The Shrine

Not necessarily talking about only tool-assisted speedruns here, just the generic 'totally awesome mindblowing display of gaming excellence' videos you see in say, Youtube. I find that it's almost like the uncanny valley argument, that once you see people do certain things that are clearly impossible you stopped thinking it's an accomplishment.

For example let's take the famous Street Fighter 3 video where Diago parried a super arts with no life left and come back to win. I played SF3 a bit and I'm pretty sure if you give an average player the exact script and just keep on practice over and over, he'll eventually be able to pull it off. Clearly any top level player should be able to do it with ease if they prepared themselves enough for that situation. If Street Fighter 3 is played with your generic TAS tools (rewind, save & load, slow time, etc) I wouldn't be surprised to see someone beat Street Fighter 3 while parrying every single move.

Yet I think if you want to find a video that represents fighting game excellence, this one is it, even though it's trivial to come up with something that's technically harder even without tools involved. Why is that so? I'd say it's because you know it's real, not just someone who tried over and over again until everything went exactly right.

Now let's go to the opposite spectrum, say the initial Super Mario 3 video which is clearly tool assisted and that clearly has its place in history of awesome gameplay videos. But by TAS standards it's not doing anything too amazing. Certainly there are far harder levels in the custom hacked Marios (mostly Super Mario World) that involves doing even crazier stuff. But you don't hear about those too unless you're really into TAS videos. I'd argue that the Super Mario 3 video involves things that, while they're almost certainly impossible, looked like something you could do. There is nothing possible about say a TAS video of someone playing on a level with all spikes and just tossing a turtle shell and jump back on it over and over, but if you're good at Super Mario 3 the idea of jumping on all those cannonballs in the tank stage at least would appear possible.

I remember seeing a making of XYZ video video, and it says that all these amazing manuevers in a 30 second fight was done on the 1/20 scale, and since it took more than one try to even do it right, the video ended up taking around 20 hours to make when all is said and done. But I don't think anyone finds that to be impressive. It'd just be like you using an emulator to get pass a boss you otherwise cannot beat with the instant load/save function, but on a greater scale.

We've gone over this before, but I don't see skill based games as being substantially different than any other skill based activity. Doing what you said - getting someone to learn a script in a fighting game - is the same as getting an actor to learn the choreography for a movie fight. In both situations, the person is clearly doing the right thing at the right time, but it's scripted. Change the scenario even a little bit, and they would be completely lost. You touched on the important point, but I don't think you really get it: the difference is that someone did what they did on the fly, in real time, in reaction to an opponent as they were occurring. For the person who did it realtime, if the situation changed, they could adapt. For the person who learned a script, they could not.

If you don't like the analogy of fighting games to real fighting, consider mathematical proofs. The mathematical sophistication and ingenuity it takes to create a new proof is substantially higher than what it takes to understand a proof someone else wrote.

Err... I said I find the Super Mario 3 speed run one, which is clearly scripted, to be more interesting than the Super Mario World videos that involves doing some totally impossible thing like fighting a boss on a level that only has spikes. Even the automatic Mario levels where no player input was made look more impressive than the original video that started the whole TAS video. In fact, it's probably the only TAS video you can assume people will know what you're talking about by just saying it's 'that Super Mario 3 video'. By their nature all the TAS videos are scripted. Maybe you can say it's special because it's the first one, but I went back and looked at it again and it still looks more interesting than all the completely improbable TAS out there.

I'd say that's because this video in question looked like something that was barely possible, as opposed to most TAS videos that are clearly impossible. Maybe it had some artistic/creativity element too. Whatever it was, it's not the same as the generic TAS video that you would forget about right after you seen it.

And I was addressing what you said about SF3, and trying to explain why what that guy did live is different from handing someone a script and saying "Here, practice this." If you want to talk about what's more interesting to watch, then that's a different issue.