Looking ahead to a 2025 play event (your input wanted -- yes, *you*!)

Playing
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I’ll definitely want to trade out some of my ideas for those on Hidnook’s list if the Olympics theme ends up winning, though right now it looks like People’s Champion is pulling strongly ahead. (If anyone else has suggestions for Olympic events, please don’t hesitate to post them. Nothing is decided yet.)

Special thanks and big round of applause for mathbrush for volunteering to give the overview of contestants! I didn’t mention it above, but the only other thing that 80% of people said they enjoyed about the Free IF Playoffs was his run-down of the various games competing in each division. He put in a lot of time to prepare each one, and I’m grateful that’s he’s willing to do it again.

On the question of large games vs. small – I get it. I worried about that as a factor in the Free IF Playoffs, too, but don’t forget that 3 out of 4 of the division champions were long-form!

My plan is that the same honor system that was used for FIFP would be used here. Specifically:

  1. Players must play both games before voting on a match.
  2. Players must approach each game with an open mind and give it a fair chance to “hook” them.
  3. Players do not need to finish both games but must play each game long enough to satisfy their own honor that their opinion is fair; there is no minimum time requirement but the standard of 2 hours per game from IF Comp is recommended as a basic rule of thumb.

Since the rules aren’t enforceable we just have to rely on the goodwill and good faith of the participants. Fortunately, there’s good reason to do so! My analysis of the FIFP results using the new IFDB backup data suggests that participants were honorable – something worth cheering. I have a lot more trust in the process this time around.

So the worst case scenario to me is that a lot of players get partway through one or more long-form works before voting, making them that more likely to return later and finish. That seems like a good outcome if the purpose is to promote play and discussion! Perhaps someone will want to try to organize some let’s-play threads, “book club”-type PMs or ClubFloyd events in the quiet play period to tackle some large games as a group?

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The popularity of the People’s Champion option has only been growing, and I’m guessing that it will win this year, but since that’s pretty well sketched out I’m continuing to think about the IF Olympics theme. On the topic of geography for this theme… if use of actual countries or regions is contentious for some reason, then some possibilities are:

  • allow registered players to claim real countries on whatever basis they like (first come, first served in order of registration)

  • allow registered players to declare their own country (e.g. Anglophone Atlantis, Grooverland, the Democratic People’s Republic of Veeder, or whatever the “founder” thinks up) – could be fun for participants to design flags for these

  • create a list of countries in advance and assign players at random to them

The impetus for the “geography” part is to create something of a team spirit among groups of players for purposes of cheering their adopted games, generating cooperative discussion about the contesting games’ merits for each event on the associated voting threads, and the like. Also, mechanically, it would serve in place of a prediction game via the accumulated medal score for each country.

The rough outline for this version would be:

  • Fan Registration/Country Formation - As fans register, they would declare their claim (and/or invention) of a country on a specific thread, or they would explicitly declare that they are joining a previous country.

  • Event Declaration - The definitive set of events to be held would be announced, to guide the selection of games in the next stage.

  • Game Selection/Draft - Each country would be given a randomly-assigned draft priority. Over the course of several weeks (to allow time for deliberation and/or response lag), a draft of games to various countries’ teams would be conducted on a specific thread. (Maybe three games per country? Maybe 5? The number is somewhat dependent on the number of countries and the number of events.)

  • Event Assignments - Each country would assign their “contestant” games to the event(s) to which they are best suited. There would be a limit to the number of events to which any one game can be assigned. Only one contestant game from any country could compete in any one event.

  • Play Schedule and “Training” - The schedule of events would be announced. There would be a significant period of time to allow players to look over the events and competitors and play some games in advance. (This seems extra important for this event because potentially many games could be competing in any one event, and potentially more than one event could be going on at one time.)

  • Contests Held - The events would actually happen, with anonymous voting. I think that for this format voters would have to submit a minimum number of votes across multiple contestants in each event, to help counteract country-based partisanship. Voting cycles would be one or two weeks long (potentially staggered), with some events running concurrently and/or overlapping. Gold, silver and bronze medals issued based on vote totals at the end of each event’s voting, and points for these awarded to the games’ respective countries. (Note that I still haven’t come up with a good way to compensate for the outsized influence of a large “country” on voting. Insisting that a country can’t vote for its own representatives seems silly, and only flips the sign of the imbalance instead of resolving it – it would unduly hurt large countries. This could be a fatal flaw for the whole country concept, but I hope not because I think having teams of players would add something to the tournament’s value in terms of generating discussion. Suggestions are welcome!)

  • Award Ceremony - Final standings posted. Virtual awards to players and/or countries, of types TBD, to recognize their contributions to the event’s atmosphere and success.

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23

I’m into it. Come for the amateur vexillography, stay for the games!

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24

lol, one must evaluate the method Vexillology(MilitaryNavalHistorian) at least thrice :smiley:

seriously, why not allow player teaming on the “geography” of IF genres ? this clash with the random draft, but is sure to get interesting debates…

Amused regards,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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(Moderators: be ready to move this into a separate thread :wink: )

now that I think on… what are the flags for IF genres ?

horror IF seems the easiest: the jolly roger ((un)dead head & bones…), but there’s many possible variations.

Wild west IF is another interesting flag: a sheriff’s star on a sand background (but I think coloradoans will disagree on the background…), optionally with a pair of crossed revolvers below the sheriff’s star.

science fiction IF can have a black flag with many small stars (no need to elaborate, I hope)

old school IF can have a white house (not the one @ 1600 PA avenue…) in their flag, but everyone WILL disagree on all design save their own… :smiley:

and so on…

more amused regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Agreed! We should have a set list of “countries”! I think Anglophone Atlantis has to be one. Grooverland, too. What other countries exist in the IF community? Anchorhead could be, although that is a city…

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I like the idea of using IF-related fictional regions, and I think it would be fine if some of them were cities/towns/etc.

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OK, I’m convinced that fictional geography would be better than real geography, and it does seem fitting. This idea has been officially adopted.

Again, the momentum is behind the People’s Champion option, but if an IF Olympics were to happen this year or a future year, the best idea I’ve come up with to let the actual voting work fairly is to ensure that each country has the same number of players assigned to it. This would mean that either A) people who want to found their own country have to self-organize into groups large enough to qualify, or B) the list of countries would have to be decided in advance and players would be assigned to them randomly once registration is complete.

Another possibility is to assign each contestant game a golf-style “handicap” proportional to the difference between the size of their adopting country and the size of the largest country with a competing game. For example, a game from a 1-person country competing in an event with a 7-person country would automatically get +6 to their score for the event. (There would be an assumption, but not a requirement, that every player would cast one of their votes for their country’s representative.)

Does anyone else have thoughts?

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I think it would be more interesting to have randomly-assigned citizens, to encourage interaction between players who would otherwise not interact very much. Like an icebreaker-type thing, but for strangers on the Internet.

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With some help from someone offline, there’s now a solid plan for a handicapping system for the IF Olympics theme, which would allow countries of any size to get a level (enough) playing field. That’s good because it would simplify the country formation stage.

Here’s an example situation showing how the handicapping system would work:

#	Game	country size	handicap 1	base score	poss oth votes	exp oth votes	exp votes 1		handicap 2	rounded h2	exp total	net handicap
-	----	------------	----------	----------	--------------	-------------	-----------		----------	----------	-----------	------------
1	A		1				6			7			40				8.0				15.0			0.0			0			15.0		+6
2	B		3				4			7			36				7.2				14.2			0.8			1			15.2		+5
3	C		5				2			7			32				6.4				13.4			1.6			2			15.4		+4
4	D		2				5			7			38				7.6				14.6			0.4			0			14.6		+5
5	E		3				4			7			36				7.2				14.2			0.8			1			15.2		+5
6	F		7				0			7			28				5.6				12.6			2.4			2			14.6		+2

This would be an event with six competing games, A through F. The number of players in the country that submitted each game is shown under “country size”. Each participating fan would be casting three anonymous votes. There are 21 total voters from the various countries.

