Among staff, there are differences of opinion on whether N-Payer-only (or player-vs-player) games qualify as a "video game" based on our site definition. Specifically, feos and I were discussing our different perspectives in the staff channel on discord. I want to place part of it here for other community members to at least be aware of these two perspectives.
After some discussion, I posted this
Here's how I'm understanding the arguments/perspectives.
General task presented by a PVP game (if humans were playing): One player must beat all others, no matter how well or poorly the others play.
my understanding of @feos perspecive: Because the game is being TASed by a single author, this stated general PVP game task is negated because that one author has complete control over all in-game players. Ergo, there is no in-game task and it's not a game by site definition.
my perspective: Even though a single TAS author has control over all the players in-game, the task of one of those players beating all the others still exists regardless of how well or poorly the players (are controlled to) play. Ergo, the general PVP in-game task is still present and it qualifies as a game by site definition.
Is my assessment of your perspective accurate?
feos replied
sounds accurate. also this makes it similar to tasing a trainer mode too
I'm guessing most members will fall on one side of this or the other; though they may have other reasoning for why they feel N-player-only games should or shouldn't be acceptable for the site.
To expand on my perspective, here's how I see PVP-only games adhering into the site definition:A video game is audio/visual. It presents its content on some electronic device in audio and/or video form.
PVP games qualify here
A video game is interactive. It requires repeated user input to progress.
Individual player actions/inputs determine whether or not the game progresses closer to the endpoint of one player being victorious over all others. So, PVP-only games qualify here in my opinion.
A video game poses a virtual task. It requires the player to accomplish some in-game job.
This is discussed in the above comments from discord. I feel that the virtual task of having one player emerge victorious is still a presented in-game task regardless of the TASer being the one controlling all the players. So, in my opinion, PVP-only games qualify here also.
User input is transformative. Which set of suggested in-game choices you make determines optimality level of your play.
Yep PVP-only qualifies here. In fact, how the the non-victorious players are controlled can impact the optimality of how quickly the victorious player will achieve said victory.
A video game is finite. It has an objective end point, or a community vetted one.
Endpoint = one player being victorious. PVP-only qualifies here.
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While the whole concept may feel anti-climactic, sub(standard)-play, objectivity of the goal was my only question, and I feel it's resolved by the very fact of how clear the goal is.
With Color A Dinosaur, the problem with the in-game task was that it was impossible to clearly define even if we try. It's inherently subjective there.
But I don't know of any other way to define a PVP goal as "one player wins". It may be subjective in that the game doesn't do anything to control either player, to compete against the main player, but it's still clear nonetheless.
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.
My first thought looking at our definition of a video game is that PvP games don't pose the task for the game overall to be won, but poses the task of winning to each individual player. But it's easy enough to argue that an "optimal strategy" for each player to win is to be pressing the buttons for all the other players to facilitate that win (or to ask the other players to cooperate to allow you to win). To an outside observer, this may seem odd, but I think it makes sense within the context of the site and the creative goals that happen in speedrunning (though I'm not sure how much real time PvP speedrunning there's been).
I do think in terms of game choice, PvP sports or fighting game may offer additional complexities. For instance, I guess we could have "win one match" as a branch (with a better branch name). But does that mean with default settings? Can we set HP/stocks/rounds as low as possible? What about map selection and randomization or allowed items selection? It's not entirely clear to me in this context, and I guess it only matters if people want to submit these specific types of movies anyway.
Regarding a related post recently where I asked about the Game & Watch Gallery 3 TAS, the goal is actually identical between single player and multiplayer: have the primary player collect 50 stars to reach the credits. The difference being that allowing linked-GB PvP in one portion of the run happens to allow a faster route for collecting these stars. I will say as far as triviality goes, the PvP component is not trivial at all: it requires extensive RNG manipulation and a decent understanding of player tactics to achieve optimality.
I guess my point of view is that a cartridge containing a PvP-only game is an "incomplete game", as one player can't play it by themself. It becomes an actual game upon adding an opponent to it. (This is similar to the way that some games consist of an engine plus level files – you can't play the engine on its own, you need to find a level file in order to create a complete game.)
In practice, attempts to play a PvP game solo normally work by defining some standard behaviour for the opponent. For example, I've seen examples where such games were analysed as "how quickly can I win against an opponent who does nothing?". Allowing arbitrary opponent behaviour could be interesting in some situations, but generally isn't (especially because most games have an option to concede).
