[Icehouse] Proposal for next contest

[Jorge Arroyo]

Well, the most time consuming job judges have to do is play the games. To
ask judges to write down their thoughts (3-5 lines as I said)  is just to
put into words what's already on their heads. They already know more or less
why they're ranking the games the way they're doing it, so that work has
already been done.

Another possibility is to ask non-designers to provide feedback and to
require designers to provide feedback. This way if you want to participate
with your game, you know you have to provide feedback for all the entries so
that your entry is valid. This seems reasonable if we expect voting turnout
not to increase anytime soon. At least this way we know we won't decrease it
while we also know all the games will get some amount of feedback for sure.

Avri, I'm eager to read your feedback about my game. I look forward to you
posting it.

Cheers,

-Jorge

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Avri Klemer <avri at surpriselake.org> wrote:

>  You think we had a poor voting turnout this time, but you want people to
> do even more work next time . . .
>
> I *will* post feedback on all games shortly.
>
> a
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* Jorge Arroyo <trozo at makasoft.net>
> *To:* Icehouse Discussion List <icehouse at lists.looneylabs.com>
> *Sent:* Sunday, March 23, 2008 3:52 PM
> *Subject:* [Icehouse] Proposal for next contest
>
> 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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>
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