(Apologies for the many posts about the minute details of these awards; I plan on having things finalized by the 15th of January!)
There has been a lot of discussion about what authors and judges should be allowed to do in the new IF awards. I wanted to put them in an individual poll because there’s a lot of nuance here that I don’t think I was getting.
First a poll about public discussion by Authors (here being anyone that released a game last year):
- Authors should not make any public comments about the competition or games.
- Authors can talk about the competition but not about specific games in the competition.
- Authors are free to discuss games but should only encourage good-faith, informed voting.
- Authors are free to campaign for votes from friends, family and internet, but not to create sockpuppets or harass others.
Spelled out more clearly, option 3 is what Zarf says here:
More broadly, both those awards do expect that people will have read the entries and vote for the ones they think are the best of the year. There is also a strong tradition of not canvassing for particular works. Authors are encouraged to announce if they have eligible books out, but you finish that announcement by saying “please vote”, not “please vote for me .”
Rules for Non-authors:
- Participants should not discuss the comp at all.
- Participants can discuss games, but not encourage voting for any specific game.
- Participants can discuss games and encourage only good-faith voting based on personal gameplay experience.
- Participants can discuss games and campaign for votes using any strategies outside of sockpuppets or harassment.
Again, the third one is meant to be similar to Zarf’s statement.
Finally, there’s the issue of how to handle people who break the rules. Since this is an open competition for every game in the last year, some people may have no idea they are in the running and are accidentally violating rules. So there has to be some kind of leeway no matter what.
No matter what, people that violate IFDB rules by creating multiple accounts for one person or harassing users their, here, or other sites can have restrictions placed on their IFDB accounts, such as account deletion. That’s a bare minimum of moderation.
- There should be no consequences for participants outside of IFDB moderation for violating IFDB rules (meaning account restrictions).
- Same as above, but votes that appear to be cast in violation of the rules can be removed
- Same as above, but games by authors that appear to violate the rules can be disqualified.