Somebody probably should start a game review thread “IF Games You Missed”, and start reviewing not only low ranking games, but also foreign language games. Who knows? Maybe that will encourage someone to start translation process.
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That’s a very good suggestion, Harry!
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@mathbrush do you know how many games people will need to play in a category to be able to vote, and how many votes they will have? Or is that to be determined?
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Limiting votes would require new tech on IFDB, which I want to limit out of consideration to Dan and anyone else adding new features. So people can vote for as many games as they want for a specific award.
The rule for voting based on the poll about promotion is that discussion and voting should be merit-based. I don’t think that needs to be boiled down to a certain number of games this year; that kind of rule often gets ignored by the people it’s intended for and makes some sincere voters hesitant. So I plan on just stating the rule that your votes should reflect your personal experience and be in good-faith. Anything that has significant evidence of not following those rules will be removed. So here are some scenarios:
-Somebody is new to IF, is into Puny Inform, and played 2 punyinform games and one adventuron game from 2022. It’s time for the awards; they vote for one of the games they played because they really enjoyed it. This is fine.
-Someone has a popular tumblr blog. They have a game in the awards. They put out a post asking their followers to vote for it. Several accounts sign up all at the same time, all vote for the same game in one poll and don’t participate in any other polls, and never use IFDB again. Those votes would be likely to be removed.
-A long-time IF author got a commercial job and had a baby. They haven’t played new IF in months, but they checked out the IFComp winner, and really liked it. Compared to games they’ve played in the past, it’s great. They cast one vote in the comp. That should be fine.
-A website tells all of its followers to send their slate of games to the top of the charts. They all come over and vote for every game in their system in every poll, which dominates the competition. None of them vote for any game not in their system. Those votes would likely be removed. (Except for the poll that is specifically about that system!). I was thinking about CYS when I wrote this, but I guess it could apply to Choicescript. Hmmm… I guess we will just see what happens. This was essentially what that vote about campaigning was about; this is exactly the kind of case that would be okay under the original rules but bad under the new ones. And I’m okay with that.
-A well-known IF author starts posting death threats about another author. They vote in the poll. That vote might be removed (harassment is against IFDB policies).
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Where will people go to find official information about the awards, past results, etc. (including at other times of the year)? Will the awards have a dedicated website, or will all that be on this forum?
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Currently, it will only exist on IFDB and Intfiction. A dedicated website would be nice, but I’d like to see how this does.
I’ve ran two other competitions in the past that didn’t work well and I dropped, so this might do the same. The past ones were the IFComp Review Competition and the Emily Short Anniversary Contest. Both failed to gain traction.
This one is designed though so that even if I don’t think it’s a good idea after the first year, anyone can come in and take it over next year. But so far we’ve regularly gotten 25-30 people voting in each of these intfiction polls, so those kind of numbers are definitely strong enough for this type of competition.
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That’s a real shame - I deeply enjoyed the reviewer competition, and was vaguely disappointed when it didn’t repeat this year. I didn’t actually engage with it though past liking forum posts so that’s a lesson learned.
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Yeah, I think only 10 or so authors participated, and so each vote counted for so much it was just swinging wildly back and forth, it just didn’t feel right to assign final results based on such little data, especially with prizes involved (I think one was cash).
It might work better under new ownership, though, if someone wants to take over!
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Intriguing! I think opening it up to the full forum might help, although you’d screw over anyone doing reviews on the author’s forum.
I’ll mull this over some and maybe make a thread about it post-Spring Thing.
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@mathbrush Is there going to be a policy on whether authors can/should vote for their own games?
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Hmm, that’s a good question.
We could just assume that every author automatically votes for their own game, so that even if someone doesn’t cast a vote for their own game I can add one when tallying the votes.
Or we could ignore self-votes. So they can stay up but are removed when counting up at the end. But that still gives self-votes an advantage, in that it makes an author’s game visible on the poll.
But I think that removing self-votes is the best option, since it keeps bold people from having an unfair advantage over shy people, and people watching the poll won’t be weirded out when the numbers change at the very end from ignoring author votes.
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Does anyone have any suggestions for how to figure out which games released in 2022 are short (under half an hour, I think it was) or long (over 2 hours)? I’d kind of like recommendations for ones to try in those categories between now and Feb. 1, but if I make it a poll about it on IFDB, that could be confusing, because it might be too similar to the actual award poll.
(Well, I guess I could wait until Feb. 1, see what other people vote for, and try playing those…)
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I am very optimistic regarding this event.
Though it would be ideal with a website, I think it would work quite well with a locked topic which only the organizers can modify and no one can reply to.
If anyone wants to discuss the awards etc they can just start their own topic.
I think it is important that this replacement for a website is kept tidy. Topics can be very organized like a website with headings, links etc so I don’t really think it is a problem that there isn’t a real website.
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Looks like there is a “short” and “long”, “long-form” tag that is sometimes used. Not sure how rigorously it has been applied to 2022 games though. More reason to tag games accurately!
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I think for this year we should go with self-determination for length, where voters determine whatever they think is short. If it ends up not working out (like the same game wins the Long game and the short game comps) we can alter it next time.
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