Re: Suggestion for future design contests.

["Aaron Waters" <aaron.waters@...>]

--- In piecepack@yahoogroups.com, "Jorge Arroyo" <trozo@...> wrote:
snip
>   Talking about the contests, I think the community would benefit from a
> contest like those organized by the Icehouse community (One is
currently in
> progress, btw) with open voting by the community. It certainly would
be an
> incentive to play some new games :)
snip

Jorge,

First off, I'm glad to see my post got thoughtful responses rather
than starting a flame war. To be honest, I didn't check back for a while.

I think the idea of contests with open community voting is a great one
and one I hadn't thought of at all. I like it, if for no other reason,
 because I think I might have more luck getting my gaming group to try
piecepack games if I told them it was to rank them for a contest. It
still wouldn't help with us almost always having at least 5 players
and there being so many games that play 2-4, but that's another story.

Depending on how the votings handled, I'm assuming it'd be some
version of Australian rules (also called instant runoff) voting, I'd
be a little worried about people only playing 1 or 2 games that they
thought looked promising or liked the theme of, but voting anyway, w/o
having given the others a fair shake. Having not looked at the
Icehouse contests, I don't know if it's been much of an issue there. I
do know that when I looked at the results of the voting for the Hugo
award for best science fiction novel the one time I had the
opportunity to participate in them, a large number of voters only
ranked 1 or 2 of the 5 or 6 nominees. I assume, but don't know, that
that's because they hadn't read the others. I'm not sure there's much
you can do about that, aside from asking people not to do it.