On Thu, 13 Mar 2008, David Artman wrote:
I believe the point was that a print-published game is "finished," and the IGDC is for "refining" games.
The *original* point was that if a game is already established then voters will have an opinion of it. It's hard to compare an old favorite to a game you just learned in an unbiased way. This is even more true if people have discussed the game and there's a consensus on how good it is.
This was taken from the Interactive Fiction Competition rules. However, IF games aren't board games. Our experience is that an Icehouse game on the wiki or on someone's personal web site is more likely to be ignored than to be anyone's old favorite.
I, personally, think it should just become "any game whose design was completed since the conclusion of the previous IGDC"--new games.
I wouldn't want to rule out a game which has been sitting unseen in somebody's notebook for five years. Nor am I willing to assume there are no such games left anywhere. (If I had such a game, I could decide it "wasn't really completed" and enter it anyway -- but why encourage people to finesse the rules?)
Maybe just say "The Competition is open to all original new games which make use of Icehouse pyramids. A game is eligible if it was designed in the past N months. An older game is still eligible if it has never been published in print or been a commercial product."
--Z -- "And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..." * 9/11 did change everything. Since 9/12, the biggest threat to American society has been the American president. I'd call that a change.