It’s assumed that every member of a country will vote for the game that their country submitted. (It’s not guaranteed that would happen in every case, but presumably the country’s members are rooting for their game, as is to be expected.) Small countries have an inherent disadvantage here, so they get a handicap (“handicap 1”) to balance out these “partisan” votes. This leaves every game with the same expected base score of 7 from the first vote cast by any player.

The more interesting part of the game comes from the second and third votes from each player, which cannot be for their own country’s representative. Let’s assume that these are distributed randomly, even though that wouldn’t be the case in a real event. For Game A, whose country has just one person, there are 20 other “non-partisan” players who can each cast two votes that might be for Game A (40 possible non-partisan votes). Game A would be expected to get 8 of these (one-fifth of 40, there being five “other” countries from the perspective of any one player).

This creates a separate problem for large countries. Looking at Game F, with a country of 7 people, there are only 28 non-partisan players who could cast votes for it, so the expected value for non-partisan votes is only 5.6 (one-fifth of 28) – significantly less than Game A’s expected value of 8.0. Following this pattern for all contestants, the total expected for non-partisan votes for each game is shown in “exp oth votes”, and the sum of that value plus the “base score” is shown for “exp votes 1”.

To even out that expected value, a second handicap (“handicap 2”) is computed to bring all games’ values up to the highest total in the “exp votes 1” column. Since these involve fractional values, they are rounded to the nearest whole (“rounded h2”). The final expected total for each game is shown in the second-to-last column, labeled “exp total”, and it is the sum of “country size” (expected partisan votes) plus “handicap 1” (balancing factor for partisan votes) plus “exp oth votes” (expected non-partisan votes) plus “handicap 2” (balancing factor for non-partisan votes).

The net applied handicap for each game (sum of “handicap 1” and “handicap 2”) is shown under “net handicap”. This is what would be added to the actual vote totals for each game when determining event winners. The range shown in this example is 2 to 6, but it could be rescaled 0 to 4 and work the same. There is a little bit of distortion left from the rounding of handicap 2, but it’s a pretty small factor – less than or equal to about half a vote – in the context of the number of votes expected to be cast. This seems fair enough to count as a level playing field to me.

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My first thought for the geography would be to group by format or genre or such, but randomly is definitely intriguing…

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I’m a bit perplexed on Hidnook’s idea of randomised assignation to teams: is well known that people like and dislike this or that IF genre… but OTOH, this can give limelight to less-known IF genres.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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I think the terminology can get a little confusing when talking about the Olympics theme, so to clarify the above:

  • “player” means a human person, one of us here on the forum who will be voting on games
  • “contestant” means a game, which players will be voting for during events; sometimes called “representatives” in the context of a particular event
  • “country” means a group of one or more players who choose a name and optionally create a flag for themselves

My preference is to allow players to self-organize into countries on whatever basis they like. The original proposal is that any player can announce a new country to become a “founder” of it, and any player can declare that they are joining a pre-existing country. Subsequent discussion is about how that could create unfairness and how to address the unfairness, with the current list of options being:

  • fixing country size in advance and requiring players to organize along those lines
  • deciding on number of countries based on number of signups and making random assignments of players to them
  • implementing a handicap system as explained above to negate the influence of country size on voting results

There would not be a random assignment of games to countries. Countries would get assigned a draft priority, and they would decide which contestant games will represent their country in an orderly draft. Everyone would know what the events will be ahead of time in order to guide their choices. When the draft is complete, they would assign their contestants to represent them in each event. Each country could assign at most one game to any event. There would be a cap on how many events any one game can enter.

