speedrun.com Feedback Form Response

	My feedback primarily relates to the game request rules, as well as the Detailed Game Request Rules listed on a separate page (as there are some listed on one but not on the other). I consider a very large number of these rules unnecessarily restrictive and seemingly based on a desire to appear professional as opposed to serving a wider audience. While I understand the desires of the (now-ex-) ownership to have the site appear professional, and to control the kinds of content that can be added to the site so as to make sure it does not become a free-for-all, I feel a lot of the restrictions in place hamper the fluid workings of different parts of the speedrunning community, and give speedrun.com undue authority while also limiting its potential userbase by pushing away the communities of smaller, lesser-known speedgames and making it harder for them to be satisfied using the site.

	I will go through the rules roughly in order and describe what I feel to be wrong with them; I apologise in advance for what will probably be quite a long response.

	Starting with the regular game request rules page, under "What We Do Not Accept":

"At this time, we are not adding the following:

- Short/Trivial Games
- Generic Puzzle Games
- Generic Typing Games
- Geography Games
- Vocabulary/Math and other Educational Games
- Quiz Games
- Generic Sudoku Solvers/Minesweeper Remakes/Rubik's Cube Solvers/etc.
- Visual Novels/Interactive Movies
- PvP-Related Activities
- High-Score Based Submissions
- Non-Video-Game Activities

We may make an exception for notable commercial releases of otherwise generic concepts."

	While some of these make obvious sense for a site dedicated to speedrunning, some of them reject games that can be speedrun as not "valid" enough for one reason or another in ways that I feel are arbitrary or unnecessary.

"Short/Trivial Games" - what is the defining line of short or trivial? I don't believe that setting these arbitrary lines helps speedrun.com in any way, and in fact reduces its audience by pushing away those who run "shorter" games. I think it is unfair to denigrate or look down upon short speedgames and not consider the considerable effort that can still go into them regardless of length.

"Geography Games" - I can simply think of no reason why this rule is the case. Admittedly I don't know a great number of geography games, but if they can be speedrun, they, in my view, have a place on the site. The same goes for "Vocabulary/Math and other Educational Games" and "Quiz Games".

"Generic [...] Games" - I feel these listings do not consider smaller differences that might exist between different varieties of these games. At what point does a game become generic? I also feel it may be talking down to the developers of such games, who, in at least some cases, still put effort into making what they create.


"Requesting a New Series

A new series must be requested by a moderator of at least one game within that series. We are requiring that there are at least three games in the series already on sr.c before we will even consider a series request."

	I have run into some difficulty with the series request rules on two separate occasions. The first time was last year, when I had a request rejected because there were only two games in the series instead of three. I don't think this restriction makes any sense, personally; a series is a series is a series, and I believe each series should have the same access to overall moderation regardless of whether or not they meet some arbitrary ruling on whether they are "enough" of a series.
	The second set of difficulties that I had was a few months ago, when I rubbed up against the rule stating that three of the series' games must be on speedrun.com separately before they can have a series page assigned to them. I believe this rule is wholly unnecessary: if someone wishes to create a series listing for games, I see no reason that three games should need to prove themselves separately besides some kind of desire to keep the site "clean" or "presentable" in case all of the leaderboards are not immediately used, a desire I frankly feel to be misplaced. I feel speedrun.com has tried to "curate" the games it lists, something which I believe it should be aiming to do much more minimally (e.g. obscene or illegal material) than it currently is; to sum it up, I feel speedrun.com needs to function as a framework to serve the speedrunning community's needs and take more of a back seat when it comes to deciding which speedgames are "valuable" enough to be on it. This is something of a running theme in my feelings and criticisms about the site.
	I also feel that this rule largely just puts off work for the content moderators until tomorrow instead of reducing their overall workload with a more immediate approval: instead of simply accepting a series request, this rule means that the moderators need to accept three separate game requests, make those leaderboards, then accept a series request, make that leaderboard, then move the pre-existing games into that series. I don't think any of this is needed when I feel that the flow of less stringent series requests would be better for everyone involved.
	(An additional note on this point specifically: while I cannot prove it, I am fairly sure that the rule specifying that three of a series' games must already be on speedrun.com before the series request will be accepted did not exist at the time of my submission; this series request was rejected after five weeks of waiting, and if I am right, I don't feel it fair that my submission be judged based on rules to which I did not submit it. I also discovered that in the five weeks I waited, 26 separate games had not only been submitted and accepted, but *released*, submitted and accepted to speedrun.com. I am confused by how the requests system must work if it is truly the case that 26 games can be released and accepted to the site while my fairly simple series request was not on the radar for five weeks. This complaint about game requests during my wait time is secondary, as I understand content moderators have lives and can be busy, but I do not know what system allowed me to fall by the wayside for so long when requests that had very obviously been made after mine had already been tended to.)

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	I'll now shift over to the detailed game request rules page.

"• Well-known users or moderators of other games in a series may request unreleased games beginning 21 days prior to launch. In rare cases, requests for unreleased games may be accepted by well-known users and only at site staff discretion. Series moderators may also add games to complete a series. Games will not be added prior to release for users who are not well-known."

	I feel this could do with some clarification. Who exactly counts as a "well-known" user? I don't particularly have an issue with the general nature of this rule, but something more concrete could be nice.

	I next want to deal with a number of the bullet points listed under the Request Processing Details subheading.

