Well I’m glad my harmless little Monty Python reference managed to so positively derail what was otherwise quite an interesting discussion. To all the people frothing at the mouth in indignation regarding the idea of a woman being slapped across the face with a fish, I have to ask: were you offended? I mean sincerely and truly offended? If you were, then on one hand I’ll wholeheartedly apologise for my crass comment and try to avoid any posts in future which could offend anyone*, and on the other hand just rue the day when people go so out of their way to take offence at comments that they know full well were never intended to offend.
My posts henceforth will be limited to simple “yes” or “no” - unless someone finds them offensive as well, in which case please suggest a non-offensive alternative.
Throwing my 2c in here – game design is a cutthroat business. What I love about this community is that even though that is true, there is always someone willing to take time out to help aspiring authors and game designers, just for the sake of it – even though they may be competing against the person they helped! It’s this duality that is putting me in front of my computer and sacrificing time I could be doing other things, working on my game for the next comp (a game that I’ve been working on since before SP 2013). I was rushing to meet the 2013 deadline, but because of the harsh blogs and reviews, I gave myself another 6 months.
Some of the reviews are hilarious. None of them are completely mean-spirited, and even the ones that totally trash a game also have constructive criticism thrown in. (I agree that discarding a game because of its medium is absolutely stupid, though, and that person should be put in a corner with a dunce cap and have spit balls thrown at them!!! [emote]:D[/emote])
Anyway, the IF medium seems to me to be one of the hardest to write in. It is game design stripped of all bells and whistles (usually), so that if the story doesn’t work, there’s nothing to cover that up. I didn’t play Final Girl, ironically, because I didn’t have web access from home when the comp began, but it did look like one of the better games of the comp, from what I’ve read about it. I threw the review that started this thread out the minute I read it – it’s too personally biased to affect my view.
Also, slightly off-topic, I’ve been checking out game reviews on these two sites for awhile now, whenever I want to laugh my ass off. They are reviews of non-IF games, but to see how a game can be eviscerated in a hilarious way, these are good examples. They trash games for all the right reasons, because they love games. This is the spirit I’ve seen, here, and IMO, it’s the right one.
Nowadays, every time one uses the word “woman”, or even if he doesn’t use it but just addresses a woman, there’s a risk of somebody being offended. I seriously think we all are getting over-sensitive on a lot of subjects. I don’t want the intfiction arcadia to become a smelly pub in front of the port, but, seriously, too much politically correct is becoming ridiculous. That was a movie reference. Period. And I’m with David when he says that just an oversensitive woman would have seen that as an offense instead of a joke. The same joke would have applied to me or any other guy.
That said:
Yes. I understand. And think you are right. But being condemned for publicly offending someone like the trivial guy at the aforementioned pub while you were only quoting a movie is something that can make you answer like that. It was, after all, a MP reference. David said “sorry”, anyway, so this thing is over. Let’s get back to the more important topic.
I stand on my ground, anyway, that we all are becoming far over-sensitive.
Something that occurred to me also: The way the voting works is that scores are calculated as an average of all the scores it receives. If a reviewer skips giving a game a score, it doesn’t hurt the average - technically a game could get one single review of 10 and if it receives no other scores it would win.
I would venture that some players who have an aversion to CYOA know this and could make a point of giving a 1 to a game they don’t even bother with just to throw the scores. Someone above pointed out that the top few games which were all parser had no or very few scores of 1. The first CYOA on the list, Solarium is where you start seeing the 1s showing up significantly.
Yes, it’s sort of conspiracy theory-ish. But it gets into the statistical mire of “are you voting to help your favorite game, or are you voting to hurt your least favorite game?” A game that gets three 10s and one 1 gets a 7.75 and loses to another that gets three 8s or one 8. Sure a game might be truly BoD-worthy, but allowing games to have different numbers of votes for a calculated average can subject the system to grudge/sabotage votes.
