This mean, that during the judging period someone can theoretically upload their entry in their blog, site, or what perplexes me, social forums
the latter is what worries me: giving visibility to work outside the IF community means also attracting “judges” following our HYPOTHETICALLY unfair author to the Comp’s voting, and this can too easily lower the general objectivity (social forums are often used for connecting with extended family, former classmates, coworkers and people open to give a very high vote a priori in general)
I admit that I noted this loophole when musing about the idea of releasing a “scientific research edition” (many of you get my drift…) in the appropriate section of this very forum (no promise, eh !) but the potential seriousness of the issue is much more important than idle musings on how to deliver a variation of narrative… so I put on the table this question, is wise to allow releases outside the 'Comp during the voting period ?
Best regards from Italy,
by a worried dott. Piergiorgio
People have to rate a minimum of 5 games in order for their votes to be counted, which nicely prevents any kind of vote brigading. With that in mind I don’t see any potential negative consequences for allowing the game to be released elsewhere after judging starts. In a way it’s a bit risky since a lot of the potential audience won’t follow the links back to vote.
I have it on good authority that the IFComp organizers keep tabs on votes behind the scenes as well, so if a game attracts a bunch of people rating it a 10 and 4 other games a 1 that would also get dealt with.
I can understand your concerns here, but i think this rule is proper. For example, I will probably put my entry on itch.io - which automatically means it’s open to the general public. It would be a bit of a mess if i could not do that. I guess i could host it myself, but then the link would still be public in any case.
Yeah, lots of people host on itch or their own sites, so this would be a pain to enforce; and honestly anyone with enough of a profile that a release outside the Comp would bring in mass attention probably has enough of a profile that releasing exclusively in the Comp would raise the same issues. But the judging rules would likely take care of any unfair impact - heck, lots of new people paying attention to the Comp would be a good problem to have!
I think this rule, farther down the page, covers this to some degree:
while you are free to talk about your entries in public, please avoid suggesting to judges, directly or indirectly, how they ought to fill out their ballots
In other words, an author is free to get out the word about their entry, but shouldn’t go so far as to suggest or plead for votes.
As long as the game was not publicly released ahead of the opening of judging, and the author does not tell potential voters how to vote, there are no issue with uploading your game on other platforms outside of the IFComp.
There have been multiple entries hosted outside of the IFComp in previous years, such as on Dashingdon (ChoiceScript), itch.io, and self-hosted.
Discussion of your own entry still falls under Rule 4 for Authors:
Authors may not encourage competition judges to violate the rules that pertain to them (as listed above). This includes, but is not limited to, the rule requiring judges to cast all ratings in good faith.
In other words: while you are free to talk about your entries in public, please avoid suggesting to judges, directly or indirectly, how they ought to fill out their ballots. Competition voting rules and guidelines already instruct judges to rate entries according to their own tastes and principles, based on their individual experiences with the works. Please do not ask them to act in any other way.
So you can tell people you released a game for the comp and tell them to participate as judges, as long as you don’t tell them to vote a certain way towards your or the other entries.
For their votes to count, judges still need to play and rate at least 5 entries. Votes are still checked by the IFComp committee, and can be removed if they are suspicious. That’s Rule 7 for Judges:
Judges must make a good-faith effort to play, as intended, every game that they submit ratings for. Conversely, a judge who did not or could not make a good-faith effort to play a certain game must not submit a rating for that game.