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DrD2k9 wrote:
To expand on my perspective, here's how I see PVP-only games adhering into the site definition:A video game is audio/visual. It presents its content on some electronic device in audio and/or video form.
PVP games qualify here
A video game is interactive. It requires repeated user input to progress.
Individual player actions/inputs determine whether or not the game progresses closer to the endpoint of one player being victorious over all others. So, PVP-only games qualify here in my opinion.
A video game poses a virtual task. It requires the player to accomplish some in-game job.
This is discussed in the above comments from discord. I feel that the virtual task of having one player emerge victorious is still a presented in-game task regardless of the TASer being the one controlling all the players. So, in my opinion, PVP-only games qualify here also.
User input is transformative. Which set of suggested in-game choices you make determines optimality level of your play.
Yep PVP-only qualifies here. In fact, how the the non-victorious players are controlled can impact the optimality of how quickly the victorious player will achieve said victory.
A video game is finite. It has an objective end point, or a community vetted one.
Endpoint = one player being victorious. PVP-only qualifies here.
This right here really answers a lot. The current rules seem to allow for PVP games, but it seems that one point should have been added.
To clearly eliminate PVP from acceptance, maybe something should have been added a point about a game providing "Resistance", or in other words...something that can challenge one of the players to "Fight" for the optimization we look for. For example, I fell it is just cheap beating up a player that doesn't respond to your inputs; however, what can you say when the 2nd player doesn't know what they are doing? Another point, it does show what is theoretically possible for fastest win.
I recently discovered that if you haven't reached a level of frustration with TASing any game, then you haven't done your due diligence.
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SOYZA: Are you playing a game?
NYMX: I'm not playing a game, I'm TASing.
SOYZA: Oh...so its not a game...Its for real?
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Anybody got a Quantum computer I can borrow for 20 minutes?
Nevermind...eien's 64 core machine will do. :)
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BOTing will be the end of all games. --NYMX
I don't have much of an opinion on whether PvP-only games belong on the site, as I can see some being interesting to TAS while others being boring. But I definitely disagree with the method of ruling them out by wordsmithing the site definition of a video game. I think this would set a not-so-great precedent of narrowing the definition of video games in order to define what games are acceptable, which can come across as exclusionary and could be confusing or counterintuitive. By most definitions of the term "video game" as well as the colloquial usage of the term, PvP-only games are still considered video games. In fact, the first commercially successful video game was itself a PvP-only game.
I think if PvP-only games are to be excluded, it should be because of an explicit rule rather than an implicit interpretation of what is and isn't a video game. And the corollary to that is that I think the TASVideos definition of a video game should be updated as needed, if it excludes PvP-only games that are widely regarded as video games.
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ais523 wrote:
Allowing arbitrary opponent behaviour could be interesting in some situations, but generally isn't (especially because most games have an option to concede).
For movies that are clearly interesting to the audience, we now have a dedicated class called Alternative. In Standard, it just needs to be a well made speedrun record of some objective and well-established (standard) goal.
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.
This conversation, as well as the one surrounding difficulty modes in the "Suggestions for changes to movie rules", bother me somewhat. It feels like the underlying problem at hand is "These movies would be bad and boring, therefore we shouldn't allow them" - not based on the poor entertainment of any actual submission per se, but merely that of imagined submissions.
I feel like the argument that PvP games are "incomplete" or otherwise shouldn't fit into the definition of a video game on the site is a strange one. Yes, a TASer is not going to be playing against an opponent, but defining a video game based on how a TASer might "play" it rather than how most people would play it seems very strange to me. Not all VS games and gamemodes that require multiple players even explicitly lack a goal with 1 player - if there's some endpoint in the level, or set of collectibles a player needs to obtain to win, that is still something that can be optimised. These kinds of situations seem to be missing from the conversation.
Really, the worst case scenario I can imagine with PvP-only games is fighting games, where you can just beat up your opponent in endless combos with no resistance...but if I'm being completely honest, that is just what most fighting game TASes already look like to me. Yeah, technically the CPU is putting up a fight, but TAS play reduces that resistance to samey, boring nothingness. I suspect many causal viewers wouldn't even notice the difference.
