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vincenzo vinciguerra wrote:
> Why is that so hard to swallow? This isn't a political election where
> you vote for Bush because he's got a better make-up than Kerry. The
IF
> competition should be a place where people express well-founded
> esthetical convictions, not their ignorance.
Well, if you want to do that, you had better start restricting the set
of judges to only that set of people who have "well-founded esthetical
convictions", and not letting any old person (like me) judge games. My
votes were based on: 1) Does the game have serious mechanical flaws?
2) Is the concept of the game interesting? 3) Did I enjoy the game?
In general, stuff that did really poorly in part 1 got a very low score
from me--that was along the lines of "the parser works so poorly that
this is unplayable" or "ten completely unreasonable causal chains in
the first ten minutes of the game." That kind of flaw was most likely
to make me put a game down quite quickly, and give it a score of 1 or
2. Assuming no horrible horrible flaws like that, it mainly just meant
+/- 1 or 2 for things that were done especially well or especially
awkwardly.
Parts two and three varied a lot. For example, I found the whole
concept of Gamlet to be quite interesting, but found it to be pretty
un-fun in practice. Contrariwise, I thought Luminous Horizon was
somewhat fun but not actually very interesting. Baseline here is "if
it was fun or if it was interesting, but not both, start at around 5.
If it was both fun and interesting, start around 8."
Of course, my opinions are almost certainly going to be different from
anybody else's. I'm sure other folks found Luminous Horizon to be more
original (and also more fun) than I did. I'm just as sure that other
folks found Gamlet to be less un-fun than I did. Or, more likely, they
had different ways they were looking at games. I was looking for
"working, interesting, fun". Somebody who's been doing this for longer
might be looking for for "different from what's been done before."
ANYway, the key thought is: this is a competition that is *well
publicized*, which has judging open to the world. As such, you're
going to get a pretty wide range of viewpoints. You are certainly
going to get people voting who haven't played much recent IF. So, it's
a little hard to say that "people [should] express well-founded
esthetical convictions, not their ignorance" without saying "We must
exclude those who have not proven that they are aesthetes."
So make a new competition with more restrictions if you want that--with
enforced anonymity of authors, and picked judges who are respected
members of the community. Ifcomp is obviously the populist contest
here, where hoi polloi gets to come in and have a voice.
Walter S. wrote:
> Not what I meant. The ten games rule would still stand. "Best" would
> thus mean "best game of the ten I've played", assuming you hadn't had
> time to play more.
Yes... but I think that works worse than the current system. With the
"rate every game and take the average" model, if you get people to "do
the right" thing and play in random order as they've been asked to, you
get at least a reasonable amount of statistical goodness coming out.
If you ask for "what are the top three games you've rated out of the
at-least ten that you've played, and please play in random order", then
a person who happens to play only ten *truly awful* games is supposed
to say that three of those games were the best three? I mean, I guess
it sort of works--but it doesn't make much sense to me. Or at least,
no more sense than the idea that "If you didn't like any of them, don't
vote at all" is really voting.
John.
You'll note that
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