Hi,
I'm curious as to what the rationale is for not accepting ANY short/"trivial" games any more.
Games like Solitaire etc are on the boards and have a decent level of competition.
Games like SMB can now be completed very quickly.
I don't understand the reasoning behind having an artificial limit on game submissions, and why this thought process changed from the days when games like Minesweeper etc were (imo rightly) accepted as speedruns.
Maybe it's just me, but I feel like any game with competition should be accepted? It's not like we host the videos on-site.
There are a lot of threads on "The Site" forum with similar questions, you can look them up. The general response of the moderators/admins, is that they want to keep some level of quality control over the games here.
The short/trivial types of games are usually free games on the web - old Flash games, Unity or html5 games, games on Itch.io and some free games on Steam, to give some examples. Lots of the very short games are just very similar clones of each other, without any unique mechanic, concept or gameplay. There was also an "issue" of self-published games - everyone could develop a 20-second game in Flash, "speedrun" it and then submit it to the site.
Also, you should separate short games from short speedruns. SMB can be completed in 5 minutes, but that's because there are several warps involved that skip most of the game. The new Spongebob game has the Taxi-Glitch that can skip the entire game and spawn you right at the last level, making the runs around 2 minutes. Does that make them short/trivial games? No.
Yes, but why. To what purpose is excluding games a good thing? I have read quite a few threads etc but can't seem to find a proper answer, other than "because".
Surely a game, any game, with competition and at least two players thriving to optomise it should be welcomed in a speedrun aggregation site?
Maybe, maybe not. I would agree with you about that several months ago; but after some time around here, the more I get the approach of the mods. I still think this thread about GeoGuessr answers it the best: https://www.speedrun.com/the_site/thread/czj4g you can find all sorts of arguments there.
A couple things to keep in mind here: • The barrier of entry for creating a game is extraordinarily low these days, and as a result there are probably millions of extremely low-quality games out there that aren't really noteworthy in any way (and I would know, because I've made a fair number of those). Someone could quite literally create a game, "speedrun" it, and then request it here in like two hours, but is that something we should accept? I think not.
• Long-term, smaller leaderboards tend to require more work from site staff (replacing moderators, cleaning things up, handling issues, etc). Per-game it's not much, but with nearly 20k games on the site and counting, it adds up very quickly.
• Frankly, a lot of the requests we get for shorter/simpler games tend to be extremely low effort. In a lot of cases it's pretty clear that a run is being attempted just for the sake of getting a leaderboard created and very little (if any) thought has been put into optimizing the run, leaderboard setup, etc. Even with our current restrictions, you'd be surprised how many games just get deleted after being accepted because the requester couldn't even be bothered to set up the leaderboard.
With these things in mind, I don't think it's feasible for us to attempt track every single video game in existence (or at the very least every single game that people submit), so ultimately we have to draw the line somewhere.
Also, since you brought up Solitaire and Minesweeper specifically, worth noting this line in the request rules: [quote]We may make an exception for notable commercial releases of otherwise generic concepts.[/quote]
So the Microsoft versions of these games would not necessarily be strictly forbidden under the current rules as those could be considered notable commercial releases, but the thousands of generic Solitaire games on various app stores certainly would be.
[quote]So the Microsoft versions of these games would not necessarily be strictly forbidden under the current rules as those could be considered notable commercial releases, but the thousands of generic Solitaire games on various app stores certainly would be.[/quote] It's pretty annoying to see trivial games based purely on RNG get accepted simply due to having a Microsoft release (e.g. https://www.speedrun.com/holdem ), when somewhat longer, purely skill-based games get rejected as being too short.
You might get less pushback if that exception were applied less freely. (So contra the OP, make some rules stricter!)
@hahhah42 - that game was added by series moderators, and not as a game request evaluated by sr.c staff, though you are correct in that it was added recently. And this is an excellent example of why we are being incredibly restrictive with series moderation.
@Habreno Ah, I didn't realize series moderators could add games without needing staff approval. Thanks, I feel better about that now. That said, if you're going to have strict rules for games, isn't that a dangerous loophole? If a couple of series mods decided to rogue together, they could really do some damage...
Series mods who chose to blatantly disregard site rules can and will be removed, or possibly even banned depending on the severity of their actions. And while we generally do not delete leaderboards, ones that are created in a deliberate and organized effort to bypass the site's content restrictions, as you seem to be describing, will most likely be removed without warning.
Shouldn't there be a section in rules regarding series moderators adding games? Minecraft 4K is my favourite example... This is not even a game.
Because you made your account less than an hour ago and aren't any kind of mod
ShikenNuggets, thank you for your reply and Oreo thank you for your link to that GeoGuessr discussion.