I’m not suggesting a rule-change necessarily (I know this is my first comp, so I hope you’ll please indulge my random musing here), but what if the voting process was “Rank the games in order with 1 being highest and [35] being lowest”? A voter can stop assigning ranks any time after the fifth game. The game with the greatest number of 1 ranks slots into first place. Then the game with the greatest sum of 1 and 2 ranks gets 2nd place….etc. Or…I’m not a statistician - would it also work to count 1’s as 35 points (or number of games in comp) and votes of 2 as 34 points… and then arrange the games by number of points?
Alternately give voters five votes to assign: One “Best Game” and four “Games worthy of recognition”. Best Game counts for two votes, and “worthy” counts for one vote.
Yes, David. I was sincerely offended by the fact that, in a thread which was turning into a bunch of men complaining about a couple of women, a man made a joke about hitting a woman that he was angry at (with a fish, yes, but hitting her). Because I think it’s a bad thing to trivialize and normalize violence against women, even if it’s jokey violence against women.
ETA: Well, I wasn’t really so offended by the original joke, more by the chorus of "Ermagerd how can you possibly tell him not to say such a thing? If you had said “Sorry that was in a bit of poor taste” or even everyone had let it drop then it wouldn’t have spoiled my day, at least, though I can’t speak for anyone else.
I feel like a jerk jumping into an argument–but doubling down on a risky joke sows the wind.
Also one of my “things” about Monty Python was that people (especially in HS) would have more fun saying “You don’t get the joke?” or letting people know they know it than actually enjoying it. This is never offensive, but it’s tedious.
That said I have to say, re: the original topic, people who said they would pass on judging my IFComp games left me with no hard feelings. In fact I was rather grateful. It’s a small courtesy. 95% of people do take a deep breath before they flame. People generally don’t suck. The vocal minority can overrepresent, though.
Thank (insert religious, or spiritual not religious, or philosophical, or theological reference here)!
It does suck that votes like this affect the final outcome. I think this one should have been thrown out. Is there moderation for voting? It might be difficult for hundreds of votes to read through the reasons for the low score, but the “I don’t like web games” is a poor argument, and serves zero purpose for a game design competition that is open to any and all platforms that fit the ‘IF’ medium.
Take a step back. Stop trying to read hidden meanings into every single comment posted on this forum. Take things at face value. Someone making a joke - go look up the phrase while you’re at it, I think you could definitely use a few right now - about slapping someone with a fish is in no way advocating violence against women.
You could make an argument that web-only games are as fickle as the server they’re on, and are bound to disappear if not shared also in offline form.
This would be in regards to the “I don’t like web games” bit, naturally. As far as the Comp is concerned, though, I fail to see why future storage would be an issue, as long as the game is accessible throughout the competition.
Another thing on web-only games, they tend not to have SAVE/RESTORE/UNDO. I for one hated “Chemistry and Physics” because of that - it was relatively complex gameplay, involving me collecting items, using them, and always staying one step ahead of pursuit, while having to navigate in an awkward interface which gave me very little spatial reference (as compared to a parser game) and where, if I made one mistake, I had to restart to the beginning. So I was reluctant to experiment, and ended up quitting.
This is an isolated example, of course.
How would you moderate that? If you follow that process to the end, you end up with a pre-selected panel of judges, possibly elected by the community. Which is not bad as far as voting is concerned, but suddenly IFComp is no longer that much fun.
That’s one of my main beefs with web-only games. I dislike not being able to save the game when I need to, or having to begin all the way at the very start each time if I die or want to try out a different branch. Or, as has happened to me a few times, I’ve hit the delete key and instead of it deleting the last few letters I’ve typed, it’s hit the back key in my browser instead and taken me right out of the game. Meaning I then have to restart it as it hasn’t saved my progress. Until all those issues are fixed, I think web-only games are going to struggle against downloadable games.
