Looney Labs Icehouse Mailing list Archive

Re: [Icehouse] Icehouse Game Design Competitions and Icehouse Awards

  • FromDale Sheldon <dales@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • DateFri, 6 Nov 2009 11:23:40 -0500 (EST)
On Fri, 6 Nov 2009, Bryan Stout wrote:

It's sounds fine to me to have just one rating, plus nominations for
special awards. I like your proposed categories:

* Most Beautiful To Play is basically also saying "this game [...]
* Best Brain Buster also points the harder-core players to the [...]
* Best Introductory Game is the opposite: this game is great [...]
* Best Use of Theme still provides an award for conforming [...]
* Most Innovative Mechanics is my personal love, because it [...]

But if this were done, I think each should have a strong option for "no award", because again the field is too small to justify an automatic award each year. Since the theme would change from contest to contest, "Best Use of Theme" would still be an appropriate title there; but IMO the others would be better titled something like "Special Award for {Aesthetics, Depth, Simplicity, Innovation}".

Idea: after you play a game, each player can score it (and we just ask people nicely not to ballot-stuff, just like the floating tournaments); at the same time they can nominate the game for any number of special awards.

Overall winner is determined by the usual score voting procedure.

Special awards are done as an approval vote (score voting with a 0-1 range; nominated = 1, not-nominated = 0), but we set a minimum threshold (.5? .75?) which, if no game reaches it, the award is not given.

--
Dale Sheldon
dales@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx