* Every judge (which is to say, anyone who wants to) gives every game an integer score vote from 0 to 99, or a "score" of X, meaning "no opinion".
OK, this goes to the wiki, right? That's the judges instructions.
(Poll Question: allow submitters to vote for their own game, or require an "X" vote? Systematically, either one should work fine.)
I say no voting for oneself. Too messy--some will vote lower than they deserve (deprecating), some will vote higher (bumping), and some will not want to vote (X). Just make 'em all X, I say.
** The absence of an explicit vote for any game will be presumed to be an X vote.
* For each game, all non-X votes are added together, and divided by the number of non-X votes _plus_1_; this is the game's score.
So, for practical purposes, this X thing could just be a blank, right? So long as it's not treated like a zero (0)?
** The 1 "soft zero" is to ensure that the judges (that is, the community) have some minimal level of familiarity with a game before declaring it a winner.
*** Why 1? Because we had 12 judges last time, and 2-10% of the electorate is the recommended number of soft zeroes for a score voting election. So this number may change for later contests.
I'll take your word for it. ;)
* Whichever game has the highest score wins; the second highest gets second place, third third, and so on. In the (hopefully unlikely) event of a tie in scores, whichever game has the most non-X votes wins; if there is still a tie, then it truly is a tie.
So being scored at all is a tie-breaker? Seems sort of odd, to me. I guess that works from the perspective of "if they tried it, it must be better than one they didn't deign to try." But I hope it doesn't come down to that, honestly. I'd hate for a tie-breaker to come down to, basically, "which games did folks make time to play." Ideally (yeah, yeah--when's that happen?), ideally, we'd get a vote on every game.
On that note, what do you think about throwing out mono-votes? I recall getting a ballot or two back in the day with only one game on it, ranked #1. I counted them, but it felt REALLY seedy. Like I was enabling. Then again, if folks know we throw out such ballots, they'll just pad ballots, right? Wait! We keep it a secret! Yeah, that'll work.... ;)
HA! Awesome.
I considered being all thoughtful and finding terms with a lot of connotations or denotations... but then I thought I might be skewing it with my own tastes. Sort of shaping the contest to suit some (possibly unconscious) vision I had for it. The I remembered the Facebook "First Album Debut" game and thought I'd steal it.
(For those who don't know:
1 - Go to Wikipedia. Click "Random Article" (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random).
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
(Alternatively, if the first article you hit is short, hit Random
Article two more times.)
2 - Go to Random Quotations (
http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3).
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3 - Go to flickr and click "Explore > Last 7 Days Interesting" (
http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days).
Third picture, no matter what it is, is your album cover art.
4 - Use Photoshop, GIMP, Picnik.com, or some other photo editor to put it all together.)