Should Adversity strike again?

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papillon
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Should Adversity strike again?

#1 Post by papillon »

... uh, basically, is there sufficient interest in doing the "make a VN with limited shared resources" contest a second time? It wouldn't be for quite a while, but if we're going to do it again I'll need lead time to get graphics commissioned.

If we go ahead with it, this contest would generously bequeath TWO sprites, and they'll be a little less silly than Disaster-tan, but it would obviously still require a lot of creative energy to stand out from the obvious.

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Re: Should Adversity strike again?

#2 Post by Carassaurat »

While I greatly enjoyed writing with such tight constraints last year, I think it's the judging that was pretty problematic. In the end, only a handful of people actually played all of the 29 entries, and I'm not sure if I'd take the time to do so again this year. Imagine if this year even more people will participate and even less people would play every entry (Anarchy has sadly, mysteriously, left us), the voting would not be representative of anything at all. I can't think of a proper solution either — getting a 'professional' panel of judges would be interesting, but it'd cut out on the discussion.

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Re: Should Adversity strike again?

#3 Post by Sapphi »

Carassaurat wrote:While I greatly enjoyed writing with such tight constraints last year, I think it's the judging that was pretty problematic.
Yeah. I loved writing for this, and I did enjoy the entries that I played, but there were so many of them... I do plan on going back to enjoy the rest of them... someday... >_>

I want to say that if we did do this again, it would be nice if the discussion of all the different games wasn't all in the same thread... when I had played a game and wanted to see what other people had thought about it (so that I could try to provide a different angle or at least note my agreement with their sentiments), it was a little tiresome to have to skip around and look for their posts.
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Re: Should Adversity strike again?

#4 Post by Applegate »

I'd recommend having a panel of judges pick candidates and have a limited amount the public can vote on. I did not write anything and was all set on judging, but too many entries.

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Re: Should Adversity strike again?

#5 Post by papillon »

And as I explained many times, I strongly object to the concept of a 'panel of judges', so I guess that's that. Oh well. :)

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Re: Should Adversity strike again?

#6 Post by Applegate »

You can also weed out the bad from the good yourself. There's nothing to gain from judging and it's taboo to call something bad; Therefore, the hurdle to judge is a lot higher, and having 28 games to judge just makes it excessively hard. It's just one of many suggestions to limit the amount of work the public voting process will take.

I think you could be a lot more successful if you had a panel first select the top ten and have the public vote on those, but if you absolutely dislike that, don't do it obviously. It's your money.

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Re: Should Adversity strike again?

#7 Post by papillon »

When the end goal is "get people to discuss all the games" rather than "pick the best game", any sort of winnowing is obviously counter-productive. I don't care about the winner, I care about the conversation, the prize is just to get people to participate.

I also argue that any sort of winnowing tends to be counter-productive to picking the 'best' game as well, because that makes things even less representative. If I go through and pick out the games I like best and then make people vote on those, it's quite likely that a good story which I just didn't personally click with will completely slip through the cracks, and instead you'd end up with an overabundance of games featuring yuri.

The modification I was considering, voting-wise, was to assign any judge a subset of games (say, ten?) and require them to rank that entire subset. So you wouldn't have to play all the games, but you would have to submit more than just three votes, which should produce broader data.

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Re: Should Adversity strike again?

#8 Post by TrickWithAKnife »

Why not base it on ratings rather than votes?

At least that way you'll get a more accurate view on the popularity of games regardless of how many people played them.
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Re: Should Adversity strike again?

#9 Post by PyTom »

I've been thinking about setting up my own VN competition thing, regarding non-fiction or educational games. Although I haven't decided to go forward with it, I did think a bit about the judging.

One rule I'd suggest is allowing people to rate a game after they've played it for a certain amount of time - say 10 minutes or so - rather than playing it to completion. I think in the "real world", we give games a certain amount of time to pique our interests, and we drop them if they don't - and I think saying that is a fair review. Asking judges to play through n games - even if the games didn't draw them in - seems like it may cause burnout.
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Re: Should Adversity strike again?

#10 Post by CheeryMoya »

When it came time to play the entries, I was determined to read and partake in the discussion, but some of the more active users made me feel a little less enthusiastic after my opinions were essentially invalidated by them. After a while I just got tired of trying to keep up.

The judging portion of the contest just needs to be more organized. I remember that assigning some game discussion per day was suggested somewhere? Keep tabs on who's taking part too, while comments shouldn't be policed I think there was some heat while talking about 4Dimensional. Then again, I couldn't keep up with it so I can't recall for sure.

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Re: Should Adversity strike again?

#11 Post by TrickWithAKnife »

A 5-10 minute play time is interesting. It's common knowledge that any kind of electronic media needs to grab the consumer's attention within the first 5-10 minutes, so it would be good practice to get people thinking hard about that important part of their game.

Regarding an educational game category, would there be enough of them? I strongly believe VNs have a lot of potential as education tools, but I'm not sure how many devs are working on educational titles.
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Re: Should Adversity strike again?

#12 Post by akizakura »

I certainly hope so!!

The feedback I got from entering last year was extremely helpful and I was able to see where I struggle and how to improve. It took away the need for me to worry about art and music so I could focus solely on the writing.

In terms of the judging component - I do agree it's tough. The discussion aspect was a great part of the contest last year, but what to do in the face of numerous entries? I like Py'Tom's idea about having people give a rating after 5-10 minutes if we're actually trying to declare a winner. But that still doesn't account for the more robust reviewing we saw last year. Hmm - I think last year, papillon, you gave us a minimum number of games to try and review. For me, that was really helpful because I was crunched for time but still had a minimum number to shoot for. Just some thoughts.

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Re: Should Adversity strike again?

#13 Post by Funnyguts »

I'd consider joining again, but it might be nice if it wasn't a competition, just (potentially anonymous) creations being compared and discussed without any need for posturing over which one is 'the best'. But that's just me.

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Re: Should Adversity strike again?

#14 Post by akizakura »

Funnyguts wrote:I'd consider joining again, but it might be nice if it wasn't a competition, just (potentially anonymous) creations being compared and discussed without any need for posturing over which one is 'the best'. But that's just me.
That would be pretty cool and would take away the need to ensure or create rules for judging/

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Re: Should Adversity strike again?

#15 Post by dramspringfeald »

I feel an hour time limit would be better for the games. We've all seen those games and movies that stick to the "10 minuet" rule and after the time limit it's like they just gave up. I feel that would happen here for the same reason. If you give them a forced hour limit then they will be forced to keep at it.

Remember Oblivion and Skyrim take almost half an hour before you get to see what the game really looks like and we should have to stick to the same.

As for the judges Admin's and Mods! We have mods split into different categories why not use them?

Will this be on Technical Skill or just Good Games? We would need a Scoring criteria like time, interest, structure and the like.
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