[Icehouse] Proposal for next contest

[Jorge Arroyo]

Hi all,

  Here's something I've been thinking about that I'm pretty sure would make
the next contest both more useful for designers and more fair overall:
Require voters to add a small paragraph explaining their votes. It doesn't
need to be a full review for each game, just a small explanation to justify
their rates.

  With this small requirement of the judges, we can all have that
information right after the contest so games can be made better right away.
It will also make it more difficult to abuse the contest and to vote
strategically instead of sincerely. Now, I'm aware that it's very hard to
eliminate strategic voting, but at least it will require an effort. If a
game is so bad it's almost broken, no amount of sweet talk will justify
ranking it 1st. And if a game is very good, it will be more difficult to
justify ranking it last (although, of course, as tastes do variate a lot,
the system might not be that effective in this case).

  The only drawback I see is that adding more work to the judges might
reduce its numbers even more and we don't really want that. But I can't see
how writing 3-5 lines of text after trying out a game will be too much work,
so I'm more inclined to add this requirement. What do you all think?

   In a concrete note,  I'm still trying to figure out why Virus Fight was
rated as bad as it was by some judges, especially other designers. It's not
only that I don't think it deserved those rates, but that if they really
thought the game was so bad, I'd like to know why so I can fix it if
necessary. So, I'm asking of all of you who rated it badly: please, speak
up. I can take it. I've made an effort to provide some limited feedback for
every game, but if everyone else doesn't do it too, it won't be very useful.
I'm still hoping that entering this contest will be proven to have been a
good decision.

  Cheers,

-Jorge
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