My thoughts on TASBlocks

I've seen a bunch of people in the RTA community complain about the content of the TASBlocks. Too much goofy shit and why not do "real" TASes with TASers commentating. I've seen people say stuff about the blocks just being "TA without the S".

First of all, TAS doesn't stand for Tool Assisted Speedrun. It stands for Tool Assisted Superplay. There are plenty of TASes that don't aim for speed in any way shape or form. This is especially common for stuff like fighting games or sports where aiming for speed isn't seen as particularly entertaining, but the arbitrary code execution runs are still a part of that.

Of course this in and of itself isn't enough to completely blow off the TASes that do aim for speed. However there are lots of other issues.

The main issue I see: GDQ's are an RTA focused event. Now this might not sound like an issue at first but it is. This means only a small number of TASes are going to be submitted in the first place. The way TASes are mainly submitted are through a group submission done by dwangoAC. Honestly bless dwangoAC for his work. This means that there are basically only 5 TASes that can be submitted. In order to have TASers commentate, they'd have to attend the event. When it comes down to it, a lot of TASers don't interact with the RTA community very much, so they'd be going to an event where they don't really know anybody. Of course, not all TASers are even involved with TASVideos to begin with. Those TASers do tend to interact mainly with the RTA community, but they tend to interact hardly at all with TASVideos and would unlikely post in the AGDQ planning thread on the site. When you're basically representing an entire hobby in like an hour or so, accepting separate submissions isn't likely to happen. Plus there's the concern of stepping on RTA runners toes with TASes (this was an issue with Sonic Advance in SGDQ2015 where the category shown wasn't actually ever shown off at a GDQ yet).

Issue number 2: People don't want to watch pre-recorded content. It's a live marathon. Why should there be a segment of pre-recorded content? There's no suspense. You could just look up the run on youtube or whatever on your own time. This can be mitigated through having TASes done on hardware but that severely limits what can be shown off.

Issue number 3: TASes accepted can't be TOO similar to RTA. This was a huge problem with vvvvvv.

The way TASBlock is being handled currently sidesteps a bunch of those issues but not without fault. I remember one "normal" tas being submitted to this AGDQ and it was rejected (mario kart 64 with skips). I definitely don't envy having to decide what goes into a relatively short segment. I don't really see any other marathons with TAS Blocks either (I knew ESA did at least some but I don't remember anything recent) so there isn't exactly anything to compare GDQ's to in that regard.

In conclusion, a separate TAS-centric event should be organized imo.