Twin Galaxies and official competitive gaming - Computer Games ...

I think anyone attempting to do "official" accreditation of video game superplays is in a tough spot these days, Twin Galaxies more than most. The rules when it comes to "as the developer intended it" are so grey, and the number of games and categories so high, that it's impossible for one organisation to effectively oversee it.

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If you look to, for example, Guinness' world records in general, they mandate only a relatively small number of records, and need good reason to add to them. This is a good thing, in my opinion. It is, however, something you can't do with video games.

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About 8-9 years ago, there was a move, particularly in speedrunning, away from Twin Galaxies (which specialised in old arcade games and score attacks) and to more informal communities. Undoubtedly two of the big reasons for this were the strict, and sometimes illogical, rulesets TG would produce - for example, banning all weapons other than the handguns in Tomb Raider 1 in about 2005 or so - and their, understandable, bans on any and all use of glitches. One of the most popular communities at the time was Speed Demos Archive, which did much as TG did, while being more open, allowing glitches (in their own categories if necessary), and archiving videos of all the runs they posted.

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Over the last 5 years or so, however, overarching communities like SDA itself have become more and more obsolete in the way they do things. With video capture now cheap and easy, and everyone and their dog streaming on sites like own3d.tv and twitch.tv, superplays are often being beaten almost as soon as they're made. An organisation or site can't afford to take weeks to "approve" or "publish" a run, because someone else might improve that run long before the approval is made.

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Similarly, many games have active and mature communities that, through their own experience and expertise, define their categories and rules appropriately, and won't allow sites like TG/SDA/Cyberscore to dictate otherwise. Communities and individuals will ignore groups that they disagree with - for example Andrew Garkidis, TG record holder for speedrunning Super Mario Bros., who disregarded TG in around 2009 over their decision that wall jumping was a glitch. This means, of course, that the site can't be assured of having the best results, and - especially in the the case of TG, who have leaderboards for every category of theirs under the sun - will have huge holes in their records.

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So, now, the record keeping for the cutting edge of speedrunning is mostly in small communities, and the bigger communities instead promote them rather than accredit them. On the one hand, the experts know the game better, there's much greater peer review, and you're much more likely to see the best runs, but on the other hand you're more likely to see faked or outright stolen runs (case in point, Sega's Sonic Generations speedrun competition). This is countered by the hard core of gamers that stream their attempts for hours and hours, making it pretty clear they're not cheating. Overall, I think it's a good move.

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...and then Guinness decided to belatedly join the bandwagon by setting up their own video game record database. While still using TG's records as well. And sometimes taking times from other sources to put in their GWR Gamers' Edition books, as "unofficial" records. Like I say, superplay accreditation is a mess.

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So, uh... yes! I like speedrunning

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My game really is Metal Gear Solid 2. The community isn't that big for it, and most of the activity is focused on Big Boss - beating the game with perfect stats. The categories I prefer involve collecting all of the dog tags. When I began, there was only one person that'd done it in the past (and they'd stopped doing it), so it was up to me to build what the community calls the "metagame" (entirely the wrong context, but who cares! ) for it. In the last year or so, I've managed to gather a group of 4 or 5 people that do dog tag categories, but it'd be nice to have a proper community and real competition. Still, the strategies and routes are far removed from how they used to be, and for that I'm pretty happy.

Source: http://board.sonicstadium.org/topic/15064-twin-galaxies-and-official-competitive-gaming/

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