Explain the TAS community to me

This thread is about TAS, which stands for “tool-assisted speedrunning” or “tool-assisted superplay”, depending (the latter can include high score runs or no damage runs or combo demonstrations or whatever). Essentially, it’s using save states, frame advancement, luck manipulation, etc. to get through a game as quickly as possible. I found about this from TASvideos.org.

Okay. I’ve never actually spelled this out before, so here’s my take on the whole thing:

  1. Even without taking in to account anything else, nearly all of these runs are breathtaking to watch, and even the ones that aren’t visually stunning are highly satisfying.
  2. Especially satisfying is seeing games that were outrageously difficult, insanely broken, or otherwise drove me absolutely nuts when I first played them being demolished.
  3. This is awesome.
  4. It also has absolutely nothing to do with actual gaming, requires no skills you’d expect from a player, and overall is cheap and dirty and shameful and disrespectful and a huge insult blah blah etc.
  5. Which makes it even more awesome.
  6. No, really. If you actually think that tapping buttons and moving a stick around for entertainment is a matter of honor or righteousness, you’re exactly the kind of yahoo who needs to get taken down a peg with videos like these.
  7. These speedrunners make no apologies. They don’t consider what they’re doing immoral or inappropriate. Because it isn’t. Video games are entertainment and should be treated as such.
  8. In all, this is an activity, a community, and a mindset that not only should be rebellious and cool…creating art for its own sake, no stupid video game prejudices, not asking for anyone’s approval beforehand, healthy competition, openness to all, hell, that’s the combo platter right there…but, as something that will never garner mainstream acceptance, pretty much has no choice but to be rebellious and cool.

Yeah…about that last one. Here are a some comments I’ve picked up:
“This run is way too boring. I don’t care how many times you submit this, there is no way we will ever put this on our site, ever.”
“I don’t get it, how is this TAS useful?”
“You’re just doing the same move over and over! Thumbs down!”
“I wish someone would do a run that had more combos! I wish this wasn’t so repetitive!”
“WTF?? Huh? Whazza? WTF? Zuh? Grah? WTF? WTF? WTF?”
“Terrible game choice. What were you thinking.”

I see a lot of demanding, a lot of debasing, a whole lot of grumbling…it’s as if their response to mainstream videogaming’s insufferable pretentiousness is to be insufferably pretentious in a somewhat different manner. And every time any type of criticism comes up, it’s the same boring old lecture over how this isn’t really playing so nobody has any right to criticize (I got it once, believe it or not, and I was far from critical of the run in question). Yesterday someone on YouTube was in my face about how “disrespectful” I was (without citing the post in question, of course). Never any attempt at humor, or reconciliation, or even just not caring.

TASVideos.org, in particular, has me completely baffled. First off, let’s get one obvious fact out of the way: They use YouTube. Therefore, no one needs them. Anyone can put videos on YouTube, and, provided they maintain at least a minimum of decorum, don’t have to worry about them ever being yanked. TASVideos doesn’t provide any special service, or hints, or even a supportive network. In fact “supportive” is about the last word I’d ever use to describe any of the posters there.

No one’s getting paid for this. No one’s getting accolades on G4 or a plush job with Sony for this. It’s a labor of love, and yet I don’t see any love from anyone. Where’s the joy? Where’s the thrill? Where’s the appreciation that something this wild and amazing exists at all and we all get to see it? Am I truly the only person who thinks this should be FUN?

P.S. Yes, I know of enterplayment.net. From what I’ve seen it’s pretty nice, but not a TAS site per se.

Well, I can’t argue that the TAS community aren’t jerks. I’ve known several people interested in TAS that won’t do it because of the bad community. That said, TAS have different criteria than regular speedruns for pretty good reasons. Since a real speedrun is dependent on human skill, people mess up, make mistakes, and the race is the point.

In TAS, people can rewind, the race really isn’t the point. Everyone knows you can use frame perfect timing, and rewind when you mess up. Finishing a game 13 frames faster just isn’t that interesting. So people focus on taking the most interesting fast route. A speedrun that exploits no bugs – especially if there are bugs that a human can’t reliably exploit due to their frame perfect nature, just isn’t very interesting.