"Game types such as rom hacks, mods, mobile games, webgames, gamejolt, itch.io, and steam games will be held to some level of scrutiny."
	This seems unnecessarily judgemental, especially for varying platforms. Suggesting that Steam games would be held to extra scrutiny strikes me as bizarre given how many games are released on Steam and how large a force Steam is in gaming. On another note, I feel it is unfair to judge games from itch.io and Game Jolt - I feel like this sends a message that games from these primarily indie storefronts tend to be worse than games from the AAA/"big league" storefronts . I don't believe indie games deserve this kind of judgement, and it reinforces a top-down view of the gaming industry in which the most worthy games are the most well-funded games from the largest companies in the most well-known places. I don't think this has any place in speedrunning. I feel similarly about extra judgement for mobile games and webgames; I think this reinforces the idea that mobile games are less "real" than games on any other platform, and that webgames are simply little distractions rather than games that can be taken just as seriously as downloadable games (bearing in mind the long history of webgames, I also find it odd to judge them harshly when they form an important part of gaming history). Both my views on storefronts and on platforms boil down to the fact that I feel that the judgement of any request should be agnostic, and based solely on the game rather than where it might be from or what it might be played on; such things are irrelevant to their validity as speedgames, in my opinion.

"• The game should have a reasonable length such as 5 minutes or longer."
	As with "Short/Trivial Games" from earlier, I think this is vague. I also think it isn't fair to judge a speedgame on one's own idea of "reasonable" length, both to its runners and to its developers.
"• The game should show that a reasonable level of effort has been put into development from a functionality standpoint."
	Following on from the last point, I think it is unfair for speedrun.com to be any kind of arbiter of what constitutes "reasonable" development effort; I don't even think that it strictly corresponds to what makes a good speedgame. I think this rule in its entirety is passing a kind of judgement that speedrun.com, and the wider speedrunning community, is not fit to pass. I think we ought to be less dismissive of the people who work to make the games that we play for hours on end, and the effort which they put in.

"• The game should have been played by a reasonably large number of people."
	This simply has no relation to a game's value as a speedgame. There are plenty of titles that can be optimised as a speedgame that are virtually unknown. This rule has a fairly clear bias towards games from well-known developers or large publishers, and against smaller indie games. I don't know to what degree this rule is actually being enforced, but I believe it should be removed completely.

"• Fangames with common names that create confusion in the search bar may also be held to a higher standard. There are hundreds of generic Mario fangames."
	This also has no bearing on what makes a good speedgame. I also think it is unfair to dismiss the work of any developer, or the speedgame of any community, as "generic" in the way that this phrasing does. I understand the desire to keep the site "clutter-free", but I don't think this needs to be the priority over serving the speedrunning community, and given the volume of leaderboards that speedrun.com already hosts, "clutter-free" may be a moot point.

"ROM Hacks
If you are submitting a ROM Hack, then additional information including the following is appreciated: How different is this hack from the standard game? What kind of mechanical or design changes are present that alter the way it plays from the original? We generally do not want to add a very short rom hack, a rom hack that only adds one or two mechanics to the original game, or a rom hack that is primarily a reskin of the original game."
	My qualms with this are addressed as a combination of the points above.

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	To conclude: the bulk of my concerns over speedrun.com's current policies for games and series requests are summarized by my idea of what the site ought to be. It appears to me that over the past few years, speedrun.com has become concerned with appearing "presentable" and "curating" the games it accepts more and more so that to onlookers the site appears professional; however, I think that this is to the detriment of the actual usability of the site for the speedrunning community (especially communities for smaller or indie games, which typically do not have the bargaining power afforded to them by noteworthiness, popularity and community size that larger/AAA games do). I think that when accepting a speedgame or series, speedrun.com only really needs to ask two things:

	1. Can this game be speedrun?
	2. Is this game content-appropriate for the site? (e.g. not containing content too sexual, obscene, or illegal for the site)

	Past this, I feel that speedrun.com's, or any equivalent's, purpose in the community is to act as a more centralised and easy-to-work-with backend for speedrunning leaderboards, information and links, as opposed to taking a more forward position where speedrun.com presents only the games it deems not just appropriate, but "up to scratch" in some sense. As well as not being fair to developers who put the effort in, I also don't think it is fair to those games' communities, which, as far as I am concerned, should have just as easy access to the tools this website offers as larger communities. It is relatively easy for larger communities, for example, to sort out their series and handle them as they wish, whereas small communities must jump through hoops and have three games prove themselves worthy to get to moderate their series as a whole as they might wish. Beyond not being fair, I also think it is not needed. Fairness to smaller communities and cutting away unnecessarily restrictive content and request policies are the essences of my point with this message.
	I have seen it said in the speedrun.com Discord server (a few months ago) that part of the reason for the series request rules in particular has been a desire not to hand the power to create and remove leaderboards to a large variety of different people. I understand this; with that being said, I am uncertain of how easy to abuse series moderation would truly be, or whether it would actually be used for abuse (I am not aware that it has been in the past). Now that the site is in the hands of Elo, it may also be easier to prevent this from being an issue with people working full-time on developing it, and more resources behind it (though I am not an expert on this). Either way, I think moderation for series is something that all series (including those with fewer then three games in them) should have access to the same moderation and organisation tools, rather than having to qualify for some arbitrary standard based, either explicitly or implicitly, on number of games or popularity. I am aware that things potentially relating to site security are trickier to change or work around, however.


	I hope that despite the length of this message, what I am aiming at and hoping for from speedrun.com is relatively clear. It is a valuable resource and tool for speedrunners of all stripes, and I only desire to make it better with my vision for its policies and rules. With my feedback and suggestions, I hope I can make speedrun.com an easier, friendlier and less intimidating platform for speedrunners to work with, especially those speedrunning indie or otherwise lesser-known games and series. Thank you.