This is a reminder that, with a little over two weeks to go before the end of the voting period for ParserComp 2025, we need your ratings for the 12 excellent and free to play games in this year’s competition.
The voting form is here, and the deadline is Sunday 3rd August.
Lest you are being driven to a state of intense distraction by curiosity over the state of play so far, we took the liberty of requesting, the necessary 72 hours in advance, a summary of the current figures from Sandra on the front desk (in reality a fusion-powered Sinclair machine running a copy of Psion’s Abacus and rendered sentient by application of the dark algorithms contained in this book of forbidden knowledge). Here is what she(it) told us:
Game
Number of ratings
The 13th Quest - Older Timer
0
Witchever - improvmonster
0
A Taste of Terror - Garry Francis
1
Desperados - The BDB Project
2
Last Audit of the Damned - thoughtauction
2
Mystery Academy - thoughtauction
2
Tin Star - The BDB Project
3
EYE - Arthur DiBianca
4
Lockout - xkqr
4
The journey - paravaariar
4
Wild West - The BDB Project
4
Swap Wand User - Passerine
6
It is perhaps no surprise that the longer games have the fewest votes, but we trust that ratings for those will come in due course and we’ll have a more equal distribution by the time the final whistle blows. Their fate is in your hands!
Thanks for the reminder. I didn’t feel that I should vote this year, as I authored one game, co-authored and tested three games and tested a further four games (one of which wasn’t submitted).
I’d encourage everyone else to play and vote though, as the games I tested were very good.
What are the conventions around voting as an author?
I played one of the other games thoroughly, and at first I was going to vote it favourably, but then I liked it less and less the more it wore on (in a way that also cast a negative light on my first good impressions) and it would feel unfair for me to vote negatively on my competition – even if that is my honest impression. I also embargoed my ifdb review for the same reason.
(I still hope I will be able to take the time to play more of the games and find one I can gush over, but these are busy times for me with little access to electronics.)
Good faith voting on anyone else’s game is fine. We trust that nobody would downvote competition in a desperate bid to elevate their own star and, in all honesty, the pool of voters in this rather niche community is so small that further eligibility restrictions beyond self-voting would create more problems than it would solve. So please, go ahead and submit your ratings.
