After being on this site for a while I feel there needs to be a discussion about the qualifier "Bad Game Choice" when deciding whether or not to approve a movie for publication. We are quickly approaching the stage where, under the current rules, there will be no more publishable NES TAS'es that are not improvements to currently published runs. With NES being a gateway for most people into the world of TAS'ing this is a problem.
The current rules state that a movie may be rejected due to various
"Bad Game Choice" rules, many of which I agree with, but the one I am arguing is uninteresting game play.
The reasons I feel this rule should be looked into is as follows:
* As each submission is judged by a single judge and not by a committee of judges or by vote count what may be officially classified as "uninteresting" one day may not be the same tomorrow.
* What one finds to be entertaining is not universal and thus limiting the published movies can prevent people from seeing movies that are entertaining to them.
* As there is is a rating and star system in place on this website the need to be exclusive is unnecessary. Being more inclusive would allow for more games to be completed and the ratings will dictate what people consider to be the most entertaining videos on the site.
An example would be comparing
GlitchMan's NES Back to the Future 2 & 3 that was rejected in May of last year with
OmnipotentEntity's SNES Lagoon that was approved in January of 2005. I will be the first to admit that both of these games are long and not the most interesting things in the world. But, they were both TAS'ed extremely well. In addition, in both cases 50+% votes were yes (50% for Back to the Future 2 & 3 and 57% for Lagoon). Similarly only 16% voted no for Back to the Future 2 & 3 whereas 28% voted no for Lagoon.
Now, if you look through the discussion pages for these submissions they both followed the trend that while at least half of voters agreed it should be published they all had their complaints about the entertainment value, length and repetitiveness. Yet with these complaints both Lagoon and Back to the Future have been viewed, on YouTube since it is impossible to gauge those who viewed it on emulator, hundreds of times (414 for Lagoon and 300+ for every segment of the Back to the Future run). While 400 may be small compared to the views of the new Super Mario Bros submission it is still substantial enough that those viewers should not be ignored.
The similarities between these two submission and the fact that one was rejected while the other accepted make clear the arguments I was making before. First, hundreds of people spent over an hour of their life on these game so to say that they are uninteresting would be facetious as they are clearly interesting to some people. Second it exemplifies the subjectivity of the judges. It shows that between different judges there are different standards for what should be accepted and what should be denied as these are similar movies. With that, even if a
list of bad game choices was made it would be possible to change over time as the fact that this site is now 8 years old make it impossible to have the same subjective standards. Bisqwit, while still present on the site, is no longer a judge and the rules he used to judge then have evolved to now. Finally the movie proves my third point that we should just put more emphasis on getting people to rate movies and let that dictate the entertainment level. Lagoon currently has a rating of 4.1 which places it at 926 out of 933 (928 if you consider 2 of the movies are lower due to having no rating yet). That means for people who become addicted and want to watch through 925 movies first they can still encounter this movie, or if they only want to look at RPG games it is one of 105, yet it is by far not the first movie that is shown to new visitors of the site.
Now for a more recent and completely biased example. My
Uncanny X-Men run was recently rejected. I completely agree with the judge and the voters that it is a simply horrendous game, backed up by the fact that I discovered it through AVGN's review. At the same time though people thought it looked technically sound and got a 56% yes overall, which while not great is still majority. When DarkKobold claimed the run for judging he said that it would be a hard decision because of the conflict of bad game choice.
So my question is this: Why not remove the uninteresting bad game choice conflict, focusing on quality of the run and allow the ratings to dictate entertainment value?