Times are changing. The speedrunning community is significantly different from what it was five years ago. Heck, a lot of things have changed from just months ago. SDA has changed too, but a big question comes up again and again: are the changes within SDA keeping up with the growth of the community and the hobby as a whole? SDA's mission has remained solid and stable, but there's a very real question how this mission should evolve to best fit things moving forward.



Before I go any further, I want to make it absolutely clear that this is not a call to arms. This is not a crusade meant to drag out the admins and interrogate them on why this or that hasn't been fixed/changed. This is about the vision of what SDA represents and the role it should aim to have within the community going forward.



SpeedDemosArchive has stuck to its mission statement pretty solidly since it started accepting speedrun videos: To host high-quality videos of video game speedruns, where quality is just as much about gameplay as it is the video itself. This was especially valuable in the darker days of the Internet, where bandwidth and video services were scarce, and capture ability was lacking. Much of this has changed; capture devices are plentiful, YouTube and Twitch reign supreme, and consumers have more bandwidth available to them than they know what to do with. Yet the mission statement hasn't changed. This may or may not be a bad thing, which I'll cover in a bit.



SDA has a few roles in terms of the resources it presently offers the speedrun community.

- Speedrun Archive . You will not find a wider collection of videos anywhere, and it is free to runners and viewers alike. This is not as valuable as it once was since videos can be uploaded to YouTube or saved as highlights on Twitch, but as a hosting service solely intended for completed speedruns there isn't a more comprehensive source anywhere. There's also some peace of mind knowing that some future policy change (see: Highlights) isn't going to wipe recordings from your channel.

- Collection of Knowledge . Having a communication medium with permanence is critical to keeping up the "state of the art" for many games years down the road. This also follows for the Knowledge Base. To keep this up, people have to want to add content; I am unsure of any objective metrics for this, but the best I can say for now is that progress feels slow. Many runners try to coordinate through other mediums, like Skype or IRC, which is a losing plan for future runners who don't know what has and has not been explored.

- Central Community Hub . This deserves its own mention because there are few other places with the brand exposure that SDA has for speedrunning. If people pick up speedrunning in any capacity, they will know about SDA. Whether they choose to join and participate with it is another matter. SDA has resources for new runners, but they have to feel like the site is useful to them in the long term or else they end up not giving anything back.

- Mark of Quality . Some people may disagree with this, but the fact is that the current quality standards for gameplay are very high. This exclusivity is a big motivating factor for pushing times lower across all games, not just the most competitive ones. The phrase "submittable run" has merit because it is not tied to any current or future record, but just means that the effort and result of the run are significant. This is actually a huge role, as no other current speedrunning resource provides a generic goal for any run to shoot for beyond the runner's own quality standards.



These roles are all somewhat interconnected, but they're being supported to varying degrees by the community and site. Now the question becomes, are these the roles it should focus on moving forward? The core mission statement of SDA is dated; pretty much everybody realizes this in some capacity. But dated does not mean obsolete. It still means that SDA exists as a quality standard without claiming to be the sole authority on categories, World Records, rules and otherwise. This is convenient from the perspective of staff resources and consistency, but it also means that the overall speedrunning community is free to decouple themselves from SDA should the paths diverge. The paths are indeed diverging. To quote a statement overheard from AGDQ, "Speedrunning overall has seen exponential growth, but SDA's growth is merely linear." If the roles SDA is supporting are no longer adequate for the community, it is time to re-evaluate its efforts in those roles.



So now we get back to the original question: how do you think SDA's mission or roles should change to keep up with the changing times?



A key missing aspect I think is that SDA is solely SDA at this point. People from the larger community come to SDA for its namesake and, prior to this year, for GDQ coordination. With Games Done Quick now as its own entity, there is no guarantee that it will continue to operate through SDA (this is purely conjecture). The remaining content is catered towards runner collaboration and archival; viewers and casual runners don't have a lot to grab on to. On that front, one solution is to change front-page updates to cover general speedrunning news as opposed to just submission announcements. You can see similar models in popular fighting game community sites, such as Shoryuken.com and Smashboards.com. This does nothing to inspire more people to submit though; that's something else that needs to be dealt with reform to either the mission, the submission system, or both.



There are many, many ways to re-imagine the purpose of SDA. The big thing is not to think of the site as the problem, but the goals of the site. Even in writing this piece I had difficulty not going off-topic to discuss radical redesigns and other off-the-wall ideas. There are many problems that can be solved by throwing programmers and graphic designers at something, but this is not one of them. Focus on the roles rather than the product. If the vision is something that people are passionate enough about, the necessary talents to achieve it will find their way to realize it. We just need to find that new vision. What do you think it should be?

