an understanding. Or, preferably, a conclusion.
EDIT: I need to word things a lot better and think before I moderate from now on. I apologize and won't be locking the topic at all.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
I can see where you're coming from with this Warp and I tend to be open to everything, but I wouldn't necessarily characterise this trend you describe as "worrying".
The core of the issue with these "meta" game techniques comes from the fact, that after all video games can be (in principle) arbitrary programs running on a general computing platform and many of the underlying abstractions these games rely on (e.g. (non)volatile memory, time and computing performance) leak through, making it impossible to distinguish where the game starts and ends, to distinguish where the boundaries of the virtual world in which we think about concepts such as characters, mechanics, rules, abilities and goals and the incidental facts about its implementation on a general-purpose computer lie.
As has been stated already, there's no one way to interpret or execute a game (how is "the" memory initialized, how quickly will computations be done, etc) given how underspecified the environment in which it is executed normally is (mostly out of pragmatism). The rigidity of old consoles masked this issue to a certain degree, because if one were to break out of the boundaries of the game world at least underlying system would behave identically: ROM would not be writable, the amount of free writable memory the same, computations be done at the same speed (console hardware iterations exist, but I'm not sure how to gauge their influence at the moment)
This certainty is only going to decrease as games running on modern OSes and vastly more varied hardware are opened up to TASing (we're not quite there yet, and there'll be many other issues to conquer such as the frequently changing nature of modern video games via online delivery of patches, something I guess the unassisted speedrun community had to put up with for quite a while now, so there's much to learn from them).
For instance arbitrary code execution in these environments would be very circumstantial (depending maybe on permissions, security features and other operating system abstractions and properties such as how memory allocation is done), but also very powerful.
So, are you willing to view video games as general-purpose computer programs or are you constraining yourself to the high-level thinking of the virtual world when there never was a specification as to what this entails to begin with (that we can uniquely determine, only conjecture (which is what you do when you talk about in-game and out-of-game mechanics), anyway)?
Most speedrunners and followers are probably in-between: obviously "accidental" corruption of important game memory by some external cause (e.g. Cheat Engine) would be out of the question, but what about killing a game while it is in the middle of a non-atomic filesystem transaction?
Is process termination a game control? Not in the view of a game as a virtual world, but in the view as a computer program it is.
What about if the game has a chat feature, that allowed you to corrupt memory by inputting certain character sequences? In that case one would break out of the notion of a virtual world where concepts like memory and its layout don't exist, but not out of the notion of the virtual world as a certain execution state on a computer, where suddenly entirely different things matter.
(I'm not even touching on the subject, what in these two views would then count as game completion!)
In the end it is a question of definition: To you it is an unfortunate fact, that game makers didn't/couldn't make their virtual worlds "watertight", to others it is an opportunity that opens up new ways for optimisation.
I think that if we promote and encourage the "category aspect" of speedrunning, that there is more than one valid way to interpret (and, by extension, to finish) a video game, we can deal with the complications arising from issues mentioned above, so be vocal about (and active in!) the categories you want to see most, so they don't go away.
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