No, actually those are better arguments than “I don’t like web games, so the score is an automatic 1, regardless of the quality of the web game I’m voting on.” The annoyance of restarting at the beginning, or not having good save points have made me quit many games before. In fact, even games I like, I can play them for hours upon hours, but when I’m forced to go back too far and re-do too much, that’s when I notice the clock, and generally quit.
I wouldn’t form that as the basis for a game review, however. That might be a design decision you don’t agree with the author on, but it doesn’t take into account what makes the game good. A good review should have both.
I agree with that. However, one rule for judges would fix this: you HAVE to play the game for at least a half an hour, or you can’t vote on it. That might cut out a lot of votes, but would level the playing field. So, you have an upper limit of 2 hours to decide, but can’t just open a game, or read a game’s description, and make a snap judgment that will negatively affect the game’s score if it’s just not for you. There would be no way to moderate this, as it would be on the judge’s honor, but would at least give someone pause before giving a quality game a 1 based on a personal bias.
So you when you said you’d apologize you were lying. OK.
And I didn’t say you were advocating violence against women. I said you were trivializing and normalizing it – treating hitting a woman that you are angry at as a laughing matter. Part of the sea change in attitude that we need in order for violence against women to subside is for people to stop thinking that it can be funny. (Just like you used to see a lot of jokes about drunk driving, and you don’t since people’s consciousness got raised about what a problem it is.)
Also, it’s a bit rich for you to tell me to take a step back. You started this off by whining about someone who had given a game of yours a bad vote two years ago. You are now in full-on tantrum mode because I criticized an attempted joke of yours. Take care of your own thin skin before you start telling other people they’re oversensitive.
Can you folks move this battle to personal messages? I think everyone can agree that violence against women is not funny, but what does it have to do with the IF comp?
The theory makes sense, but I’m afraid that in practice people would keep doing the same thing. One person in this thread already admitted that he didn’t take the 2hr rule into consideration at all while voting (that’s another reason I don’t vote; I hate playing with a clock). It won’t make much of a difference in the whole run - you’d need a LOT of people breaking that rule and a LOT of huge games that people wanted to play to completion in order for it to adversely affect the results, and I don’t believe that’s going to happen until we have another Blue Lacuna. Or until Andy Phillips comes back. Anyway, point is, people will probably keep doing the same thing.
THAT SAID… it’s always better to try and fix it than to sit wallowing about how it can’t be fixed. So yeah, maybe we could give that a try, as well as any other alternatives that pop up.
Yeah, that’s fine – the 2 hour rule kind of sucks, too. But, that’s what the IF Comp vs. Spring Thing is about. The original intent of the IF Comp, from what I’ve learned, is for shorter games. I don’t like this rule, myself, as I think the IF Comp has transcended its roots, and is the place for IF games to get the attention of the IF community, and in some cases, media outside the IF community. Spring Thing is still relatively obscure, but is a good overflow for games that can’t make the Sept. deadline.
I just don’t like a vote being cast from someone that didn’t even play the game for 5 minutes. That seems unfair.
My apology was meant with as much sincerity as my original comment about slapping people with fish. Read into it what you will.
But I’m bored of this fishy little debate anyway. This is neither the time nor the plaice for it. I cod stretch it out for a while longer but I don’t have the energy for it.
This debate about fish has ceased to exist. It is an ex debate. It has kicked the bucket, shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible.
(The above is in no way intended to incite violence against fish. Just so we’re clear.)
The problem is that no matter what changes are made to the rules, it’s still debatable whether people will follow them or not. The last time I voted in the IFComp, I played the games for as long as I wanted - some for only 10-15 minutes, some for a lot longer than 2 hours - and submitted my votes, not caring one way or the other if I was breaching some sacred rule or not.
I’m sure it was more sacred when it first appeared. I don’t mean to imply you are doing a Gweat and Tewwible Thing by Violating the Sancity of the Two-Hour Wule, or anything, you were just a handy example of theory not always going hand to hand with practice.