I wanted more empirical data on playing vs reviewing and thought it might be useful to see how other people experience games, so I decided to record myself picking a random unplayed SGS game and reviewing it. I don’t have a mic, so it won’t be interesting to watch the whole movie, but you can drag the slider and see how much time was spent on playing vs reviewing (and 15-16 minutes vs 9-10). So this actually disproves a bit what I said earlier, but that’s why I wanted empirical data.
I ended up randomly getting a very subsantial game that was beautiful and interesting: REPEAT IT BACK TO ME by SkyShard.
(echoing Daniel Stelzer, I agree that a good short story is often much harder to write than a long one, and is a wonderful art form.)
I think what makes this rather unpleasant is that I knew going in, download-only titles would fare poorly. I just didn’t expect it’d put the game to be in the low 30s thanks to Itch’s rating skewing. I’m not sure how one goes around fixing it besides making the game available for browsers (and that creates a lot of complication and debugging that may not be worth it).
This would negatively affect visual novels and download-only games in the longer term, so I would ask for some reconsideration on how scoring works.
For what it’s worth, I think basically every jam on Itch that I’ve participated in has resulted in people complaining about the rating adjustments. But it exists to address a real problem (games with a smaller number of ratings have “less accurate” ratings in a certain sense; a game with two 5-star ratings is not necessarily better than a game with 4.5 stars from 100 ratings), and I’m not sure the other solutions to this problem are any better. Ludum Dare, for example, has a minimum threshold of at least 20 ratings, and games with fewer than that simply don’t get ranked at all. The system Itch uses supposedly has a principled statistical argument behind it.
Similarly, every game jam I’ve participated in has resulted in people lamenting the fact that download-only games get way less attention. But there’s really not much you can do about it, besides acknowledging that you have to make web a priority if you care about maximizing the number of people who play your game. In terms of hard numbers, my Itch analytics typically show that ~10x as many people play the browser version as the downloadable version, so I’ve always prioritized web on that basis.
I know that, it isn’t my first jam. But since this is the Short Games Showcase feedback thread and not the Itchio feedback thread, it is worth bringing it up.
I forgot the most important feedback of all! Thanks for organising the showcase! I think it was quite successful and am keen to see many years of refinement of the formula.
I was pleased to be able to put in the three games I did because they all got a tiny bit more attention and comment and that’s valuable to me. I don’t have any problem with the number of games - there was no way I was going to aim to look at them all, but I got some good recommendations and played and enjoyed several that I’d missed before. I wish I’d been able to engage more but I’m in a peak wave of work and that’s my problem not the comp’s, obviously.
The number of games is only really an issue if you’re concerned about the scoring, which I’m not as (for reasons well enumerated in this thread and elsewhere) I don’t think it’s particularly meaningful. (Of my solidly mid-table efforts I’m by far the most proud of the one that did least well).
If there was a way of prompting people to write comments (however brief) rather than to enter scores I’d think that was an improvement. Possibly make the ribbon voting more visible if possible - could it be done through itch? I don’t know. As I wasn’t paying much attention to emails (my fault, again) I missed it completely this time.
The ribbon voting was also explained on the jam info page and the form was linked there, so I’m not sure what else can be done to make it more visible, other than perhaps having the link in bigger font. Which is to say, I know some people may not be looking closely at the jam info or the emails, but I’m not sure what other venue there is.
We can’t do it through Itch unless we come up with a different set of categories that would apply to every game—its system can’t currently handle the concept of categories in which not all games should be ranked.
This is my first time participating in SGS so I may not be well qualified to comment
I’m very happy with the jam experience. My reason for entering the jam was to get more eyes on the games and that worked out well. I submitted two games to both SGS and the IF Showcase, and SGS drew significantly more views to the games. I’m guessing that one of the main reasons for that disparity is simply that rankings motivate participants to play more games.
I come from other game jams where there is more of a culture of commenting on the submission pages. I was a bit surprised to see that is not so common here and I think that’s an area that could be improved. I get that a lot of the games have been previously enjoyed and some people prefer to put comments on the game page or on other sites. Comments on the submission page, where they are most visible to other participants, foster a greater sense of community and camaraderie, they increase the feeling of being part of a special event, and they encourage other people to follow suit. It’s important for creators to get constructive feedback on what works well as well as areas that could use more work. The submissions page is a better place to give this kind of constructive feedback than the game page, in my opinion.
My small suggestion is to reduce the time for the submissions period and put extra time and fanfare into the reviewing period.
Thank you both for running the showcase! I submitted a game and also voted on itch, and I found the experience enjoyable and the instructions clear. I have a hard time playing everything in the comps and jams, so while I was happy to be able to rate around 20 games right off the bat because I had played them before, it was a great way for me to play many games that I had missed.
I did not vote for ribbons because I didn’t feel that I’d played enough games to say fairly which one was the best in a given category. So I really like the idea of self-nominating in different categories. I think it would increase ribbon voting, and, because it could function like a filter or facet (not sure how you’d do that in itch, though) would also make the number of games feel more manageable. For instance, I could see myself playing, say, all the “best use of interactivity” nominees, and then feeling confident that my vote is really reflecting what I see as the best among a smaller pool of games, all of which I have played.
Anyway, thanks again for all your work. Looking forward to next year!
Oh, that’s an interesting idea! If a jam has questions that people have to answer when they sign up, you can then filter by the answers—like, if you look at the “filter submissions” sidebar for this year’s event, you can see under “Does this game contain flashing images or screen effects?” that you can filter by those that answered “Yes” or “No”. So you’re right that if we asked people to opt into categories that way, it would create filter views that participants could use to guide their exploration of the collection.
(It wouldn’t work for Best Previously Unawarded Game since the eligibility rules are just complicated enough that I don’t want to shunt the work of determining eligibility onto the participants, but we could do it for the rest.)