I’d like to point out this one as one of the best TAS runs ever, and it doesn’t even beat the game:

Here’s another one, but the output isn’t as impressive:

I’m no gamer, but most of those tool assisted speedruns are indeed very boring.

I like seeing the runs where somebody completely destroys a game, taking down bosses in seconds that I remember being really difficult. They are interesting because I can appreciate the difficulty and skill involved.

The tool assisted ones are just boring though. I look at them and think that they might as well just use noclip and get it over with.

Because this deserves to be posted. And so does this:

Most people not big on competitive smash don’t even know how most of this stuff is possible. In fact, the only actual modification there is that G&W’s hammer is regular.

I don’t understand why anyone would complain about TAS. About how it would be immoral or inappropriate. It’s a game. They play it a different way that has nothing to do with us. It’s entertaining. I don’t see how anyone could have a problem with that; then again, I’m the guy who spent two days on a dissertation about how it’s wrong to ban Pokemon Stadium 2 in super smash bros brawl tournaments, so…

Here’s the most interesting non-TAS I’ve ever seen, but it’s in the same flavor as a TAS:

Do you feel the same about this speedrun?

BPC, DKW, Jragon, meet The Internet. The Internet, meet BPC, DKW, and Jragon. Hope you all enjoy your stay!

Personally, I see TASes as sort of an addendum to “legitimate” speedruns. You see one guy beat the game in 12:37, and then another guy beat it in 12:16, and then another guy comes along and knocks that down to 11:57. You start wondering, what’s the absolute floor best possible time for completely perfect play, and how close are these skilled players getting to that absolute optimum? And that’s where the tool-assisted runs come in. If the TAS record is 11:53, then you know that that guy who did it “legitimately” in 11:57 is pretty darned good. On the other hand, if it’s 9:22, then you know that the human players still have a lot of roof for potential improvement.

That’s not always true. I mean, yeah, I guess it’s theoretically true, but a lot of TAS require consistent frame perfect timings on dozens of maneuvers. Regular speedruns may require a few frame perfect things here or there, but there’s a certain upper limit to human skill. If you watch speedrunners sometimes you’ll even hear them talk about maneuvers that “can’t be pulled off without tools”. So sometimes TAS runs are well below the actual feasible human floor time.

Can’t be pulled off consistently without tools, maybe. But frame-perfect timing can be achieved through luck, even if it can’t be done by skill (though the amount of luck needed might depend on skill). If the best human can only get the timing right one time out of ten, and there are three spots in the game where timing that perfect is required, then a very determined human (with enough skill to pull off everything else consistently) can give it a thousand trials, and only upload the one where everything went just right.

I prefer this one for overall silliness:

There are speedruns that do this. Dark Souls for instance has a 1/6 drop required for the optimal speedrun.

Take Wind Waker, for a time when this isn’t the case. There’s a bug called super swim, that allows you to swim across the map in seconds, but it requires dozens if not hundreds of consecutive location-perfect movements on the analog stick. With another bug called storage you can lock the camera in a way that makes these movements predictable frame by frame (after finding the initial angle you can repeat the movements). Without locking the camera it’s really wonky, kind of guess-and-check (it’s possible to know the angle a-priori, but probably not possible to compute quickly in your head), and requires a ton of close-to-perfect movements to perform.

In Wind Waker HD for the Wii U, they fixed storage. So Super Swim is still “possible”, but only by tools because they took out the bug that made it feasible for humans to perform. (Hence all the speedrunners will continue to use the GC version).

…DAFUQ DID HE DO?!

I mean, I thought pokemon glitching was bizarre. That… That is something else entirely. What even the hell.

…Now let’s see him do that with Kaizo! :smiley:

OK, I’ll grant that true perfection might be impossible for a human in some cases, since there’s no way to do something hundreds of times in a row without being extremely consistent at it. But part of my point, I think, still stands. Even if true superswimming is now impossible, I expect that the human speedrunners for Wind Waker still use some approximation of it, to move faster than they could without it. The better the approximation, the faster you can get through. And so, for any given human speedrun you’ll find, it’s always possible for another human to beat that record, so long as you’re still above the TAS time. It might get progressively harder every time the record is pushed up, but it’ll always be possible.

