Joined: 10/28/2013
Posts: 130
Location: United States
Samsara wrote:
entertainment value is what sets us (and TASes in general) apart from normal speedruns
I don't particularly agree: for me, what sets TAS apart is the quest for perfection, not entertainment. I've seen plenty of human-powered speedruns that also entertain me by design, i.e. by choosing the more entertaining option between two otherwise-equal alternatives. So the only thing that TAS offers beyond that, in terms of entertainment, is entertainment that requires skills not possessed by humans.
I think more people than you might suspect agree with me. And -- in case I sound like some inhuman omnivore, indifferent to fun -- I say this as someone whose single favorite run on the site is probably the famous "Own goal?!" SNES soccer TAS!
Anyway, I think the biggest thing is that no one should be claiming that different games in a series don't have substantial differences unless they've actually played those games. Experience has taught me that a lot of what's written about sports games is superficial nonsense, so I wouldn't trust Wikipedia, casual reviews, or "conventional wisdom" to offer up accurate information about the differences between series entries.
The difference between a human-powered speedrun and a TAS is that the human can fail, or will have to make judgments on the fly, whereas the TAS benefits from rewinding, memory state knowledge, and frame precision.
These advantages are some of the reasons why sports games are considered trivial to complete under Vault conditions (quickest victory, etc.).
How do you win at baseball optimally? Score ten runs and end the inning.
How do you win at football optimally? Score one point and wind down the clock.
How do you win at American Football optimally? Kick a field goal and wind down the clock.
These would not be entertaining to watch, even with the rampant potential for AI misuse.
The "Own goal?! SNES soccer TAS" that you make reference to (that I mentioned in my other post) is entertaining. It has entertaining qualities that go above and beyond the rules of football. You know that, you've watched it. It's actually fun to watch, and there's a "Wow!" factor beyond "yaaaay it's digital football".
As to your comment about different games in the same family of a sport's games not necessarily being substantially different, tell me, did the rules of American Football change drastically between 1991 and 1992? I'm pretty sure that they didn't, so any simulation of the same is going to look similar, even if the player names and underlying stat numbers are slightly different from year to year.
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
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2794
Location: Northern California
goldenband wrote:
I don't particularly agree: for me, what sets TAS apart is the quest for perfection, not entertainment. I've seen plenty of human-powered speedruns that also entertain me by design, i.e. by choosing the more entertaining option between two otherwise-equal alternatives. So the only thing that TAS offers beyond that, in terms of entertainment, is entertainment that requires skills not possessed by humans.
The quest for perfection is the epitome of human speedruns. We generally have a much easier time with attaining perfection, in that we have the perk of not having any limits to our reflexes, and thus we have to go the extra mile to set ourselves apart.
Entertainment and optimization/speed are equal to us. I may have accidentally implied that we cared far more about entertainment, whoops. The Vault's introduction is what sealed the deal for us treating things more equally, though I expect that when people come to see TASes, they come to see something that's superhuman. Like Invariel said, humans can fail, and there's excitement and entertainment in watching a human player speed through something without any fear of danger, knowing they could fail at any time. TASes don't fail. They will always get to the end of the game every time. This means we have to make up for that lack of danger in other ways, either by creating art or doing the impossible. This is why entertainment is so important to us as a general rule.
I think more people than you might suspect agree with me. And -- in case I sound like some inhuman omnivore, indifferent to fun -- I say this as someone whose single favorite run on the site is probably the famous "Own goal?!" SNES soccer TAS!
A lot of people love that starred, award-winning run with an 8.7 average rating. But this is about the Vault.
Anyway, I think the biggest thing is that no one should be claiming that different games in a series don't have substantial differences unless they've actually played those games. Experience has taught me that a lot of what's written about sports games is superficial nonsense, so I wouldn't trust Wikipedia, casual reviews, or "conventional wisdom" to offer up accurate information about the differences between series entries.
