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[Uykered]

I forgive you!

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

well i don't

hang him by his ears

[Blademasterbobo]

it feels weird when paul posts something like that

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i think that feeling is just 'being bobo'

[Blademasterbobo]

 

[aeiowu]

When I first checked in to this thread I saw Phubans specifically tearing my game apart for getting an honorable mention over his in the mobile category. I can understand his point about our game (he said it looked like a weekend tech demo) and that he's upset. But it still hurt kind of a lot. I met Paul last GDC and I thought we became fast friends so it was hard to hear that the reason he was upset was because of my game, in some way or another. I think Spunk and Moxie looks pretty sweet, I haven't played it but I think it's going to do well just from the looks of it.

Greg, I want to apologize for that. I said some very stupid things out of anger of losing, and I didn't mean for them to be personal attacks, especially not on you. It was only after I realized that I had already said those things that I realized the error of my ways. I'm sincerely sorry. I remember meeting you and Mike and thinking you were both really great dudes, and I didn't even realize that half of the games I was dissing were made by friends and people I knew. You could imagine my embarrassment and chagrin when I realized that Honorable Mention was yours. I've wanted to apologize for that ever since, and I've never really had the opportunity to do that until now. So again, I'm really sorry for the stupid things I said out of anger

Hey dude no worries! I understand for sure and it's not a big deal now. Let's forget about it, see you in SF hopefully! I wanna check out Spunk & Moxie.

[Dragonmaw]

I think the real lesson we can take away from all this is:

Nobody is more fervent about the quality of a game than its developer

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i'm not sure about that. what about minecraft? some of his fans are way more fervant than notch is about it

speaking of minecraft, i just read this comment on that igf article:

I can look back and imagine me "reviewing" my first five minutes of Minecraft. I have to punch trees? You just punch trees? I'm all alone and there is nobody to talk to. What do I do? Oh I can punch the dirt too... woo. Now it is dark, I can't see anything, I just blew up, Where did all my wood go? Everything is trying to kill me and I just have to punch them with wood? I died again. This game is boring. -End- Five minute review of one of the best indie games. Notch really should have learned and started you with a full set of diamond tools fighting a dragon, you know... to hook me, let me know the game is worth playing.

[:^)]

Yeah... what I take out of this is thus, YOU'RE ALL _____

[Glaiel-Gamer]

nobody claims that minecraft's lack of an intro and reliance on an external wiki is a positive factor of that game

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

nobody claims that minecraft's lack of an intro and reliance on an external wiki is a positive factor of that game

that's true, but i can't help but also think that if nobody knew about minecraft, and it were submitted to the igf before it got popular, no judge would have played it for long enough to even discover that you can craft things, and it possibly wouldn't have been nominated for a single award

[Alex May]

I think everybody is right! To an extent.

- Rotten Cartridge are right: people should be playing at least the games they are assigned and giving the games some actual time. Entrants deserve to have their games played (n.b. this generally happens).
- Paul Eres is right: people should be playing games for more than 5 minutes, in the interests of fairly judging something and I think judges should be more like reviewers than consumers (though playing a game to completion is expecting too much IMO).
- Andy Schatz is also right: there are many games entered in the IGF for which it is totally possible to form a dismissive opinion (nomination-wise) in less than 5 minutes. They might be decent games (so, so many are not), but judges are working to categorical constraints. It's unreasonable to expect a judge to play through a 15-hour game just because e.g. the ending might be an amazing bit of storytelling.
- Brandon Boyer is right: all games still got judged.
- Jenn Frank is right: Rotten Cartridge should not have posted Simon's email and should have talked with the IGF organisers about their experience before airing their shit in public.
- Greg Wohlwend is right: the negativity here is short-sighted and blinkered.
- Brandon Boyer is right: Developers would do well to make their games easier to judge.

I think above all, Andy Moore is right and the IGF is awesome, and not perfect, but I think in essence that is everyone's view. It's just that (as Greg said) some people think the IGF organisers are busting a gut to make it the best they can year after year and others seem to think they are deliberately screwing people or are incompetent.

I prefer to think positively and I think that if everyone did that things would be a lot better for everyone.


A few other personal opinions:

As a judge and an entrant, I liked the mandatory feedback rule and was disappointed that it was lifted this year. It proves that people have played a game enough to comment, which is my personal threshold of whether a game has been given enough time. Never mind that e.g. some judges just don't like some types of games, or are not good judges, or whatever - at least this rule ensures people have played a game enough to form an opinion that can go into 100 words. If you can't play 16 games over a month or two enough to write 100 words on each, consider not being a judge.

Entrants should have to enter their games into the individual categories. In this respect we would have some initial self-selection by entrants themselves - if I'd made a game that had mind-blowing level design or game mechanics, but graphics that looked like Asteroids, I'd not be expecting a nomination in 'Visual Art' but would consider entering in the 'Design' category. This would enable judges to approach a game in the right frame of mind, and not dismiss games that look, sound, or play a certain way just because of that one failing. It also would make people think harder about whether their game is competitive in each of the categories and ultimately if it is actually worth entering the game at all (many games entered in the IGF are not worth entering in my opinion).

People shouldn't enter just to get feedback. Feedback is a bonus. It's fair to expect your game to get played, but don't pay $95 to get feedback on your game. Post it on the internet instead or get some friends to play it.

Also I think that people should be nice about feedback to the IGF. Almost all of the people who are writing about this every year and with whom I strongly agree mention that Brandon and Simon are actual people and they have feelings too, not to mention that they are really passionate about indie games. They DO respond to feedback but I get the feeling that all the pissing and moaning that people are exhibiting really makes that hard to do - I know if it were me, I'd just be tempted to withdraw from the process of getting public feedback at all and start running it more like the closed, ivory-tower organisation that some of you guys seem to think it is.

I don't think you guys realise how hard you're making it to improve the IGF.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

to be clear i don't think that playing all assigned games to completion is absolutely necessary. i like adam saltsman's personal rule for his judging: at least one hour each game (if the game is more than an hour long). that's still only about 18 hours total over the course of a month (or half an hour a day), which is a good chunk of time but not so large that you have to totally neglect your other projects/duties, it's an amount of time even the busiest judge that volunteers to judge should be capable of

also, to me, the issue isn't primarily that there are a couple lazy judges. there will always be lazy judges, that's human nature. the issue is more that the laziness is defended by the igf rather than discouraged, which in effect encourages it. if you read brandon's comment to the rotten cartridge post, he didn't sound apologetic at all towards those whose games are dismissed in seconds, which you would have expected someone in his position to feel. so sure, he does have feelings, but so do the igf entrant indies who had their games judged so quickly; if he isn't cognizant of their feelings enough to feel apologetic, is it so surprising that others treat him similarly? (and does not *that* make the igf harder to improve, when they defend its problems rather than admit they are problems?) and you have to admit the rotten cartridge post was more mature about it than the jess frank post



you'll also note this comment exchange with her, where she seems more reasonable:

    @VeteranGamer says:
Thursday 02.23.12 at 10:06 am
I don't know anything about IGF. I don't really know or care much about indie games either. I'm here only because of @GWJRabbit retweeting this article. Here's the two cents of someone who is about an impartial an observer as could be.

The author pretty much needs to calm the heck down. Rotten Cartridge probably shouldn't have published the email. On top of that, they should have made that phone call. That, to me, is about the only thing they did wrong here. In the end, maybe something could have been fixed and this could have had a much happier ending if they make that call? Who knows? One thing's for certain, nobody will ever know now since they took the nuclear option.

The author here certainly has a lot of personal issues that go into her position. The argument of the game not installing doesn't hold water unless I just don't understand (or Rotten Cartridge has overstated the capabilities of) how the test suite everyone was given works. It appears that everyone gets the same code which when installed and played reports feedback to the developers. The fact that one judge didn't install the test suite could indeed mean that this person had life events come up. They're an outlier, just like the guy that played 53 minutes is an outlier here. The rest, those that never installed the game (which the code had to be good if anyone installed it) and those that only played an average of 4 minutes, here is the interesting stuff. We don't have the whole story here. What we need to know is if the group of non-installers installed any games. If not, they can be firmly grouped with the judge that never installed the test suite. If so, we've got a problem. Because as a judge, you never bothered to play all of the games you were assigned to play, and therefore you can't possibly be giving every game a fair shake. The other group here is the 4 minute people. If all the games played for these judges are about that long, then everything is kosher here at least from the fair shot standpoint, if not from a quality standpoint. But if you can see games getting way more play time, then we again, have a problem with all the games getting the same chance. But beyond even that, No self respecting game critic would review a game having only played it four minutes, so why should a judge in pretty much the only event that the mainstream (like myself) will see for indie games be given a pass on this? If you don't have the time, then DON'T BE A JUDGE. When you accept that role, you owe it to the entrants to do your job. The author, in this instance, made the right decision and took a pass this year. It sounds as like she did a fantastic job in other years as well. But looking at the report from this dev, only ONE judge actually gave a crap. Out of eight. 12.5%. Even in baseball, that's terrible.

I get the author's point that basically "stuff happens" in life, but there's also this thing of accountability too. She went off the deep end because she felt someone crapped on people she liked. I understand that. I defend people I like too. The issue here though is that the dev's comments were never about her capacity to judge. The problem with most of this article is that she took it like they were. The complaint was about the staggering 7 out of 8 of judges assigned to their game that looked like they could care less. There was one person that certainly did their job.

Were I the author, I'd be more interested in the seven jackwagons making the process look bad than about the dev calling out my friends. The dev's post, and this article never happen if they simply did their job in the first place.

Reply

    jennatar says:
Thursday 02.23.12 at 10:18 am
The author is totes cool with this assessment, thank you. Thank you for writing, too; I really appreciated this.

[st33d]

Notch really should have learned and started you with a full set of diamond tools fighting a dragon, you know... to hook me, let me know the game is worth playing.

This is how the Java web demo of my first Minecraft experience started. It gave you a diamond pickaxe. I ran up to a mountain and punched through to the other side and thought, "wow, that was strangely fun."

nobody claims that minecraft's lack of an intro and reliance on an external wiki is a positive factor of that game

I think what appears to be a nuisance is actually the main draw of the crafting system. People like reading wikis. I've lost days to TVTropes. It's like browsing through a big spell book, and although its a pain, it's rewarding because you've "mined" recipes.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i think that is also true of dwarf fortress. there's a new class of game emerging: games that require a wiki and will kill you mercilessly otherwise. it's good to see that trend opposed to the 'games that don't even require you read the instructions or try very hard' trend

[Alex May]

to be clear i don't think that playing all assigned games to completion is absolutely necessary. i like adam saltsman's personal rule for his judging: at least one hour each game (if the game is more than an hour long). that's still only about 18 hours total over the course of a month (or half an hour a day), which is a good chunk of time but not so large that you have to totally neglect your other projects/duties, it's an amount of time even the busiest judge that volunteers to judge should be capable of

also, to me, the issue isn't primarily that there are a couple lazy judges. there will always be lazy judges, that's human nature. the issue is more that the laziness is defended by the igf rather than discouraged, which in effect encourages it. if you read brandon's comment to the rotten cartridge post, he didn't sound apologetic at all towards those whose games are dismissed in seconds, which you would have expected someone in his position to feel. so sure, he does have feelings, but so do the igf entrant indies who had their games judged so quickly; if he isn't cognizant of their feelings enough to feel apologetic, is it so surprising that others treat him similarly? (and does not *that* make the igf harder to improve, when they defend its problems rather than admit they are problems?) and you have to admit the rotten cartridge post was more mature about it than the jess frank post

Agree with all that, although my perception of Brandon's position isn't that he is unapologetic about it (examples exist of him apologising to devs and even refunding entry fees). I would be resistant to apologising to someone who had ignored an offer of resolving things in a friendly, face-to-face manner and had instead chosen a negative passive-aggressive route. Even if it was ostensibly done in the interest of other indies, cases like Kale In Dinoland are not the norm and RC's blog post serves to magnify those times when the IGF fails people - something I don't think anyone is outright denying.

Jenn is clearly also an outlier in terms of her extreme viewpoint, a viewpoint that can be explained by her life events over the last year or whatever as explained in the comments. I cherry-picked the main part of her post I agreed with (as I did with all the other posts), and I never claimed to agree with the entirety of what anyone was saying.

[paulmcgg]

I prefer to think positively and I think that if everyone did that things would be a lot better for everyone.

Hear, hear.

As a judge and an entrant, I liked the mandatory feedback rule and was disappointed that it was lifted this year. It proves that people have played a game enough to comment, which is my personal threshold of whether a game has been given enough time. Never mind that e.g. some judges just don't like some types of games, or are not good judges, or whatever - at least this rule ensures people have played a game enough to form an opinion that can go into 100 words. If you can't play 16 games over a month or two enough to write 100 words on each, consider not being a judge.

Definitely.

Entrants should have to enter their games into the individual categories. In this respect we would have some initial self-selection by entrants themselves - if I'd made a game that had mind-blowing level design or game mechanics, but graphics that looked like Asteroids, I'd not be expecting a nomination in 'Visual Art' but would consider entering in the 'Design' category. This would enable judges to approach a game in the right frame of mind, and not dismiss games that look, sound, or play a certain way just because of that one failing. It also would make people think harder about whether their game is competitive in each of the categories and ultimately if it is actually worth entering the game at all (many games entered in the IGF are not worth entering in my opinion).

Now this is something I think IGF should strongly consider, it would help with a lot of problems in my opinion.

It would help alleviate judging games under every category pointlessly and let games be judged, sooner by more applicable judges to that category, on what they think themselves possibly worthy of merit (eg: a Nouvo award and not its graphical fidelity).

Perhaps it costs half the current price to enter one category, but obviously that stacks by entering more. Even under the same pricing structure I think it would help though.

The grand prize could still be nominated from all the games entered to the other categories, and a game could possibly be nominated into another category as well if enough judges think it apt?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

the idea for submission to individual categories was something that i plan for the indie contest discussed earlier on in this thread: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=22256.msg677133#msg677133 -- i don't think it'd work as well for the igf because the igf's categories are so generic (equivalent to gamepro's categories for its rating system)

@haowan - i guess i do think that the times when the igf fails people does deserve magnifying, because it's been hidden and underplayed for too long, and because nothing is changed in a bureaucracy except in reaction to some type of public outcry/protest, when it becomes more painful to stay the same than to change. blog posts like that *should* magnify failings, and it's a good thing that they look at a problem under a magnifying glass and encourage discussion about it

i doubt that much will change this year because of stubbornness, but i do see the beginnings of change here. as more and more people implement some form of time-tracking, in future years we'll get more and more data about exactly how common it is for a game to be judged based on someone not even getting through the tutorial/intro. more transparency about it will make problems harder to hide or defend

[eyeliner]

I find it funny how lenient the positions towards the (not so) judges have become. It looks like you, in general accept this travesty.

There's only a couple of points to assimilate here. IGF is seemingly non exclusive on entry but it is on judging. They accept happily the 95 dollah and what do they give in return? Jack shit.

The games, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, should have been played a fair amount. Any judge that didn't comply with the task given to him failed miserably and lets just hope they are removed in the future.

For Christ's sake, two months to fairly analise a game and there was no time to do it? Bullshit!

Better they create restricting standards to entrants or just remodel the business. Paying 95 dollars for a promise at a fair judging and not having it, in my eyes, is theft. Basically, a service was purchased and the provider didn't deliver.

[st33d]

I agree that it's piss poor when people in any walk of life don't do what they volunteered to do.

But nowhere on the IGF site does it say they are offering a service or a promise.