On Thu, 14 Aug 2008, Jason Spears wrote:
My thoughts are already turning to the Winter competition and how that may be run. There was talk about having some restrictions. At this time, I don't have a real preference, so I'd love to hear what others think.
There was some talk about it before the Summer IGDC (which, now that the wiki seems to be working again, I should really get around to finializing the contest results on it). If memory serves, one thought was we could do a product restriction--like last winter's 2HOUSE, or another proposal I remember was Martian Coasters--in order to help drive sales for LooneyLabs. Another possibility I recall was using some kind of theme-words; something like "giants, calendar, laser, toothpick; pick any two" (probably should use more interesting words then that though). I'm just listing posibilities here, but perhaps someone would like to advocate for any of those options.
I do think we need to do more to help drive participation, not necessarily for entries, but for judging.
This is true. We had only 10 judges, most of which were the developers for the 10 entered games.
I wonder if there was more time for people to play the games would that help?
You would think a month would be enough... but we seem to always have people wanting an extra week or two. Maybe we _should_ just resign ourselves to it, and set the judging window to six weeks; something to think about. I guess lots of groups get together only every other week (or less!), so I can see how waiting for the release, downloading the rules, printing them out, reading them and understanding them to explain to your friends, with an out-of-step schedule could lead to a lot of people just not getting around to it. Does this sound like an accurate description of anyone's experiences, or am I just entirely off-base?
Could we offer a prize to be given to a random person (non-designer) who provides rankings and comments for 75% of the games?
If someone offers to pony up a prize and to handle shipping it out, if I were coordinator, I'd be willing to draw the name out of a hat for this. (Speaking of which: is anyone excited to take over for coordinator? I felt it went smoothly enough without being a terrible burden on my schedule, so I'd be willing to do it again, but if someone is chomping at the bit for the chance, speak up now!)
We'd do well to try and tap the PrintAndPlay community if we can find some good instructions for making paper pyramids.
I thought there were links from the wiki, but it looks like I'm wrong. The bottom of LL's treehouse product page has a few links that look like they might be helpful though. http://www.looneylabs.com/whybuy/treehouse.html I'm sure some googling will turn up better links. But, is there a reason we don't have links to paper pyramids on the wiki? Is this an attempt to not drive down LL sales? If so, since /they/ have links on their very own product page, I think that's a bit of an odd argument against it. Would a LL representative care to comment on this?
Anyway; I'm not familiar with that community, but please feel free to advertise our event (once we've got a schedule worked out; tenatively, near the winter solstice is when judging would start, and entries would begin to be acepted 3 months prior to that; so, like, 5 weeks from now.)
If we ran any sort of contest on BGG, we could even give away GG, which can drive participation.
What are GG? I've been to BGG twice; once to announce the start of this summer's IGDC and once to annouce the start of judging for it. I don't think that limited level of involvement on my part helped at all to advertise the IGDC this summer.
Thoughts?
Who wants to be IGDC vice-coordinator for publicity? Just reading over my comments here, I see that as something I did not do well, so if no one wants to take over the *entire* coordinator position, I'm more than willing to hand over the part of it I actually don't like doing, especially if it's to someone who dosen't like the part I *do* like doing (namely wiki mangling, vote-counting, and interpreting the contest's rules with an IRON FIST.)
-- Dale Sheldon dales@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx