Thursday, January 8, 2009

More thoughts on the IGF

ive thought about it a lot today and if the way the IGF judging was setup in a more democratic way then, every game that made it into the finals would be totally validated.. if 20+ people think that YHTBTR should be a finalist then they are right and im wrong... but i gave a feeling if the judging was fixed the results for the finals would be a lot different.

but the fact is the games that got in are only the opinions of 2-6 people and not a combined score of all, or even a majority of judges. I think the only real valid issue with every bitch and moan people have about the igf can be traced back to the fact that their judging system is extremely and obviously flawed.

when only a few people are judging a game often times your running into very polarized opinions and personal taste of the people involved.

if you have 3 people judging your turn based strategy game, and 2 of those judges arnt fans of that genre.. then your fucked. Judging something by its average score is only valid when its a consensus of all involved.

now i realize that having 200+ games and only 20 judges working on them is a big reach.. but it doesn’t mean keeping the way its setup now is the best.. because its very obviously not.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Edmund, we will welcome proposals, of course. I think letting judges (there are >40, by the way, not >20) just nominate their 10 favorite games means they have to play all 250+, though, which is definitely unrealistic, right? Many of them are busy professionals or working on their own games.

Edmund said...

Yeah it will all be explained in the proposal. we are thinking through every little loop hole.

in the end i realize that the ideal situation (having all the judges judge all the games) isnt possible, but i think we can come to a comfortable medium that works a little better then whats already established.

right now the igf is working on the basic judging structure from when less then 100 games were being entered and the categories were split into 2 larger sections. either way i think we can all agree that there are something that need to be rethought to fit the new situation.

i hope we come up with some reasonable ones in the proposal