07.12.2021: Thread #22927: Playground Class Discussion (it's here!)
Initially we were convinced that if we create a place for creative freedom on the site, so many people will start using it that we'll end up with something that we won't have the capacity to process normally, like regular submissions/publications. We also dreamed of it being user curated, to help with both providing more room for creativity and solving the curation problems.
The solution I invented was to just have Playground as a submission status, and then such submissions would be displayed on game pages, which almost never happened.
It took us severalyears to make PG runs appear on game pages. Entry pages are still not-existent (even tho we kinda solved the listing problem by adding the concept of Goals).
So nobody ended up really knowing about Playground, nobody ended up aiming for it, and nobody ended up really wanting it. Even judges ended up feeling like sending a submission to Playground equals mercy-killing it, so quite some brainstorming went into being able to avoid it:
07.09.2024: Thread #25660: Expanding Alternative and Redefining Playground - A Proposal
We still found out that it can't be completely avoided, yet nobody was excited about it. And we discussed internally again that maybe a complete or partial merge between Alt and PG would solve it. Full merge would be publishing PG submissions under the Alternative class, and partial merge would be publishing them as some kind of a new full-blown class called Playground.
The idea of such a merge revealed 2 problems.
If every Playground movie is published just like every other currently accepted movie, that implies that the only purpose of being creative on TASVideos is to eventually have a publication with a TVC encode (and potentially awards).
If every Playground movie is published just like every other currently accepted movie, that also implies that legitimacy is not a thing anymore, simply because there's no longer any distinction between movies that follow any kind of community rules and movies that flagrantly violate them.
Regarding the first one, sure not a lot of us would be here if publications didn't exist and we only had the community itself. Like it's hard to imagine a community even existing if it didn't form around the whole publication system, and everything that leads to a publication. A movie entry is just like a final form, a manifestation of all the work that we all felt like doing to have it, both TAS authors and staff. But it's not the sole end-all-be-all goal of everything that happens here. It's just a nice result of it, a part of the whole. The final movie will only be good if we've enjoyed the process. Otherwise we'd all be doing shortcuts just to put the publication out, and a lot of people whom it depends on wouldn't even bother with it if they didn't like the process itself. The process of making something of high quality.
And the whole legitimacy matter can't be unilaterally declared irrelevant after all the effort that went into establishing and achieving it during the last couple decades, by speedrunners (assisted or not) and their audience. Maybe TASVideos spent a little too much time telling authors what to create and how, but that trend only survived for this long because it wasn't completely unilateral. It was a result of some kind of synergy between creators that became curators, new creators appearing from the audience, and the rest of the audience. Some skew was definitely there, so independent scenes appeared all over the place, but even they had rules, and often a special place where those rules were not as enforced. On speedrun.com it's called "category extensions", and they don't appear directly on the primary game pages. They're on a separate page, with cross-links.
https://www.speedrun.com/smb1https://www.speedrun.com/smbce
And absolutely unbelievably, those category extensions still follow some rules of their own! They're still not absolute chaos!
Samsara suggested to solve this by making a secondary youtube channel for the newly added Playground publication class. So that all the "perks" of regular publications are there, but it's also still clear that there's some kind of distinction. We could call than channel TASVideosPlayground or something. It'd additionally let us reduce the confusion for the youtube audience who just blindly assumes everything instead of reading the descriptions.
If people start suddenly wanting to send hundreds of their all sorts of cheated runs to PG, we'll sure still drown, but at least it'd let us proceed with them instead of drowning in discussions about every single rule that a submission may be breaking while still being well done, like maybe that's yet another rule that should be dropped, or not, etc.
The proposal, in summary:
Fully publish Playground submissions under the new class
Create secondary YouTube channel for that class
Still to be decided:
Is there a better way to show all the PG and non-PG branches on game pages? Just imagine adding a few dozen more branches to Super Mario Bros. as an example. Like maybe at this point it's better to just show them all like this?
As always, discuss, tell us if this proposal rocks or sucks, why, and most importantly how to improve it.
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.
Publication to YouTube should take less priority than non-PG movies when publishers are overwhelmed.
Forgot to mention! There's a clause similar to this for Alternative, tho currently it seems to only be in movie rules:
Depending on publication overload, Alternative runs may not be immediately encoded and uploaded to the TASVideos YouTube channel, though they will still be published on the site using a temporary encode until they are able to be officially encoded.
