Short Games Showcase - Feedback Thread

Competitions
1

Thanks so much from @EJoyce and I to everyone who participated in this year’s Showcase! I hope everyone had a great time, and we couldn’t have done it without you.

That said, there’s always room for improvement so we’re starting this thread to collect ideas on some things we want to improve.

Ranked voting and number of entries

Participation this year was fantastic, and the games this year got, on average, more votes per game. That said, many games still got the short end of the stick on that front especially if they were download only. (This goes double for the ribbon voting since people have to go to another site to do it, and the number of ribbon votes has consistently lagged behind the ranking votes for both years. The number of games also makes the ribbon voting interface pretty clunky.)

The obvious lever to pull here would be to try and decrease the number of entries for next year so that each game can get more attention, and the easiest way to do that is to decrease the number of entries allowed per person. But that would cut out a lot of potentially excellent games from the showcase, so we want to hear what people think. (And if there’s any other ideas on how to improve engagement, please share them!)

Non-English entries

There’s been some interest in opening up the Showcase to multiple languages. We like the idea, but the question is – how exactly to go about it? EctoComp has had great results this year having all entries as part of the same competition, but given the number of entries we’re already getting in English we worry that they’ll get buried. That said, running a separate competition for other languages has its own pitfalls. We’d like to hear from people who would likely submit non-English games to know what they’d prefer.

Other things

We’re happy to take suggestions for more ribbons, but we’re not going to add any more categories for 2025 while we work on improving engagement with ribbon voting. If we can get that to a good place we’ll consider adding more ribbons for 2026.

Please let us know your thoughts on the above topics, and about anything else regarding the SGS! (I feel like I’m forgetting something so EJ may chime in later with more feedback topics as well).

10 Likes
2

Thank you both so much for running the showcase again! I had a great experience as both an entrant and a player.

I’ve seen some Itch jams enable the rating queue to help make the number of ratings more even across all games—maybe something to consider?

A possibility for this is to integrate it with Itch instead of using the Google form. This would work for basically everything except “Previously unawarded”; you could have “Use of short form”, “Interactivity”, “Replay value”, “Story”, and “Puzzles” as rating categories in addition to the overall rating. If a category didn’t apply, e.g. for a game with no puzzles, people could just give 1 star in that category as an “N/A” indication.

My suggestion for this would be to make the SGS only open to games that were not previously entered in ranked/awarded comps—so IFComp, Spring Thing, Ectocomp, etc. While it makes sense that people want to showcase their best work (which is why I submitted my Ectocomp game this year), I personally would be okay with losing the opportunity to submit previously-comp-entered games in the future. If the goal of the showcase is to get more eyes on overlooked games, then leaving out games that already got plenty of attention in other comps makes sense to me.

Another reason I like this idea is because it meshes with my own approach to the showcase as a player. I mostly focused my nominations on games that hadn’t been in other 2024 comps; I liked a lot of those games a lot, but I wanted to highlight ones that hadn’t previously gotten a chance for recognition. (The “best previously unawarded” category didn’t really help with this for me, because most of the games in the showcase met the “previously unawarded” definition. An alternate suggestion to excluding comp games would be to replace “best previously unawarded” with “best not-previously-entered-in-a-comp game” (with a better title).)

I’m probably an outlier in wanting to see the SGS operate this way, so I don’t expect this suggestion to be adopted! But still wanted to share my thoughts.

I’m not sure if the AI disclosure question was meant to include the game’s cover art, but if so, I’d suggest that be specifically spelled out to avoid any ambiguity!

Thank you both again for all your work on this, and for reading this long post!!

7 Likes
3

I appreciate the suggestion, but the impetus for creating the Showcase came from the fact that short games in IFComp typically get, well, short shrift when it comes to rankings. (You Can’t Save Her and Quest for the Teacup of Minor Sentimental Value pulled off a big coup this year by making it into the top 20 despite their length). It’s important to us to give these games another chance to shine specifically because they’re overlooked in their original context.

I don’t believe IFComp or Spring Thing games were submitted in any kind of significant quantity this year either? I don’t have time to count but I believe the only previous comp with significant overlap was EctoComp.

