Recent change to "speedrun" tag

Question

As of a change made yesterday, the speedrun tag's usage guidance states one should "Use this tag for questions about speedrunning in general - if your question is game-specific, please use the game's tag instead." However, of the 17 questions that still have the tag, only 4 actually follow this direction - one of which is closed as Too Broad, and the others could potentially be considered such as well. There's a reason for this: very little in speedrunning is game-independent, with every game tending to have differences in the rules of speedrunning them. Things can even vary widely within a single game depending on the type of run being done.

In particular, there are at least a few situations where I believe the speedrun tag would apply to a game-specific question. Conveniently, I can find at least one existing question for each of the topics.

When "fastest" and "best" aren't necessarily the same

In a speedrun, one obviously wants to complete the necessary tasks as fast as possible. However, this often doesn't coincide with the easiest or most efficient way to do something. Maybe you need to go into a difficult area while underequipped, maybe you need to use a lot of a limited resource, but whatever the case, you're looking for a tactic that you would primarily only use if you're trying to go fast. While one could argue that a person could choose to do such things as a challenge instead, that could largely be applied to anything, and I'd expect the most common use of the information to be more significant when it comes to determining tagging.

Example:
What is the closest Fragrant Branch of Yore to Majula?

Routing questions

Potentially a subset of the above, but it seems sufficiently different that I'll make a separate point for it. When one has options and needs to determine which one would be the fastest to take. As above, it's not necessarily the easiest or most efficient choice, and "routing" in this sense is rarely relevant outside of a speedrun (or imitating a speedrun more slowly).

Examples:
In Super Metroid speedrunning, which backup Super Missiles are fastest to obtain?
In Mario 64 speedruns, why are the keys necessary?

Speedrun rules

Seemingly the most obvious category of game-specific question that the speedrun tag would apply to, questions directly relating to speedruns of a particular game, including allowed versions and category rules. (It seems questionable whether this particular category of question is actually valid for our site, but the example question seems to have avoided an attempt to close it, which is currently providing the only precedence I'm aware of.)

Example:
Which version(s) of Super Mario World are allowed when speedrunning on SpeedRunsLive?

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As a further note, while a speedrunner of one game is only marginally more capable of answering speedrunning questions for other games, many such questions require knowledge specific to those who have an expertise in speedrunning that particular game, or otherwise have specifically studied speedrunning the game. i.e. "speedrunning Super Metroid" (to use a particularly popular example) is a distinct skill set. Most non-speedrunning Super Metroid players won't be particularly proficient at answering such a question, nor would a non-Super Metroid playing speedrunner (though either of those groups would have a better chance of answering than someone who is in neither group). But requiring a theoretical new super-metroid-speedrun tag for such expertise, plus another for every other game-specific speedrunning question, would quickly get out of hand, especially when we can simply use both more-general tags.

With this in mind, does the new intention that the speedrun tag be restricted to game-independent questions really make sense?

Answer 1

Two years later, this tag is still problematic. Its info page and excerpt have gone unchanged since the edit that prompted this question, and the tag is still used together with game tags in the majority of cases, contrary to the usage guidance; this seems to indicate that either questions are tagged without reading the tag's guidance info, or the community finds value in using the tag even when instructed not to.

For these reasons, I am proposing a new definition of the speedrun tag, which should hopefully make it more intuitive and clear to use, as well as make it easier to recognize cases in which it should not be used.

The Speedrun tag should be used when asking about techniques and rules of video game speedruns

That sounds rather simplistic, so I will go into more detail:

The Speedrun tag should be used when asking about speedrunning in general

While not many speedrunning questions can apply to multiple games, such cases exist, probably best exemplified by the question Why do speed-runners usually use the Japanese version of a game?. For questions such as this, only the Speedrun tag should be used.

The Speedrun tag should be used when asking about speedrunning a specific game

Some questions only make sense in a speedrunning context; maybe the question is asking about a new possible speedrunning route and would like to know if it is actually faster, maybe the question is about the rules surrounding submissions of speedruns of that specific game. Examples of these questions are:

• In Super Metroid speedrunning, which backup Super Missiles are fastest to obtain?
• Which version(s) of Super Mario World are allowed when speedrunning on SpeedRunsLive?
• Fastest route to 99 lives in Super Mario World
• Why is the Memory Card used an element tracked in Animal Crossing speedruns?

The Speedrun tag should be used when asking about a specific speedrun

Maybe the most common type of speedrunning questions, these ask about a glitch or technique that the asker saw during a speedrun, and would like to know more about how they work or how to perform them. Examples of these questions are:

• On San Andreas Speedruns, why do players blow up the Picador in the mission Ryder?
• In Super Metroid, is jumping after running not just as fast as running on the ground?
• Looking for more detailed explanation concerning SMB flagpole glitch
• How does "wrong-warping" happen, and how can I do it myself?

The Speedrun tag should not be used when trying to beat arbitrary time goals

Playing through a game quickly does not a speedrun make. Many games have achievements and trophies for beating a level or the entire game in a certain amount of time, but while a speedrunner would certainly be able to answer these questions, they are not about speedrunning, i.e. completing a level in the lowest possible time, not just lower than a certain time. For an extreme example, consider racing games, where almost every question about winning a race could be seen as a speedrunning question. Examples of these questions are:

• How can I beat this Dev time in Offspring Fling?
• What happens if you disable the quarantine enforcement platform before the arrival of the Sunbeam?
• Is it faster to run or dodge-roll?
• What sidequests can be done before getting Excalibur II?

But wait, using Speedrun together with game tags makes it a meta tag!

The fact that there are questions that only use the speedrun tag should already mean that Speedrun is not, in fact, a meta tag. Even if we were to count Speedrun as a meta tag, I think that some meta tags are acceptable on Arqade and, in fact, accepted. The mods tag is almost exclusively used together with a game tag, as is the competitive-gaming tag.

These tags are useful the same way any other tag is useful, by letting users browse, follow, or block an entire topic of our expertise, and by letting experts find interesting questions they might want to answer. I am not alone in finding speedruns of games fascinating even when I've never played the games themselves, the popularity of Games Done Quick speaks for itself, so I believe browsing the speedrun tag would be interesting for our users.

I think the speedrun tag, used the way I've described, would be just as useful as mods.

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Since this proposal has a relatively high score and the speedrun tag was not only used for speedrunning questions in general, I have edited the tag's description to match what I've said in this post.

Answer 2

I'm assuming the change was made based on the outcome of this question, where a mod (Robotnik) states that the longplay tag is valid as long as its questions are about longplaying in general. Since a speedrun is related to longplays (opposite sides of the same coin, so to speak), it makes sense how someone might think the same logic should also apply to the speedrun tag.

This logic does make sense. Many of the questions in the speedrun tag are asking about how to cause/exploit a glitch in one specific game. Though they are doing this for the purposes of speedrunning, that info is inconsequential for the purposes of narrowing down the focus of the question. Imagine if someone asked something like "I'm trying to catch every Shiny Pokemon in [Pokemon version], what is the spawn rate for Shinies?" The motivation for asking for the spawn rate doesn't matter - the question can still be answered just fine without that info.

For some examples within the tag... one of the more popular questions, How does the 20 minute OOT run work?, is asking how a glitch (or series of glitches) works in a specific game. The fact that the person is asking for the purposes of a speedrun are inconsequential, because it doesn't change the main question at all, and thus the speedrun can be safely removed. As a counterexample, if we removed the tag from Why do speed-runners usually use the Japanese version of a game?, now the question can't really be categorized. The question is asking about speedrunning in general, not any specific game, so removing the tag makes the question harder to understand.