If countries were to be part of the format, I would want them to matter. My reasons for wanting countries are:

  1. Countries decide which games to draft via any criteria they like. This will hopefully provide greater exposure to some less well-known games.

  2. Countries create a prior investment in particular contestants during the actual events. This encourages more “cheering” for the games that the country’s players have chosen, and discussion about why “their” game should win. Each player will be expected to vote for games besides their own country’s representative, so this discussion will matter. Also, with everyone having a deliberately chosen representative I would expect a more lively discussion all around.

  3. Countries create a secondary game for the event, in that there is some strategy in trying to choose the best set of games for the events in order to maximize the country’s “medal score” across all events.

I am totally on board with the People’s Champion Tournament – in fact, I’ve already been sketching out some styling choices for its “big board” graphics since it has such a huge lead – but I want to give each option its best shot in the poll at the top post. The IF Olympics theme has drawn the most discussion here (probably because the concept has changed quite a bit in response to suggestions), though, so I’m trying to make sure everyone understand the current vision.

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Regarding the People’s Champion Tournament theme: With 13 people already voting for that theme plus myself, and anticipating several more players based on other indications of interest, I would expect to get 70 to 100 nominations.

Depending on turnout and overlap between nominations, there may not be a need for any lottery at all – at the low end of the range, there could be fewer than 64 distinct contestants, so the ladder would include some “bye” slots and games paired against these would automatically advance to round 2.

I’ll be leaving the poll up top open until year’s end to give everyone a chance to weigh in, but for now I’m starting to plan for the People’s Champion option. Start thinking of your picks!

Following are some quick polls to guide the manner in which the tournament is conducted:

Regarding voting eligibility: Understanding that voting for matches will be anonymous, I think that…
  • only registered players who submitted nominations should be able to vote on matches
  • anyone joining a “PCT Fans” group should be able to vote on matches
  • anyone on the forum should be able to vote on matches
0 voters
Regarding commentary on competing games: Having seen how the “positive commentary only” rule worked out for FIFP, I think that…
  • only positive commentary should be allowed, even if it limits participation
  • negative commentary should be allowed, and forum mods can intervene if necessary
0 voters
Regarding the length of time for voting in each of the six rounds: Understanding that many if not most contestant games are likely to be new to each player, I think that…
  • early rounds should be two weeks long, and late rounds one week long
  • early rounds should be one week long, and late rounds 3.5 days long
  • something else (which I will describe in a post here)
0 voters
Regarding the length of time between contestant selection and the start of matches: Understanding that there would be a weekly “meet the contestants” post during this period to keep players engaged and give each person time to play several games in advance, I think that the “quiet play” period should last…
  • about 1 or 2 months
  • about 3 or 4 months
  • about 5 or 6 months
0 voters
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It seems that I’m the sole voter for allowing negative commentary on contest threads, so I’ll clarify my position.

In the Free IF Playoffs, the “positive commentary only” rule was a significant roadblock to navigate when attempting to post about a matchup. I found myself second-guessing particular phrases and words, trying to decide, “Is this positive enough? Does that imply that I don’t like the game?”

Another issue is that specific criticism about particular aspects, areas, puzzles, or passages is nearly impossible to express under the “positive commentary only” rule. Equally specific praise would be allowed, but a well-considered critique is far more likely to provoke counter-arguments and discussion.

To be clear, I’m opposed to completely unsupported blanket statements or judgments made on the basis of an author or system instead of a game’s merits. But I think that nobody participating here is likely to do that, and even if someone did, the Intfiction moderators are able to remove particularly egregious cases.

I understand the impulse behind the rule - there are plenty of other relatively unrestricted venues for IF criticism - but in an event designed (according to @otistdog) primarily to provoke discussion about lesser-known games, I would prefer to leave that discussion as unconstrained as possible.

