On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 2:44 PM, Jeff Wolfe <jwolfe@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > Looking back > I thought the first annual ICE Awards were a great success. I certainly > would like to see us continue it again next year. > I'm still convinced that three is the correct number of finalists. I agree. > I'm not sure when the > materials showed up in the Lab, but it could've been earlier. > At the show, I'd like to arrange to have the materials on hand from the > beginning. I don't remember seeing anything on Wednesday, when things were > quiet and there might have been more opportunity for early birds to work the > games into their schedules. The materials were in place on Wed evening, as planned. I had wanted to arrive in the afternoon, but ended up getting there around 8:30, and I put out the finalists' rules and game supplies on the designated table right away. Later on Scott put up the signs he'd made. So the stuff could have been up earlier, yes, but only by a few hours. The display was not very noticeable, though, being on a small table against the wall behind the giant pyramid area. On Friday I got permission from Kristin to set up all the stuff on one of the demo tables, where it was much more prominent. > For the pre-show evaluation, I think we would be well served to have a > schedule, with more time for everyone to look at the games before we make > our nominations. Absolutely. > Also, we might consider scheduling a meet-up > time early in the week so that people can identify other people they might > be able to play the games with. Sounds good. > And we ought to do a better job of publicity. The thing that the ICE Awards > can do that the previous awards did not do is reach out to the general > public. We lose that if we do insufficient publicity. The signs were > great, but that's really just a bare minimum. The publicity definitely could have been improved. > For example, the awards > GeekList should clearly identify "ICE Awards," which was not the case this > year. And we should make sure we notify any relevant media outlets we can > find. We talked about contacting BoardgameNews.com, but I didn't see them > publish anything. I'm not sure the "ICE Awards" title was finalized when Ryan made the Geeklist, though it could have been changed later. The award title was just a fuzzy thing, really, with no formal announcement about it. Contacting BoardGameNews was one of the things I'd meant to do but didn't. > Playtesting and feedback for games > One thing that I liked about the IGDC was the feedback to developers. I am > hoping that we can do something to maintain that. To avoid oversaturation, > I think we should only have one award a year, but that shouldn't stop us > from using the rest of the year to playtest and improve the games that are > being designed. > > The idea that's been bouncing around in my head is to transform the IGDC > into an "Icehouse Game Playtesting Forum." The IGPF would be a specific > time that we set aside for people to playtest and comment on new designs > that are coming out. We would schedule it soon enough that the designers > would have a chance to incorporate the feedback into their games before the > evaluation for the ICE Awards began. The result would be higher quality > award winners, because the feedback would come *before* the awards, not > after. I don't have much comment about this for now, but I'd like to hear the responses of those who have participated in the IGDCs in the past. Bryan