4 Likes
4

I wonder if this is a sign of a shifting attitude toward short games in IFComp?

And I guess I don’t fully understand in what way these games are getting overlooked—they may not tend to rank as high in IFComp, but I think their numbers of plays and reviews is typically commensurate with those of the longer games. And comps other than IFComp and ST are typically fully comprised of short games—this year’s Ectocomp had a few longer ones, but I believe all the Petite Mort and most of the Grand Guignol games were under 30 minutes.

I just did a count:

EctoComp: 9
IFComp: 4
SeedComp: 4
PunyComp: 3
Spring Thing: 2
ShuffleComp: 2
TALJ: 1
Total: 25

(Didn’t include other ranked Itch jams because it’d take me longer, but the number would go up a bit with those included.)

Again, I’m not actually expecting this to be adopted; my own personal preference for the showcase might just be different from its actual intention, which is fine! But I wanted to bring it up because it would be an easy parameter to set in order to reduce the number of games entered next year.

4 Likes
5

I said this elsewhere but the use of itch.io rankings is not working for me.

This year, the 1st place tie for the “Best use of interactivity” ribbon went to the 6th, 11th, 28th, and 64th ranked games.

The 1st place ribbon for “the most replay value” was a tie between the 66th ranked and 12th ranked game.

Something is terribly wrong with either the itch.io rankings, the ribbon voting, or both.

Congrats to the people who placed highly according to itch.io, but they felt nearly random to me. There aren’t enough votes per game nor ranking options for the results to be meaningful. I know that IFComp functions the same way as this, but you get droves more people voting on the games there, and 10 ranking options.

I think if you drop the itch.io rankings and funnel all the energy we pushed toward those into the ribbon voting instead, it might help get the ribbon results to be less wonky and more accurate. Imagine if there half as many people voting on the ribbons as the amount who ranked games this year! Ties would probably be less likely, and past 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place, you wouldn’t have people feeling bad for ranking so low in such a huge competition just cuz one (1) person out of the 9 people who voted on their game gave it 1 star or something.

Personally I don’t like this approach. I like the ribbons because they’re comparative to the other games in the showcase as opposed to “did I think this game was interactive in and of itself” or something. And 1 star for N/A seems like it’d make the results even wonkier.

In any case, if you go with itch.io rankings again next year, I am not going to enter.

2 Likes
6

At this time, we are not seriously considering either turning this into an unranked jam or banning games that have previously been entered into competitions.

Does anyone have feelings about whether their desire as an author to enter more games outweighs their desire as a participant to have a more manageable number of games to play or vice versa, or thoughts about the potential handling of non-English games?

3 Likes
7

It has been said elsewhere before, and I’m aware that this is a function which was programmed into itch, but itch negatively adjusts scores of games which fall below the median number of ratings, and this penalty is surprisingly steep.

31st March, Midnight has a raw score of 4.429, which would have placed it in the top five if this score adjustment didn’t exist. However, it received a hefty -0.7 score adjustment which brought it down to 30th place.

My game was also affected, so I’m not exactly an unbiased party here. I did rate a few other entries during the jam even though I knew it would push the median up.

I don’t really have strong feelings on this. There were over a thousand ratings so I think there weren’t too many games. Although on my end, I probably won’t be entering more than one game for future events.

5 Likes
8

Yes, Encorm and I have been privately discussing using the raw scores for the official rankings next time, as I believe ECTOCOMP is planning to do. A lot of the games with low vote totals also had low raw scores, so very few games suffered as significantly as 31st March, but if it’s affecting even one game that would otherwise have placed highly, it’s worth considering. Thanks!

8 Likes
9

Here were some ideas I had during/after the event. I hope some of these could be useful!

[1] Self-selected ribbon category pruning: When submitting games/pieces, have entrants self-select which of the ribbon categories they want to be considered for. Maybe have a few more categories, and say that entrants can pick up to 3 categories they want that entry to be considered for. There can be some overall categories that it makes sense for all to be considered for, but that doesn’t apply to all of them. For instance, it doesn’t really make sense to be voting among all 94 entries this year on “best puzzle focused game” since not even a majority of games had puzzle-like elements. I think having the ribbon categories be more focused among fewer entries will help direct the attention of ribbon voters to reduce the clutter on the form.