PG would be identical in that regard.
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.
Joined: 10/12/2011
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feos wrote:
Fully publish Playground submissions under the new class
No, cause that implies that even though some people have made Playground TASes about certain things, that they might as well make new submissions over something to get them corrected.
Alternatively use the User Files to get them adjusted. This feels like an extremely late adjustment which sounds like it would punish those that like TASing with the 3 Submission Restriction.
I remember that if there was ever going to be a Publication that it would circulate around the author's YouTube channel and not something from TASVideos.
TASVideos was only meant to host the files, but never the YouTube video about it, and that's more of a valid choice to get people to view someone's work on where they made it.
Personally I would not approve TASVideos Publishing my Playground TASes at all.
Mine were made with the goal to either be Rejected or to Challenge the Rules, some got Published instead, whilst others ended in the Playground.
In that sense only the downloadable I would be fine with, not anything else. I made these as my own goof, and I rather keep my goofs to myself.
Again, this feels like an extremely late adjustment to Playground at least to me and what I've produced.
feos wrote:
Create secondary YouTube channel for that class
No, the idea of a second channel that will be shadowed by this seems honestly quite silly, and again what I remember talking about previously about this.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Strong for yourself and also others.
Publication to YouTube should take less priority than non-PG movies when publishers are overwhelmed.
When are publishers NOT overwhelmed?
I periodically look through the submissions backlog and, nowadays, publishers seem to always have something to encode and publish. Like, it's a very rare occasion when there are no Accepted submissions in the backlog waiting for publishers to pick them up.
This raises a different question, is a backlog of 50+ submissions a norm?
My memory may fail me this time, but one of the points TASVideos must die topic raised is that it takes a lot of time to do the whole submission flow. It doesn't look like anything has fundamentally changed since then.
Ok, judges can speed-accept submissions, but can publishers do an equivalent move?
Going back to the topic of the topic. The idea looks good to me, but more judges and publishers should enter the game to handle such a major change
TASing is like making a film: only the best takes are shown in the final movie.
Going back to the topic of the topic. The idea looks good to me, but more judges and publishers should enter the game to handle such a major change
Main issue is that finding judges is complicated. For a lot of people in the modern era of TASing, judging work others do is just less interesting than doing their own thing.
I think it might be useful to adopt something similar to how RTA communities do things: have specialized reviewers that can judge movies within a specific narrow focus.
GuanlongX wrote:
auuuugh my face when games are creative and cool and don't fit arbitrary rulesets
In my opinion, treat PG as Miscellaneous categories, like how they are in SRC. The way the movies are listed right now perfectly supports it, where a drop down can be added if one wants to check what's Miscellaneous out there.
As for the encodes, I think a quick 1080p encode is sufficient to host them in a new channel like TASVideosPlayground. This is to ensure that the encodes aren't taking too much effort to make and upload. Now this isn't to compromise video quality cause runs are from "not important" class, but this is to make sure the publishers don't feel exhausted from all the encodes they have to do for both PG and non-PG runs.
I agree with publishing PG runs, however people should be aware that they aren't in the same level as Standard/Alternative runs, as they do random stuff that aren't generally accepted by movie rules.
Fully publish Playground submissions under the new class
Create secondary YouTube channel for that class
Sounds like a good solution to me. Gives me a couple ideas of what to put there if/once it becomes available too.
Still to be decided:
Is there a better way to show all the PG and non-PG branches on game pages? Just imagine adding a few dozen more branches to Super Mario Bros. as an example. Like maybe at this point it's better to just show them all like this?
As always, discuss, tell us if this proposal rocks or sucks, why, and most importantly how to improve it.
If they are shown like the link where they all are on top of each other, then perhaps have a checkbox to toggle visibility for playground? Or add it to the Filter list because right now I see no way to filter on Playground.
Publication to YouTube should take less priority than non-PG movies when publishers are overwhelmed.
Dimon12321 wrote:
Going back to the topic of the topic. The idea looks good to me, but more judges and publishers should enter the game to handle such a major change
Something that should be noted is that Playground runs account for a very very very very tiny minority of runs. Our entire approach to PG has been predicated on an assumption that there would be an explosion of usage for PG due to the potential of goals it can house, but that never materialized. Even then, such usage can be seen as unlikely to occur in the first place just due to how Alternative itself is also a tiny minority of runs.
