Disclaimer: I am posting this fully aware that my official role and weight in TASVideos decision making at this point is akin to nothing but a cheerleader.
History time!
The focus of TASVideos, as I established it, was to provide high-quality videos of flabbergasting superhuman performances in videogames. Within that framework, the primary goal was “videos that people would enjoy watching”.
Then, it was
Nach, who suggested that I should bring up the community aspect around it — something that I had totally and completely underestimated the value of — and I did. And it has been a core aspect of TASVideos ever since. Both the IRC channel, and the discussion forums. And nowadays, the Discord server.
TASVideos welcomed community submissions since day one. As more submissions poured in, it became evident that we need to define the site focus better. A focus on
speedruns — performances that attempt to beat the game in absolute minimal time given particular goals — was inevitable; this is one of the few notions that are clearly quantifiable, that is, strictly comparable — able to be judged unambiguously in a lesser-greater order.
Nonetheless, speedruns is not what TASVideos
is. TASVideos
is about entertaining videogame videos. The thing that brings people to this site, and the thing that keeps them coming back, is the expectation to find amazing video releases on the front page. This is the primary publications list.
However, there is another factor that emerged at some point. TASVideos is also a one-of-a-kind
library. It is the biggest and only website in the world that collects, nurtures and
curates tool-assisted speedruns. (This is why I chose an .org domain, or earlier, .info, rather than a .com one.) This brings certain information-preservalist responsibilities. But being a library, and also an entertainment site, means that some of the conflicting responsibilities need clever compromises: We must collect all speedruns, or at least one of each game. We should also collect notable tool-assisted
performances that are not speedruns. But we should also keep a high signal-to-noise ratio in terms of entertaining runs. We should also do the best to keep track of
history, meaning knowledge of players, knowledge of history of each speedrun and speedrun category, knowledge of game versions that have been played, knowledge of the site itself, and so on. And we should
document the findings and research that went into the making of each run, and knowledge that could go into making of future runs. And we should do all this in the highest and most lossless (or near lossless) quality possible. Yet, our files should be most accessible, so as to not exclude people who are behind slow and expensive Internet links or who use old performance-deficient computers: a library is public community service (despite being privately maintained), and it should provide equal access within reasonable limits. Equal access also benefits the entertainment aspect.
All these factors contribute into defining what TASVideos is.