Nah, superswimming is one of those “uniquely broken” things. You can’t really do halfsies with it because of a specific combination of a ton of mechanics (mostly drowning). Here’s a video of it:

Ultimately I agree with you, but there are some games that have just such uniquely broken bugs that the TAS is just going to dwarf it.

buddha david - No. Not buying that one anymore. It might have had some merit in the Wild West 90’s, but we’ve wised up. Yes, even YouTube, and if you’ve been there lately, you’ll notice that the really jerkish comments actually aren’t that common, and the truly egregious stuff gets bounced in short order. (There’s actually now far less spamming on YouTube than on Cracked or ESPN.)

My question is how that attitude was able to develop and, more baffling, why the makers of these runs seem content to put up with it. There’s none of the garbage that accounts for any of the disgusting behavior I normally associate with video games. No competition, no prizes, no achievements. And it’s a lot of work. If there’s ANY human endeavor which the prevailing attitude should by default be “watch and enjoy”, where loudmouth critics who never saw the elephant had no right to demand anything, this is it!

Here, I’ll even give a few examples. Like this Final Fight 3 one. My response to “Why would a TAS be useful in a beat 'em up?” was based on me having no freaking idea what he was talking about. Or this (old) Tekken 2, particularly that bit about “killing the community hype for fighting games” or whatever crap that is. Or this Guilty Gear where you can practically smell the pompousness.

I mean, if I did a speed run of, say, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, and someone grumbled about how the run should have lots of different combos or more tags, or the default outfits instead of swimsuits, my response would be “Fine. Knock yourself out.” Or, alternatively, “How much are you going to pay me?”

Jragon - That’s a damn shame. And going back to my previous point about TASVideos, what do you even need the community for? What exactly are they doing for you? Make the video and put it on your YouTube channel, that’s all there is to it.

Dude, you seem to have the completely wrong idea about what TASing is. TASing is inherently a competition. Using tools to assist you doesn’t change that. Putting out a TAS is all about doing the best work you possibly can.

And there’s no way you can just release your TAS on YouTube. What you watch on YouTube is the render. You’re not watching the actual movie. The actual movie is a set of button presses that has to be played into an emulator. Otherwise, how could you know the person isn’t cheating? You can’t do like the speedrun community and show the cartridge and your hands and all that stuff.

And you can’t do any of this without the community. Everything about doing a TAS requires you to know what’s been done before. You can’t just go out and do it on your own and expect to get anywhere near the levels of execution that these people do. The whole idea is to play perfectly. You can’t do that without a ton of criticism.

I’ll admit wishing that they had some sort of “don’t be a jerk” policy in their forums, but it was only a small few people causing it. The stuff you describe is not what I’d consider hostility at all. Compared to even this message board, it’s nothing. It’s just people not mincing their words while explaining their votes. And it’s not like the ones with stupid reasons usually get their way.

I just cannot get how you think TASing is just some lackadaisical thing where it’s just about watching and no competition. When you are aiming for superhuman perfection, you pretty much can’t be laid back.

Oh…my… :eek:

And I have to remind myself that these people voluntarily do this.

So as it turns out, it’s not at all about enjoyment, or thrilling viewers, or creating something amazing. It’s just another cold, bitter, joyless, cutthroat competition where everything is bits and bytes and buttons and jargon, where the finished product, the part everyone gets to see and hear, means nothing at all. Sheesh, I’m starting to think that TASVideos really does have a formula to calculate the amount of “entertainment” in a video.

I’m still going to get wowed by these videos, of course (learning the hard truth doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate Little Mac obliterating a bunch of oversized, overrated palookas), but I’m not coming within several miles of this community. I’d be seriously creeped out if I ever ran into this attitude in real life.

P.S. You think this board has a lot of hostility? Go read the stuff I’ve said about Minecraft and try to imagine another board where the response would’ve been patient explanations instead of thermonuclear outrage.