[2] Proportionate Ribbon Votes: In a similar way, trying to pinpoint 3 out of 94 entries for “best use of short form” for instance felt like a shot in the dark, even as someone who played all but two of the entries. If I want to support a lot of different cool games, trying to decide where to put votes for them is hard with the cap of 3 per category.

I think it should be set to a proportionate value (say, 10%, rounded down, but pick whatever percentage you want.) So for this year, people could’ve voted for up to 9 games in categories that included all 94 entries.

I did consider that the instructions only ask people to play in a minimum of 5 games, so it might feel weird to say you could vote for up to 9 in the ribbon voting. But if I had to guess, I would guess that the smaller pool of ribbon voters are likely the people who played way more than 5 of the games anyway. (Personally, I wouldn’t feel comfortable casting ribbon votes in categories where I’d played that few of the entries.) I was (very and pleasantly!) surprised that Lazarrien ranked in any ribbon categories considering that only 8 people rated it, but maybe it’s because the people who went out of their way to play more of the less-rated games were more likely to be the people that voted in the ribbons? Giving the people who played more games more leeway to point out more of the entries in their ribbon ballot I personally think would make the results more rounded.

[3] Voting reminders: This is a minor thing that I think could marginally help with voter turnout, but I went through to see when I got email reminders about SGS voting:

Jan. 1: Voting open announcement

Jan. 13: Voting extension announcement

Jan. 25: Last day of voting reminder

I think adding one more intermediate email reminder around the start of the second week (Jan. 8 or 9) would’ve help re-gather attention toward the event after the initial wave of ratings.

[4] Raw Rating Score: In terms of the itch.io rating system, my entry was also significantly penalized by the algorithm (I think it dropped from 11th to 31st place? lmao). I do understand that you want to avoid anomalies like if a game won with only 3 ratings or something with raw score, that would indeed be unhinged. And like I kind of understand the logic of the algorithm—maybe a marginal person who was on the fence to rate my entry, if pushed to do so, would be more likely to give it a lower rating. But that’s far from guaranteed. It is just kind of disheartening to see that my entry’s score was arbitrarily penalized along with (I think?) every other entry that got 6, 7, 8, or 9 ratings based on phantom hypothetical ratings that could have happened but didn’t.

10 Likes
10

I noticed that there were very few comments on games (unless they went to the game’s main page, which was opaque to the showcase). Also I didn’t see anyone write reviews or comments in any of the usual places. I tried to write some short comments on the rating page when I could, but I seemed to be in the minority. I didn’t get any contact on my piece, but that’s okay because I got feedback at the small jam it debuted at.

I don’t know how I feel about the combination of IF Comp and jams and unreleased games. Recognition of games could be a positive or negative. I liked the cross section of games, but also it felt a little loose.

As a showcase I think I’d prefer that it focus on comments/reviews without ratings at all.

7 Likes
11

I assume this is due to the volume of games being kind of intimidating? But since that’s a comp culture thing it’s something we as organizers might have more control over. EJ and I have talked over doing a “daily spotlight” of X number of games next year in the discussion thread (X = number of games / number of voting days), and we can try to encourage commenting and reviewing as well. We’ve mostly been staying quiet about other entries during the voting period since as organizers it seems gauche not to, but if people wouldn’t mind we can add our own positive comments to the mix.

4 Likes
12

My thoughts, as someone with lots of general game jam experience but basically new to the IF community and its “comp” culture:

I’m used to seeing more comments in other (ranked) jams that I’ve participated in, but it seems like there’s a bit of a culture difference here for whatever reason. Some possible factors affecting this:

  • IFComp, Spring Thing etc. don’t work that way & set a different expectation
  • Discussion/reviews often take place on other websites (here, ifdb.org), rather than on Itch
  • A lot of the IF jams hosted on Itch seem to be unranked, which attracts less feedback/comments & might affect the community’s cultural norms even for the occasional ranked jam
  • A lot of IF comps emphasize larger projects requiring more serious investment, compared to a weekend jam like Ludum Dare or GMTK, which might make people more hesitant to share critical thoughts about a game that someone may be deeply invested in (although most game jams have overwhelmingly positive comments; I have data to back this up). You could argue that this is less applicable to short games, but even the definition of “short” as “under half an hour” is potentially pretty long compared to many jam games.
  • Relatedly, “under half an hour” is potentially a lot longer to commit to playing each game than would typically be the case in a Ludum Dare-style game jam, resulting in fewer ratings overall.
  • game jams where you make a game in a given (short) time period, and then rate immediately after, create more of an “event feel” than something where you can just submit a finished work at any time over the course of a month

(note: I did personally participate in the SGS, which is why I’m giving opinions, but it might not look like it since my submission was pseudonymous for personal reasons)

4 Likes
13

I didn’t have an issue with the number of games, given that I’d already played almost half of them prior to the showcase (the voting period extension helped, too). I’d prefer to still be able to submit 3 games in the future.

A thought re: reducing numbers is to make it a twice-yearly event, showcasing games from the past six months, but of course that would be a lot more work, so I don’t expect this to actually be considered!

I always write comments on the actual game page, rather than the jam submission page, and I did so for multiple games. I feel like there are pros and cons to each, so I’m not sure which is better…

I wrote a few IFDB reviews toward the end, and Mathbrush reviewed a bunch on IFDB too! I thought about writing more reviews or doing a thread here with short responses to each game, but some of them would be negative, and I’m not sure if authors enter this event expecting or wanting constructive criticism of their work. So that made me a bit hesitant.

5 Likes
14

(tl;dr I point out some reasons there are difficulties with SGS but then pull out a surprise argument on how that’s actually good and I think SGS is doing well right now. Then I start rambling and lose the thread.)

In the Short Game Showcase, the balance between playing a game and writing reviews is very different than in other competitions. In IFComp or Spring Thing, you might play half an hour or an hour for most games and then spend (for me) a few minutes writing a review as a small end note. Often times the authors have been working on their games for a long time and/or are emotionally invested and frequently are planning to enter future comps and want advice to grow, so writing a review feels like something the author will value.

For the short game showcase, writing a review can be much more time and effort than playing the game itself, and very occasionally even more than what went into writing the game. There were some games that were two pages with 250 words each and only a single choice each. Those games still have value and the authors deserve respect (I’ve made games like that before myself so I get it) but it can be hard to think of something to say about the experience at all, whether good or bad. And expressing that in a review can be a downer; about 3-4 authors out of PunyInform and Short Games Showcase contacted me unhappy about their reviews, so I stopped playing games I thought I might dislike to not hurt feelings.

A third thing is that this is for games that authors felt didn’t get enough attention in the past year, and that has a non-zero correlation with game quality. Sometimes it didn’t get attention because it’s just not that good! And that’s okay! I make mediocre things, too. I released Rustjaw this year and it’s rated my worst game on IFDB in the last decade. Putting it in front of more people won’t make it a better game, but I can learn from it and apply it to future projects (which I have! I did it to practice romance simulations and incorporated feedback into my current CoG game and got good notes on it from players). My IF author heroes like Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin have some bad games, too, if you scroll to the end of their list on IFDB. That’s part of being a creative human: you try a lot of things, it’s hit or miss, and you get better.

(important caveat that no game during this comp was awful, and a lot of them were wonderful games that I adore like You or Sundown, new games that stuck in my mind like the Dumplings game and Lasagna game, and even some of the really short games were really good, like 30x30’s Sojourn which really spoke to me or the Chinese poem game.)

The part where I say SGS is good

With all that said, I think that the flaws mentioned above are exactly what the SGS is designed to overcome, not problems caused by the SGS. Longer games almost always win competitions (up to a point; 10 hour games in competitions are usually really buggy, so it’s around 3-4 hours games that win the most for parser and 1-2 hour for choice). It is hard to review short games and they don’t get as much attention and care, so the Short Game showcase is probably the best compromise.

In fact, when I really hit my stride in reviewing at the end, it was because I’d play 2-4 games back to back and then review them all at once. It fixed the problem of ‘too much reviewing’ because I got a nice fun chunk of playtime all at once.

