(SMS Timing Debate) On Purity and Meta

A.) PURITY
Any objective in speedrunning can be interpreted in 2 ways, as a (1) challenge or a (2) sport.

(1) What makes this interesting is looking at different games, and the meanings of "any%", "100%" etc. Most games have a consistent notion of reset and file select, so it's interesting to compare them. Some have skippable intro cutscenes, and it's cool if they didn't, and then a skip is discovered. Ppl are more interested the less arbitrary/game-specific the objective is – it's more elegant to time things from a reset or file select and say "that's how long this game takes". Moreover, we share an intuition that FS is where we decide to start, and last gameplay input is where the game has def been beaten. Similarly, some will feel that reset and/or end of credits is more intuitive. The point is, this is all arbitrary *logically* but comes out of naturality and elegance, aesthetic ideas humans instinctively agree on. It's real cos people share the same experience of it. The consistency across different games is no surprise, then. To some extent, it's determined by what we've learnt from history – like how 4/4 is basic in Western music but other places clap differently – but it happened that way cos we mostly experienced it the same way. So I explained purity rationally without resorting to status quo.

(2) The thing is, most sports are unencumbered with external meaning – they're just things we agreed to play with fair rules cos we found them fun and fulfilling. In that sense, the intro cutscenes are bollox and should be removed asap. But improving the sport compromises the external meaning, which gives some ppl cognitive dissonance. Is the SMS any% wr actually that 2-file run we just saw? Does it fit what we instinctively feel SMS any% is per (1)? Theoretically, it could've been done with no extra gameplay, but it wasn't. That's why sport compromises sit badly with some ppl. Things like bringing in the Hori for Bowser throws (let alone Smashbox lol), or starting with Hero Mode files in Zeldas, or the examples given of LM and SM64DS intro CS removal. Not to mention actual mods like Bioshock Infinite. The thing is, the challenge of (1) leaves **no** room for compromise. It doesn't matter how many TAS-tricks-done-RTA turn out to be fastest. If you stay pure, you could easily kill the community. A problem Wind Waker SD and HD have faced over and over. Extreme example but yeah.

This is why a poll is needed to evaluate community perception on purity vs good sport wrt intro cutscenes. This conflict between (1) and (2) is what makes speedrunning uniquely fascinating imo.

B.) META
I think ppl have mostly struggled to articulate till yday how the removal of cutscenes alters the meta. E.g. it becomes optimal to play more riskily in early game and reset more on wr grind. It alters the psychology of the run. You can extend the purity argument to say, given we've figured out the definition of any% w/o caring about any sport aspects/RTA activity (like meta), the pure meta is the one that emerges from RTA activity based on that defn. With this logic, SMS any% *is* less resettable and needs consistent early game. I personally side more with the fun-sport side and think it's not a good reason to resist the change, tho it does counter a lot of the arguments team jcool puts forward about the run not being affected. After the change, we'd acknowledge the current wr as being done in harsher grind conditions, and so a harder achievement, maybe only slightly.