----- Original Message -----
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