Reposting some of my thoughts from the Staff thread on this:
CasualPokePlayer wrote:
Alternative, like Playground, has many potential different goals for many kinds of games. So logically, like Playground, it should have many more movies published.
Yet, this does not play out in terms of movies published. Out of all the movies published on the site (a grand total of 6576!), only around 8% are Alternative, while around 92% are Standard!
Even if we curate against the movies published in 2025 (a total of 289 as of writing this) with all our welcoming more movies direction, we still see a similar ratio, around 90% are Standard while only around 10% are Alternative. It's even more drastic in 2024 (a total of 558 movies), around 6% are Alternative while around 94% are Standard.
Granted, some of this is probably to do with us expanding our definition of Standard much further than what Vault had, however, it still marks an underlying point that Standard movie goals comprise the vast majority of movies which end up getting published, or rather, the vast majority of movies which people actually make.
Even if you end up including Playground into Alternative's numbers, the ratios barely change here, as there simply aren't many Playground submissions in the first place, even less than Alternative publications. You might argue the lack of submissions is due to the lack of appeal to Playground (as was said in Discord chats), but given Alternative is hosting many wacky movies already (as such users aiming to submit might see those movies as evidence their wacky movie may get published making Playground's lack of appeal irrelevant), and even it has many, many less movies compared to Standard, I would be inclined to believe even if you give Playground the same publication perks as Alternative you simply wouldn't be getting many more movies, not in numbers that actually justify treating it as "overwhelming the publishers."
The only evidence I see of the claim that Playground would end up churning out an overwelming amount of movies and thus CANNOT be granted the same perks as the other classes is that Playground has the POTENTIAL of hosting SO MANY goals, therefore there WILL be that many goals actually created and submitted by users.
This logic, as I see it, is fundementally flawed, and I see as frankly completely disproven by our publication numbers. Alternative has a similar, although "lesser" potential for an overwhelming amount of goals, yet that simply does not pan out in terms of what people actually make. I think this frankly can be understood as for nearly every game, TASers will first try to conquer the "Standard" categories (Any%, 100%, different player counts, glitchless, etc). When the TASers run out of Standard goals, they move on to wackier goals (Alternative), which eventually becomes wacky enough (e.g. slap in some cheat code) they would possibly fit more into Playground. However, most TASers will stop TASing a game after a few Standard goals (if not just a simple Any%), maybe doing one or two Alternative goals, only very, very rarely do they actually end up making movies with Playground goals. For the few games with "large" TASer communities (e.g. SMB), this ends up more likely to occur (mainly as goals able to be TASed have generally been exhausted to the point only the extremely wacky goals are left), although such is still in the grand scheme of things a minor influence, as there are few games which end up having such communities and conditions to potentially increase Playground turnout.
It should be especially noted that Playground still has optimization expectations. This, and this alone, I believe, will end up checking any "overwhelming" number of publications. People are limited more fundementally by their ability to optimally TAS outright, not whatever goal restrictions we put in place.
Dimon12321 wrote:
This raises a different question, is a backlog of 50+ submissions a norm?
For the sake of argument, let's just assume this is the norm now. Publishing PG movies, in my opinion, only changes it from "50+ submissions" to "55+ submissions" (and that's being very generous to PG), nothing really substantially changes as far as the workload is concerned, and you aren't really alleviating any workload overload due by deciding to prioritize Standard over Alt/PG (you would be doing that "naturally" by the fact an extreme majority of movies are Standard in the first place). For this line of thinking, we need more Judges and Publishers, but that needs to happen regardless of whether this change happens or not.
Is there a better way to show all the PG and non-PG branches on game pages? Just imagine adding a few dozen more branches to Super Mario Bros. as an example. Like maybe at this point it's better to just show them all like this?
Idea regarding this: have 2 tabs on game pages, one for listing regular publications (dunno how to call it) and another to list PG publications, instead of each goal having its own tab which will result in huge overflow often. Then we could just use movie modules in each of those tabs, only showing the classes we want. With PG being a real pub class there'd be no way to make them appear as just links like they currently are.
Also there would have to be obsoletion.
Spikestuff wrote:
I remember that if there was ever going to be a Publication that it would circulate around the author's YouTube channel and not something from TASVideos.
TASVideos was only meant to host the files, but never the YouTube video about it, and that's more of a valid choice to get people to view someone's work on where they made it.
I think it's been agreed among staff that hosting encodes on the author channel should become an official option.
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.