Rambling

The game LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST is one I skipped in IFComp due to personal preferences, but the author of it made a postmortem where they disagree strongly with how IFComp is handled by the community, and describes a kind of person that they despise that is exactly the kind of person I am, and it got under my skin because there are some good points. Their thesis is that the worship of long games and the awe people have of IFComp is dumb and overrated, and that you can make good art of any size.

Back to why SGS is good

It’s hard to see how SGS could better serve its intended goal. I feel like players just want to be seen and acknowledged. Getting over 1000 ratings was really impressive here, and each rating meant someone played your game. SGS also serves players, because a lot of people don’t have much time to play games, so having close to 100 games that are guaranteed to be quick to finish is great!

Itch

I don’t leave comments on itch because the culture there seems to be that you always say ‘That was fantastic! I loved it! Amazing work! Changed my life!’ no matter what the game was like, and that kind of commentary doesn’t feel like it does much of anything. I’ve seen authors ask that all bug reports and criticism be put on other sites so that potential players don’t get turned off.

[Final note: I feel evil writing a lot of this post, and so because of that I’m willing to help out anyone that is negatively impacted by what I write. If you are a SGS entrant you can message me and I’ll say something positive about your game and I’ll encourage you in any future plans you have for writing.]

14 Likes
15

I just want to note that this doesn’t necessarily correlate to game length! I don’t think I’ve ever made anything that would take longer than a half hour to play, but I have put a ton of time, energy, and emotional investment into my projects.

While I’m pushing back on that one point, I certainly don’t think you or this post are evil! As a writer of short fiction, it’s just important to me that the work I put in not be discounted simply because the end result is a short piece.

Actually going to push back a little here, too; if someone tells me my game was fantastic and genuinely means it, that makes me feel great! Even better if they say something specific they liked about it, but every short “I liked it”-type comment makes me happy, just that someone would take the time to tell me they liked my game. I assume that when people express that to me, they mean it, and I always mean it when I make such statements to others.

8 Likes
16

This is definitely true, and I feel like that’s one reason that the voting aspect is overall helpful to the event, in that it makes it feel more “event-y” to have a set period in which to play games, at the end of which Things Happen.

That said, if anyone wants a real showcase as opposed to a slightly misnamed comp, I encourage them to check out Manon’s IF Showcase.

6 Likes
17

I saw how hard you worked on No More (as one example). That game is really brief but the atmosphere and characters are compelling, and you did a lot with background items and events as well, and added a story mode. I agree that (with this as an example and several others) that a good short game can take as much or more work than a longer game! I appreciate you pointing out that I was painting with too broad a brush.

7 Likes
18

I agree that short != low effort, and indeed part of the point of the SGS (if I can get pretentious for a minute) is to promote short works as an art form in and of themselves, as opposed to just, like, the lazy version of the better longer game you could have made if you really tried, because I think a lot of people quietly see them that way. (And some people not so quietly—not just on this forum or in an IF context at all. I may have had a formative experience in college involving a protracted argument with a guy who insisted that short fiction wasn’t literature, studying it was a waste of time, and any writer with real talent would write novels. Notably, he was not studying literature and I was.)

That said, I don’t think it’s untrue to say that sometimes with SGS submissions, you spend more time and effort on a review than the creator spent on their game, because we do get some pretty slapdash games as well as out-and-out troll/joke games or deliberately bad games. This isn’t really in the spirit of the SGS as we originally conceived of it, which was for people to show off what they thought was their best short work from the preceding year. But I don’t see a way to write rules to exclude them without also kicking out stuff like I PROMISE I AM WORKING ON THE GAME.

6 Likes
19

Something something, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”.

5 Likes
20

To put it less glibly, I really admire writers who can express more with less, who can establish characters and setting and motivations and stakes in just a handful of pages. I’m certainly not good at it myself, but in terms of static fiction, novellas are my favorite format, because of the constraints of the shorter page count. (Off the top of my head, since I’ve been reading Sanderson recently, in my opinion The Emperor’s Soul (175 pages) is better than The Way of Kings (1200 pages) because it can’t afford to drag or get bogged down in the details.)

6 Likes