[GDS] February 2011 Game Design Showdown - "The Dice Gods Must Be Crazy" - Comments and Questions

Could you just make it if you vote, your entry gets a vote? And how about only members that have been a member for the last couple of weeks at least. :)

Whoa...I never meant for my post to be so inflammatory. I was just elaborating on why some people may of wanted to change the voting format. Im fine with whatever sytem you want to use. My main point was that not voting is not in the spirit of the contest and that I hope everyone votes.
Im sorry if it came across differently :(.

An alternative (perhaps less offensive?) might be to let all games over a set number of votes proceed to the next round, rather than having the cutoff determined by rank. This would require no additional book-keeping, yet remove the conflict of interest.

In case I left any doubt earlier, I too have every intention of voting regardless, but feel that it's important that we represent our community with a robust ruleset.

I think critiques will first be opened for posting after the voting is done, to not affect anyones opinion...

Of course, Arrow's decision of what criteria were important was undemocratic, too, and some inequalities are more unequal than others. ^_^ As strange as dependence on irrelevant alternatives is, I'll take anything within spitting distance of Pareto optimality over First Past the Post any day.

Another difficult problem is that fact that democracy was never originally intended to function on a scale as large as the US is now. In Athens everyone could know their government personally and make more informed choices, whereas that's nearly impossible now. Not to mention that when you have 300 million people, the odds of making laws that are appropriate, effective, and just for all of them, or sometimes even a majority of them, are pretty slim. The same would go for plebiscites.

Ok, stopping. Don't want to turn this thread into a political debate.

Not a bad idea, actually. You could have some sort of solo game where you had to keep the country happy while it's population grew and diversified. Might be interesting. It could end up forcing players to the realization that you just have to aim to please the majority or your base in order to stay elected and keep the country intact.

I've been enjoying going through the entries for the competition, but I've been troubled by those that have violated the rules. These range from major infractions (including components not allowed in the restrictions, going way over the 800-word limit) to minor (having pictures bigger than the allowed 400 wide by 600 tall), but they are all not right.

I'm not going to grudge anybody a pencil and paper to keep track of score - I think you can reasonably assume people have that around in their homes, and it's a convenience - not necessary for or integral to the game. A completed sudoku board or a gameboard with letters and number indices are much more problematic. These are not trivial items - they're specific, and in the case of the Sudoku board, completely integral to the game. If the designer wanted to substitute a 9x9 grid of numbers printed on a half card, that's fine, but it should be in the rules that way, because it would be very small and awkward to use.

Likewise, there are two entries that have significant backstory and flavor text present in italics that goes well over the 800 word limit - this clearly violates the rules, rules that the other entries obeyed. I've frequently had to cut such things out of my rules to reach the limit, and to have this rule not applied here seems very unfair. The admonition not to read italic text isn't effective; it is impossible to ignore it completely, and many (most?) readers won't attempt to ignore it anyway. The additional text clearly adds a great deal to the mood and feel of the game.

Though not as important, the image sizes are frustrating, too, because I and others have always carefully manipulated my images to be 400x600 or smaller, and some here are much larger (double the pixel size, in one case).

I don't mean to disrespect the designs that incorporated these things - they're generally quite good games, the extra components are used well and creatively, the extra text is descriptive and fun, and the bigger pictures easier to see. But those who adhered to the rules are disadvantaged by these extra-legal parts of the entries in ways that will not necessarily be clear to those judging the entries.

I realize the contest is a labor of love by the organizers, and that there were scads of entries this month, probably too many to police, but I really think that in a game competition, of all things, we should be able to hold to and enforce the few rules that are in place.

Agreed on the triviality of image orientations, although if we're going to permit 600x400 in addition to 400x600, then why not say so in the rules? I'd be for this change; I've sometimes put images in sideways just to meet the rules restriction.

The other things I mentioned are more serious, and in my view give a significant advantage to those entries, or (more importantly) remove the possibility to do those things for people who followed the rules. Who knows how much more awesome some of the entries would have been if they'd been given an extra 800 words for flavor text, or a free bonus component?

The last part of your comment I totally don't agree with. If I were playing chess, and I said, hey, my pawns can move backwards, but don't worry, it's just a friendly game without important results, I doubt you'd want to play with me much. Just because not much is riding on it doesn't mean it's not important to those participating.

The GDS rules language says things like 'should'. It does not say 'shall'. This is an important distinction. The other important point, which is related, is that there is no mention of disqualification if the person does not adhere to the rules.
Should is a suggestion
Shall is a command
And there is no 'or else' wording.

I know for the final round what I'm looking for.

Is it, 'a quick playing light game primarily made of dice'?
If yes, it gets my consideration.

however,
If it is not a light game (too complex)
If it is not quick playing (seems too long)
If it is not made primarily of dice (the other components seem either more integral or there are more of them).
then it doesn't get my consideration.

I'm not so sure that in this self-selected group of people that flavor text, image size, and word count tremendously affect the outcome of the contest. If it were the 'general public' voting, I wouldn't be so comfortable.

Hopefully my de-anonymizing at this point won't do any further damage, but I apparently owe you an apology. Any extenuating circumstances notwithstanding, I did not consider that others might have difficulty ignoring the italicized text. If I had not assumed this to be trivial, I would have submitted the version I had prepared without it. I had no intention of putting anyone else at a disadvantage... only, as originally stated, to share. If it doesn't equally disqualify me from your feedback and blessing on future development, I would rather bow out of the competition proper than run the risk of succeeding and being considered a 'cheater'.

For future reference, is there some way to pose public questions on how to handle 'edge cases' such as this without revealing the identity of the game's authors in so doing? I was actually trying to be respectful of the anonymity of the competition by dealing with my questions via PM...

I would rather have more submissions where some are not 'following the rules' as closely and have the option of voting or not voting for them than have just one person throw them out because they didn't follow the rules to a T.

I think we're all here to try to make the most kick ass game we can right?

My previous post was simply a commentary, but my actual opinion is more submissions = better with only a very light hand used to disqualify submissions. For example the contest is about a chess style game and the submitter submits a game about Jenga style dexterity...yeah I would support Sedj rejecting that submission.

I would not call anyone who bent the rules a cheater either.

aside... has a Mashup contest been done before? Like, take a popular abstract strategy game and mix it with an abstract popular dexterity game to create a new abstract strategic dexterity game.