Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

Re: [Icehouse] Publishing only a winner and a runner up

  • FromDoug Orleans <dougorleans@xxxxxxxxx>
  • DateWed, 20 Feb 2008 22:46:36 -0500
Jorge Arroyo writes:
 >   Basically, I think that with such a low number of votes, and seeing how
 > small changes affect the final order a lot, why not just use the votes to
 > get a winner and a runner up. This way the rest of the games are not marked
 > for life (especially the ones on the bottom) when they might just be really
 > good games.

Personally, I don't think hiding information is ever a good idea.  I
think it's fine to publicize the complete rankings but we should also
document exactly what the vote entailed-- a small sample, consisting
of people who happened to have the time to vote in this period, using
entirely subjective measures of quality, and that the 7-way Condorcet
tie had to be broken by the somewhat arbitrary ranked-pairs method.

Okay, maybe that's not something that will fit nicely in the Infobox.
But I would hope that people will generally not put overmuch stock in
the full rankings.  It's just one datapoint.  But I think it's a
datapoint worth keeping.

Also, remember there is a "most improved" award (which has so far only
been given once, since only one game was resubmitted).  If you get
some useful feedback from those who didn't like your game, you might
consider tweaking it and re-entering it into the next contest.

--dougorleans@xxxxxxxxx