I'm speaking as someone who used to play a lot of sports games as a kid, and I know from experience that the most major differences between games in a series comes from the jump to a new platform. You can't expect everyone who visits this site and votes on runs to play every game in a series to determine whether or not they're worth publishing alongside each other. Hell, you can't expect people here to actually play any sports game in the first place, save for adelikat maybe (give us those A2600 sports games submissions once you're done with DW4).
We'll let this rule come up when people actually start submitting sports games runs, but bear in mind that across 12 years of site history, this new rule brought forth only 5 unrejections, two of which were submitted this year. The rest of the runs we looked at were ineligible under one new rule or another. I don't even think we had any cancelled sports game runs that were eligible, so the 5 that made it back into rotation are the only ones. I'd be legitimately shocked if the one game per series per console rule ever actually comes into play.
And remember, this is for the Vault. The Vault, inherently, doesn't allow extraneous publications. If every game in a series gets an entertaining playaround, they can all be published alongside, even if it's a series of basketball games or some other trivial sport. These rules don't apply to entertaining games.
For you to truly argue that games in the same series on the same console deserve publication alongside each other, you're going to have to actually provide proof of this. Not just proof that the games are different, but proof that the TASes will be different as well. To recap:
* The series has to be of a sport that follows our other rules
* The games have to be substantially different, not just graphics and roster updates but entire engine overhauls
* The TASes have to look substantially different as well: I'd personally say the solutions have to be different across both runs but that's not an official metric
* Both TASes have to stand proudly on their own merits and be equally technically impressive, if there's a clearly better choice then that's the one we'll always go with
If you or anyone else provides ample proof of that, then yeah we can absolutely make an exception. There may be one or two series' out there that fulfill those criteria, but I am completely convinced there are nowhere near enough of those series' to make us remove or change the rule.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Joined: 10/28/2013
Posts: 130
Location: United States
Invariel wrote:
As to your comment about different games in the same family of a sport's games not necessarily being substantially different, tell me, did the rules of American Football change drastically between 1991 and 1992? I'm pretty sure that they didn't, so any simulation of the same is going to look similar, even if the player names and underlying stat numbers are slightly different from year to year.
Eh, I don't really buy this argument. Frankly, there are more meaningful differences between consecutive years of certain sports franchises than there are between iterations of many RPGs, e.g. Wizardry. We seem tolerant of racing games, but everything you said above applies to them.
I personally would be interested in watching some of the runs you describe. If you know the game, optimal strategies can be rewarding to see. And I like being able to decide for myself what I find entertaining, after choosing from a menu whose first and primary criterion is perfection. But, that's me.
Joined: 10/28/2013
Posts: 130
Location: United States
Samsara wrote:
TASes don't fail. They will always get to the end of the game every time. This means we have to make up for that lack of danger in other ways, either by creating art or doing the impossible.
This doesn't resonate with me; I don't care about the lack of danger. I enjoy the art when it's there, but I come here to see one thing above all: perfect play against the CPU at its best. Everything else is secondary.
So you can see why exclusionary criteria based on "entertainment" are, for me, an unwelcome obstacle: I don't want anyone else deciding for me what I get to see based on their notions of "entertainment", which may (and often do) wholly differ from mine.
Again, just my opinion -- but not one I'm apologetic for having, either.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2794
Location: Northern California
goldenband wrote:
So you can see why exclusionary criteria based on "entertainment" are, for me, an unwelcome obstacle: I don't want anyone else deciding for me what I get to see based on their notions of "entertainment", which may (and often do) wholly differ from mine.
But you still get to see the run, if it's made. You frequent this site, you watch submissions as they come in. In a sense, a run that's submitted is still permanently housed on the site. It's just not put out to the public and requires a little bit more work to find.
You have to consider that our rules should never be preventing people from making the runs they want to make. If someone wants to make 11 Madden runs, they're more than welcome to. We may not publish any of them, but they can still be shown on the forums or put on YouTube for anyone interested to see, and anyone interested in these runs can find them as long as they're being made.
