That’s the problem. Everybody should have to play every game (I know it won’t happen but hear me out) so that the averages find a really good proper score. Just saying.
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I think that might have been more plausible in early years. I don’t know if anyone plays all the games anymore. Ideally, yeah, if it were possible and a remotely reasonable ask.
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Some folks do - Brian, Andrew, and I have all reviewed every game for the past couple years (Brian for way more than just that, of course!) and I think @jjmcc did all last year’s games in his first time as a reviewer (I’m probably forgetting other folks who’ve done this, apologies!) And I have to assume that for everybody who reviews all the games, there are 5-10 who just played and ranked them all.
Edit: and yeah, having done the same from 02-05, it is way harder now.
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The record was… 2020? 103 games? I’m assuming you didn’t spend the equivalent of 26 eight hour days reviewing all of those; some must have been shorter than 2 hours. Also, does that impact your reviewing style? Hitting all those titles within 30 days?
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If each person plays a simple random sample, and each person has a random bias, it can balance out over time. That’s one reason the ballot doesn’t default to alphabetical order anymore. Of course in real life people won’t play a random sample but it’s nice to try to do so.
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Some people use randomizers, right? Like especially when selecting for a Twitch stream or something.
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The Comp website has a built-in randomizer, which saves a persistent random order for you - it’s super helpful, I use it every year!
Yeah 104 in 2020 (one was later disqualified, I believe). But much like spring thing, there’s a big range in length; maybe 40% are 2ish hours, maybe a third are half an hour or less, 20%ish are around an hour or a bit more, and the rest are the long ones? I dunno, one could actually look at numbers but that feels like the distribution to me.
2020 was actually an easy year for me, though; they extended judging for two extra weeks due to the glut of games, and it was my last year pre-parenthood (and I was working from home), so I wrote super long reviews (I think my first one that year was a like 2000 word disquisition on Brecht?) and still finished a couple weeks early. It’s all been downhill since then.
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The randomizer prevents me from bandwagoning, which, sadly, is something that I need. It’s good.
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It’s a big help!
However, if I hit a wall with an entry, or it’s Just Not My Genre and I’m not in the right frame of mind, I skip it and come back to it later. (I recommend this for judges, too. Just having a bit of flexibility went a long way in me getting through things the past two years. Of course you shouldn’t push yourself to review everything, butyou also don’t want to get stuck at 5 when you hoped to get through 20. And if there are 70 entries this year, you can afford to pass on a lot.)
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Oh, no worries, I don’t get hung up on anything. I’m mainly interested in handing out high scores–I like being positive. If a game and I aren’t hitting it off, I don’t force it. Back in the old poetry days, I would make a decision after 15-30 minutes: did I want to keep reading? I tend to do the same with comp games.
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I’m totally giving up on any pretense of objectivity in playing and reviewing this year. Last year I played and reviewed all the new authors, and that was fun, but honestly, I just want to browse and pick what tickles me. Some of that will be bandwagoning, because if Art DiBianca has a game I am damn well going to play it.
But I will explain my rationale for choosing, aside from just playing authors I like. I think it’s useful for people to know what art is eye-catching, what blurbs are good, etc. I have no bias against new writers, who I know from last year’s comp will submit some amazing games, so they won’t get short shrift from me. But part of writing a game and getting it seen and played is marketing it well, so I’ll play and review those that are marketed well and of interest to me.
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Well this is a dose of cold water. Flush with Spring Thing momentum, I had hubristic hopes to repeat this year. I will do what I can, I guess, like all of us. For my part I slavishly honor the randomizer, with the exception of games I can’t play on Linux. Those get booted to the end.
We all got a process!
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Do:
- Say thank you to reviewers.
- Use spoiler tags liberally.
- DM folks for more info about bugs they find.
- Keep a change log.
- Keep a file of all the nice things people say about your work, and read it often.
- Share about your comp experience afterwards.
Don’t worry if it doesn’t seem like anyone has played your game for a while after judging starts. It’ll happen.
Don’t try to correct someone’s interpretation of your entry - not while judging is open. Someone will react to your work in an unexpected or unfair way, and it will bother you more than you expect it to. This is normal. Try to learn from it, and then go read your “nice things” file again.
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I think the last couple of years have gone back down; it’s till way higher than the past (I remember 55 was seen as shocking in 2015) but with a longer judging period it might be doable. If you stop at two hours for the giant games, that is…
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As JJ, I’ll except games that I can’t play on Linux, and give priority to parser games.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Every year I’ve reviewed, I pick games by alternating between games I’m really excited to play from the blurbs, and games delivered completely at random. I prefer playing in browser, so if a game requires download, I probably won’t play. Last year I made it a goal to review every game written with Texture (they were all pretty short). I try to at least fire up every parser game, to see if it catches my interest.
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@Doug_Egan , I disabled the play online button for my entry, because the browser player lacks so many of my game features that are supported by QTads (even though the game is still playable)…
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As mentioned elsewhere, my judging time may be limited due to family priorities, so while I like the “fairness” of the randomizer, I’m afraid I will just be hand-picking a few parser games based on the blurb or an author. I never grew up with choice games and don’t feel that I’m really qualified to judge them on their quality…
But I could see myself trying to play a few underjudged games toward the end, too…
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Don’t let the ratings/scores get to you too much. I know that’s really hard–it’s something I only learned to do in the past year, and I’ve been entering IF Comp since 2015! But try to have faith in your creation as something beautiful that you have made, whether people give it a 1 or 10 or anything in between.
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