Thanks for responding, Jeff. After saying "Who would like to help?", I was thinking "I find the sudden silence ver-r-r-r-r-r-ry reassuring." I agree with the idea of "no award" being possible. Your wanting an Excellence award is similar to an idea I was going to propose anyway, so I might as well mention it now: Starting next year, which will be a big year for pyramid games from the Labs, I propose that the Icehouse community open up an Icehouse Games Hall of Fame, which will contain games that have stood the test of time and are still judged excellent. Ten years as the minimum time since invention strikes me as a good amount of time, and both official Looney Labs games and fan-made games would be eligible. The Hall of Fame will open with a few select classic games, and every year more can be added -- probably one game, but perhaps more, perhaps none -- as more games reach the age that they can be considered. Back to your thoughts, Jeff. I think it would be good to have both types of awards: a Hall of Fame Award for true excellence over the years, and an annual Apex Award (or whatever its name will be) for the best new game(s) of the year -- which could still have No Award if no good fan-made game was made that year. Now, back to *my* original question: would anyone like to help with selecting the finalists for an award this year, either with an initial pass, or an intermediate pass? Even if you all don't have time to help judge, your thoughts about the awards are desired. Let's get this off the ground! Regards, Bryan On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 7:55 AM, Jeff Wolfe <jwolfe@xxxxxxxx> wrote: >> 1. Who would like to help go through these games? >> 2. How shall we rate them? > > When I originally proposed the idea, I envisioned it as an Excellence award. > I think we should look at it through the lens of "if you could publish one > game (and only one game), what would it be?" I suspect we will not have > much trouble screening out most of the entries, because they are not yet of > publishable quality. I feel strongly that this shouldn't just be "what was > the best of the bunch?" If they're all crap, there should be no award. > Even if they're all decent but none of them are great, there should be no > award. I'm inclined to say that we should leave it open to all unpublished > games, not just ones developed in the past year. That would make it harder, > but not necessarily too much harder. Of all the unpublished games out there > I know about, there are only a handful that I would consider to be in the > neighborhood of excellent. > > So here's the vision: In five years, the award is well established enough > that Games Magazine (or a similar publication) prints a small article about > it and publishes the rules for the winner. Mainstream exposure. > >> 3. How many finalists shall we have? > > There should be 3 finalists. We are asking people to fit these games into > their convention schedule, so there should be as few as possible while still > giving them a reason to vote. The finals should be a simple selection. We > don't want to make it complicated for people. We want to give them every > reason to participate, and no excuse not to participate. If we want it to > truly be about Excellence, then we should include "none of the above" in the > voting options. > >> 4. When should the finalists be determined? > > Ideally, it should be a month in advance. We probably don't have time to do > it that soon, so I'd say at least two weeks. We need time to prepare > materials for the public portion of the process. > > > _______________________________________________ > Icehouse mailing list > Icehouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > http://lists.looneylabs.com/mailman/listinfo/icehouse >