But as I've said a million times before, our community is the TAS community, not the sports game community or the Super Metroid community. As far as I'm concerned, the Venn diagram of the TAS community and the sports game community is the number 8, and we need a more outspoken majority (and some solid proof) to really consider changing the rule.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Joined: 10/28/2013
Posts: 130
Location: United States
Samsara wrote:
But you still get to see the run, if it's made. You frequent this site, you watch submissions as they come in. In a sense, a run that's submitted is still permanently housed on the site. It's just not put out to the public and requires a little bit more work to find.
All fair points (I tend to only watch runs with YouTube encodings, but that's me).
It's as simple as this: since the site is the leading home for TAS, I'd like to see it become the clearinghouse for the fastest tool-assisted runs for all games, regardless of their entertainment value -- a place where submitting the fastest run for a given game on the hardest difficulty is, barring obvious technical flaws, a guarantee of automatic acceptance. (I agree that timed games are problematic, BTW, though I live in hope that glitches can be found to nuke the game's clock.)
Others disagree, and that's fine. It's not my site to run, after all.
It's as simple as this: since the site is the leading home for TAS, I'd like to see it become the clearinghouse for the fastest tool-assisted runs for all games, regardless of their entertainment value
Sorry, no Desert Bus will ever be published. Superplay requires some room for being super, losing quality standards doesn't make the site better overall.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
To go back to the topic of timed sports games:
Imagine if someone manages to make an optimal speed TAS of a Madden game, using complex AI, lag and luck manipulation, a clearly superhuman and very technical TAS. Why should such a run not deserve publication, while any simple platformer is acceptable?
Current project: Gex 3 any%
Paused: Gex 64 any%
There are no N64 emulators. Just SM64 emulators with hacky support for all the other games.
andypanther: If the resultant playthrough is entertaining, then it can be published to Moons. The rules against Vaulting sports game speedruns is to prevent boring "bare minimum" completion scenarios, which are publishable under Vault rules in other genres of game.
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
Hey, instead of talking about games in a series that might be different in some way, how about make some rough run of them? I never played a single (EA) sports game, so for all I know they're literally the same with different characters.
An example would help visualize.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2794
Location: Northern California
andypanther wrote:
To go back to the topic of timed sports games:
Imagine if someone manages to make an optimal speed TAS of a Madden game, using complex AI, lag and luck manipulation, a clearly superhuman and very technical TAS. Why should such a run not deserve publication, while any simple platformer is acceptable?
The problem is in the timer itself. The introduction of a mandatory timer that has to run out before the game is finished just removes all the elements of a speedrun: There's no sense of going fast at all since you're confined to a single field. Score has to be minimized in order to keep the clock running. Strategies end up becoming trivial very fast, where every single game for a sport ends up having exactly the same strategy for fastest completion, barring the introduction of a glitch or exploit that makes one game stand out from the rest.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Consider it from another perspective:
Let's assume that game series were eligible. Also let's assume that a fan of the series were to make a TAS of every single one of those games. What's the amount of "harm" that would ensue from publishing them?
There are currently 1675 published TASes according to the statistics page. Those 9 games would increase that number by 0.5%. I somehow fail to see the harm done by this.
I don't really understand why we are being so conservative about this. I would understand it if the number of currently published movies were 30. I don't really understand it when the actual number is 1675.
Consider it from another perspective:
Let's assume that game series were eligible. Also let's assume that a fan of the series were to make a TAS of every single one of those games. What's the amount of "harm" that would ensue from publishing them?
There are currently 1675 published TASes according to the statistics page. Those 9 games would increase that number by 0.5%. I somehow fail to see the harm done by this.
I don't really understand why we are being so conservative about this. I would understand it if the number of currently published movies were 30. I don't really understand it when the actual number is 1675.
Keep in mind, by 9 movies you are talking about one series, and on one platform only. Across all platforms (including handhelds and mobile versions), counting every port individually, the Madden series has almost 160 games. Likewise, FIFA has over 180 games (not even counting spin-offs). And there are plenty of other series with similar patterns. NHL, NBA, NCAA, Rugby, and so on, and even then I'm still limiting myself only to EA Sports releases. Other competing series like PES also have very sizable amounts of games.
In the end, the numbers of individual sports game releases that could be TASed (at some point, theoretically) go well into the thousands. That's a whole world of difference from "9".
Even if you don't count Madden and other sports that don't follow the fixed time rule, the PGA Tour golf series, to give another example, has 27 installments with almost a hundred releases in total. Do we really want to publish each and every one of those without restriction?
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Consider it from another perspective:
Let's assume that game series were eligible. Also let's assume that a fan of the series were to make a TAS of every single one of those games. What's the amount of "harm" that would ensue from publishing them?
Our hypothetical fan would get bored of having a flawless 3-0 victory by the 5th game and would start on a TAS that aims at being entertaining enough for publication in Moons, removing it from Vault consideration entirely.
I don't know how much harm would ensue, but I know that I personally would get bored of and burned out from doing the same solution nine times. I suspect the judges would similarly burn out from judging tactically identical TASes.
I realized that since the only thing I have posted in this thread has been criticism, it may give the false impression that I'm unappreciative of this change. That couldn't be farther from the truth!
Please allow me to repeat what I wrote in the gummibear submission thread. I know it's just a repetition of what I said there, but I would like it to be here as well, rather than buried in a submission thread.
Warp wrote:
This might be a bit sappy, but I would like to show my appreciation that the staff of tasvideos does listen to their visitors and seriously consider their ideas, suggestions and questions. I have had way too many experiences at other sites where the staff is too stubborn and arrogant and full of themselves, and consider their own rules too holy and too rigid to ever change, and somehow seem to consider the visitors too stupid to be even being considered seriously. It's really refreshing and warming to participate in a site with reasonable and down-to-earth staff.
Thank you.
So the Mario Golf and Mario Tennis games on the GBC and GBA are eligible for their career mode?
Why restrict team based sports? Time based I understand, but why team based? Something like NFL street (where it's possible to complete the career mode with all games being manipulated to be first to 3 points instead of best score when time runs out) seems like a valid enough game to TAS.
feos wrote:
Sorry, no Desert Bus will ever be published. Superplay requires some room for being super, losing quality standards doesn't make the site better overall.
Even if someone finds (a) glitch(s) that makes it really crazy?
Sorry, no Desert Bus will ever be published. Superplay requires some room for being super, losing quality standards doesn't make the site better overall.
Even if someone finds (a) glitch(s) that makes it really crazy?
If DBfH hasn't found a crazy glitch in all the time they've spent playing it, there probably isn't a crazy glitch to be found.
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
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2794
Location: Northern California
deuxhero wrote:
Why restrict team based sports? Time based I understand, but why team based? Something like NFL street (where it's possible to complete the career mode with all games being manipulated to be first to 3 points instead of best score when time runs out) seems like a valid enough game to TAS.
Repetitive strategy, then, so it would still be rejected regardless.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Why restrict team based sports? Time based I understand, but why team based? Something like NFL street (where it's possible to complete the career mode with all games being manipulated to be first to 3 points instead of best score when time runs out) seems like a valid enough game to TAS.
Repetitive strategy, then, so it would still be rejected regardless.
Doesn't "repetitive strategy" dwell into the realm of entertainment, which I thought was rather inconsequential in the Vault tier?
On a tangent, I'm a bit ambivalent about the concept of banning sports games where each game round lasts the exact same amount of time and cannot be sped up by gameplay, and thus there really isn't a wallclock time to beat. On one hand I understand the reasons why this is not Vault material; on the other hand, I wouldn't exactly protest if they were accepted regardless.
I have a question: Is there any sports game franchise which is eligible for Vault, but which has multiple games in the series for the same platform, and thus only one of those games would be accepted at a time? (All the examples given so far seem to be fixed-time sports games, such as NFL.)
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
