Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

["Jorge Arroyo" <trozo@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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