Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

Re: [Icehouse] IGDC Winter 2009??

  • From"Jason Spears" <spielboy@xxxxxxxxx>
  • DateThu, 14 Aug 2008 21:13:33 -0400
On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 4:27 PM, Dale Sheldon <dales@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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!)

I'm willing to offer up some cash for help in acquiring a prize to
give away. (Say $10.)

>> 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?

I did some searching online and posted a separate message about
origami pyramids.

> 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.)

Once the schedule is announce, I'll see what I can do to help promote
it wherever I can.

>> 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.

GG is short for GeekGold. It is a digital form of currency on
boardgamegeek. Users generally earn it for adding content to the site.
Also people may put various items up for a geekgold auction, where
physical items are exchanged for this digital currency. It generally
trades for about $0.10 per GG.

More here: http://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/GeekGold

>> 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.)

If the vice-coordinator can still submit a game, I'll be happy to help.

-Jason