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I also think negative commentary should be allowed, but it should be in comparison to the other contestant. There’s a difference, for instance, between “X was not restricted to a two-word parser like Y was, which made that one puzzle less guess-the-verb” and “Y was terrible because it was a two-word parser”. So I suppose I’m encouraging comparative critiques, although I would not be opposed to full “negative commentary allowed”, as long as we can remain civil.

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37

That’s awfully neatly exactly 1/2 of one week, isn’t it? Maybe round it up to 4 days?

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In response to the early results of and comments on the guidance polls, I would like to add some points for consideration:

  • I do think the “positive commentary only” rule limited discussion during the Free IF Playoffs. The only two people who got “yellow cards” both seem not to have taken it personally and seem more than ready to play again here (which I am glad to see), but those two didn’t say much for the remainder of the event (which bummed me out). [EDIT: On review, I see that there was a third person who got a “yellow card,” but that person continued to comment pretty frequently throughout the remainder of the event.] In later rounds, fan commentary was almost non-existent, and I wonder how much of that was due to people being worried about being “flagged” over routine commentary – FLACRabbit’s comment indicates that there was a chilling effect which wasn’t negligible, and that was never intended. I also did not like playing the role of censor. On the other hand, the rule does seem to have done a lot to prevent ill will from developing over disagreements on the evaluation of the competing games or the results of voting; it eliminates the possibility of conflating criticism of a game with criticism of people.

  • I think it’s good to leave room for people to get involved even after the tournament begins. However, my initial inclination is toward “must join PCT Fans.” It’s clear from the arithmetic that many voters in FIFP had not joined FIFP Fans or registered for the various calendar events. We will never know who they were. I appreciate the value of anonymity, and I want to make sure that it’s understood that voting for events would be anonymous in every case, but there were a couple of matchups during FIFP in which I saw atypical voting patterns suggesting coordinated activity not aligned with the honor system binding players. Note that those instances did not affect the ultimate outcomes of the matches in question, but they did give me some concern during the event, because it threatened the possibility of casting a shadow over the whole tournament if those votes had made the difference. The PCT Fans group would be “click to join,” and everyone on the forum would be welcome. It would act only as a kind of public voter registration, and would give everyone more visibility into who’s participating. At the moment, I’m not seeing any upsides offered by “unregistered” voting while I do see some downsides; I would be very interested to hear anyone’s argument in favor of it.

  • With an expectation of 64 contestants, an 8-week “quiet play” period would result in 8 games being featured in each week’s “meet the contestants” post. Based on the FIFP mid-game polling data (which, unlike match voting, was limited to those registering as fans), most people played a relative handful of new games over the course of the first few rounds of the tournament. (About half of respondents – the largest bloc – said they had played 3 to 5 new games partway through Division 3’s first round. The pace suggested by that answer is around at most 2 new games per division. If the limiting factor was just time, then with two-week rounds one would expect the per-division rate to double.) I am willing to pace the “quiet period” as the voting public dictates, but I would expect a faster pace in the “quiet play” period to translate into smaller vote totals for each matchup, due to the “must play both games” rule.

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I voted for continuing to not allow negative commentary because I’ve run this kind of pop-culture/work-of-art tournament before and have seen people get pretty insulting when something wins/is winning that they don’t think deserves it. This forum might not be likely to get the kind of “I can’t believe X is in the lead, you people have no taste” comments I’ve seen elsewhere, but I’m not so sure about, for example, “X is so overrated, it’s only doing well because people have nostalgia goggles/blindly vote in favor of [creator] even when the work isn’t good/are distracted by some superficial shiny feature that it has,” which is a common thing I’ve seen in situations without rules preventing it and which could lead to discussion getting pretty heated.

I’m not really opposed to thoughtful criticism or discussing the relative pros and cons of games, it’s just that “no negative commentary” is an easier rule to enforce than “don’t be too much of a jerk about it.”

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