Gish Competition Planning (sticky, please?)

[PathDæmon]

I'm sure at least a few of us think we're awesome at Gish let's prove it with some competitions. Here are three concepts for development:

Time 1 - Clean
The Gish-in-20-minutes video is out there. Can you do better?
• No cheats, no level editing.
• In-level shortcuts permitted
• Warps prohibited

Time 2 - Leetness
• Cheats, godmode, warps permitted
• One level may be edited
• Finish as fast as possible
• No AI modification

Time Competition Rules (very open to suggestion)
• Game does not have to be played in once session; each level is treated as a unit that can be edited with other units
• Submissions accepted as screencasts or video recordings (should replay files be allowed too?)
• Level begins at go, ends at "Completed!". Inter-level load times don't count
• Save Brea
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Score
• Simple high score competition. Submit as screenshot.
• Same rules as Time 1 apply.

What do you think?

[Jonathan_NL]

Regarding the restrictions:
- There could be a distinct category for cheats, as far as they are reasonable.
- Warps should be a category as well.
- Level editing should probably not happen at all. It would only get people to edit the longest level out.
- Turbo is the same as normal, except faster=harder. There could be separate records for turbo, but turbo runs should be able to enter the normal list if they're fast enough.
- It's too hard to enforce playing the entire game in one run, but provided we can trust the players it could be an interesting variant.
- High score screenshots are easy to fake.
- Replays and videos are both fairly authoritative. The disadvantage of replays is that they're platform-dependent. On the other hand, replays are very compact despite not being as efficient as they could be. They also contain exact timing information (to 1/50 second). IIRC two additional seconds are always recorded. Those should be subtracted, which matters when warps are involved. I think sending a replay with a mention of the platform, and an optional video, is best. Like screenshots, replays are also easily faked, but it's insanely hard to make a game shorter that way. The worst that seems reasonable is trimming the end where Gish no longer needs input to finish. Detecting that should be quite easy.