The rules says that games should be played at the hardest difficulty, but that is it. However, games has a lot more settings than this.
For example, there is the question about how many sound channels should be used. Plenty of soon to be ok games supports surround sound.
Then there is the matter of PAL games and their refresh rate, some gives you a choice about 50 Hz or 60 Hz. Clearly 60 Hz gives shorter movies in realtime, but only if the game does not scale the gameplay to match. These additional frames can also cause less or more lag.
Continuing on the PAL games, they often offer multiple language choices. While we already have rules about Japanese vs English, what about things like German? Text may be shorter and/or longer in different languages.
And then we have backwards compatibility (as in playing the game on a console newer than it was designed for), different game version numbers and cross platform releases. It is supposedly the same game, yet it can have different glitches and so on. Should we use the latest version of the game? Any version? For example, there are different glitches in Metroid Prime depending on the version.
As for more vague things, there is things like particle intensity and the shadow intensity. These can also affect lag in some cases.
In the end, these things may not look like they will affect normal gameplay, but we can hardly call ourselves normal can we?
I believe that we need clear rules about these options as well.
