I’d like to clarify something here. The voting was done via a Google form. Anybody could vote and you did not require an itch.io account. You needed to provide an email address. This was probably to ensure that the same person did not vote on the same game multiple times. However, it’s easy to create multiple email addresses. As the organisers have the email addresses, they could easily send an email to any voters that look suspicious to (a) check that they are legit email address, and (b) ask for some form of verification to confirm their ratings were legit.
Personally, I think using a Google form is a mistake. itch.io has a voting platform that, although far from perfect, has several advantages:
- It is designed to minimise sock puppetting and they take this quite seriously. If there are any doubts, you can ask them and they’ll investigate. They no doubt have further information at their fingertips, such as what date the account was created, activity on the account and IP addresses. They can’t check voting done via a Google form, as it’s not on their platform.
- It has an option whereby you must vote on a minimum number of games before your votes are counted.
- It has an option whereby you have to vote on games that are presented to you at random and from then on you can vote for anything.
- It has an option whereby you can create and vote on different categories (as in the ParserComp Google form).
- When using multiple categories, you can nominate one of those categories as the one that determines the winner (as in ParserComp) or take an average of all the categories. I find the latter a much fairer way of voting, as it forces the judge to give more thought to the relative strengths and weaknesses of the game.
- It does not allow the author to vote on their own game.
- It has a system whereby games with a low number of votes have their scores downgraded, sometimes unfairly so, but you can see the raw scores and the adjusted scores.
- Results are available instantly as soon as voting ends.
- The results show you the number of votes, the mean score in each category, the ratings in each category and so on.
In ParserComp this year, we had to wait a few days for the results and we haven’t yet seen a breakdown of the statistics in each category. As an author of one game, co-author of another three games and tester of a further three games, I’m very interested to see that breakdown so that I can see what players thought and where to improve.
The Google form also had two free-form questions: “What did you like most about the game?” and “How could the game be improved?“ Will anyone, especially the authors, get to see the responses to those questions?