Thread title: Times are changing. The speedrunning community is significantly different from what it was five years ago. Heck, a lot of things have changed from just months ago. SDA has changed too, but a big question comes up again and again: are the changes within SDA keeping up with the growth of the community and the hobby as a whole? SDA's mission has remained solid and stable, but there's a very real question how this mission should evolve to best fit things moving forward. Before I go any further, [b]I want to make it absolutely clear that this is not a call to arms[/b]. This is not a crusade meant to drag out the admins and interrogate them on why this or that hasn't been fixed/changed. This is about the vision of what SDA represents and the role it should aim to have within the community going forward. SpeedDemosArchive has stuck to its mission statement pretty solidly since it started accepting speedrun videos: To host high-quality videos of video game speedruns, where quality is just as much about gameplay as it is the video itself. This was especially valuable in the darker days of the Internet, where bandwidth and video services were scarce, and capture ability was lacking. Much of this has changed; capture devices are plentiful, YouTube and Twitch reign supreme, and consumers have more bandwidth available to them than they know what to do with. Yet the mission statement hasn't changed. This may or may not be a bad thing, which I'll cover in a bit. SDA has a few roles in terms of the resources it presently offers the speedrun community. -[u]Speedrun Archive[/u]. You will not find a wider collection of videos anywhere, and it is free to runners and viewers alike. This is not as valuable as it once was since videos can be uploaded to YouTube or saved as highlights on Twitch, but as a hosting service solely intended for completed speedruns there isn't a more comprehensive source anywhere. There's also some peace of mind knowing that some future policy change (see: Highlights) isn't going to wipe recordings from your channel. -[u]Collection of Knowledge[/u]. Having a communication medium with permanence is critical to keeping up the "state of the art" for many games years down the road. This also follows for the Knowledge Base. To keep this up, people have to want to add content; I am unsure of any objective metrics for this, but the best I can say for now is that progress feels slow. Many runners try to coordinate through other mediums, like Skype or IRC, which is a losing plan for future runners who don't know what has and has not been explored. -[u]Central Community Hub[/u]. This deserves its own mention because there are few other places with the brand exposure that SDA has for speedrunning. If people pick up speedrunning in any capacity, they will know about SDA. Whether they choose to join and participate with it is another matter. SDA has resources for new runners, but they have to feel like the site is useful to them in the long term or else they end up not giving anything back. -[u]Mark of Quality[/u]. Some people may disagree with this, but the fact is that the current quality standards for gameplay are very high. This exclusivity is a big motivating factor for pushing times lower across all games, not just the most competitive ones. The phrase "submittable run" has merit because it is not tied to any current or future record, but just means that the effort and result of the run are significant. This is actually a huge role, as no other current speedrunning resource provides a generic goal for any run to shoot for beyond the runner's own quality standards. These roles are all somewhat interconnected, but they're being supported to varying degrees by the community and site. Now the question becomes, are these the roles it should focus on moving forward? The core mission statement of SDA is dated; pretty much everybody realizes this in some capacity. But dated does not mean obsolete. It still means that SDA exists as a quality standard without claiming to be the sole authority on categories, World Records, rules and otherwise. This is convenient from the perspective of staff resources and consistency, but it also means that the overall speedrunning community is free to decouple themselves from SDA should the paths diverge. The paths are indeed diverging. To quote a statement overheard from AGDQ, [u][i]"Speedrunning overall has seen exponential growth, but SDA's growth is merely linear."[/i][/u] If the roles SDA is supporting are no longer adequate for the community, it is time to re-evaluate its efforts in those roles. So now we get back to the original question: [b]how do you think SDA's mission or roles should change to keep up with the changing times?[/b] A key missing aspect I think is that SDA is solely SDA at this point. People from the larger community come to SDA for its namesake and, prior to this year, for GDQ coordination. With Games Done Quick now as its own entity, there is no guarantee that it will continue to operate through SDA (this is purely conjecture). The remaining content is catered towards runner collaboration and archival; viewers and casual runners don't have a lot to grab on to. On that front, one solution is to change front-page updates to cover general speedrunning news as opposed to just submission announcements. You can see similar models in popular fighting game community sites, such as Shoryuken.com and Smashboards.com. This does nothing to inspire more people to submit though; that's something else that needs to be dealt with reform to either the mission, the submission system, or both. There are many, many ways to re-imagine the purpose of SDA. The big thing is not to think of the [i]site[/i] as the problem, but the [i]goals[/i] of the site. Even in writing this piece I had difficulty not going off-topic to discuss radical redesigns and other off-the-wall ideas. There are many problems that can be solved by throwing programmers and graphic designers at something, but this is not one of them. Focus on the roles rather than the product. If the vision is something that people are passionate enough about, the necessary talents to achieve it will find their way to realize it. We just need to find that new vision. What do you think it should be?