The things I post are very serious, and I am cracking up when I was writing it: "OMG I am such a nutcase, it is gonna freak people out." In my opinion, the voting system is too difficult. With nine entries, I think that it is appropriate to allow the voters to vote as follow:

Each voter, including the contestants, may vote for three entires, and the entry with the most popular vote wins. Isn't this simple? It is a fast, easy, and intuitive voting system.


Re: Five Rounds

What I observed, is that having five rounds may be redundant. A good introduction may contain charactersation, plot outline, scenetic, and climax. Any reasonable chrunk yanked out from a piece of writing demonstrates all these abilities. But focus is also a good thing. Therefore I am not objecting that there are five rounds. But if I have to choose between having one round with elaborated discussion and five roudns with none, I rather have one.

Technically, an entry is not an early work of some long-term design. The contest simply asked the contestants to write something about the given theme. If you are not a contestant that is sure that you will win and no one in the forum can provide any further info that you don't know, then you would want feedback. And this is not just for the contestants, but for the viewers too. Viewers should be discussing the entries so that more concrete, solid evaluation criteria can be established for the next contest.

People want to know why one entry is better than another, and in what sense it is better. All of these are very beneficial. The nine entries shared many similar symbols and styles, those similarities form very good basis for comparisons and discussions.

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Original post by 5MinuteGaming I think that if we had a place to post the entries where everyone could post comments and vote on it that would work much better. Hmmm say have it a part of GameDev perhaps....[just a thought]

I think this is a good idea. It can be chaotic to have a conversation if nine entires are being discussed at the same time. On the other hand, it can also be undesirable because entries do share similarities, and comparisons are inevitable. I was imagining a board, where each entry has its own thread, and each topic of comparison has another. However, this only makes sense if there are people interested in discussing the entries seriously in depth.

I think that a major meaning of a competition is to understand how to improve. Therefore, in retrospect, it should be easy to create an entry that surpasses these original nine (that is, if the discussion that followed is a good discussion). Otherwise, why have a competition if we can't improve from it?


Writing is a pretty abstract subject to many people. Many people don't know how to evaluate writing objectively, don't know how to verbalize the weaknesses and strengths of writings, and not to mention the ability to compare writings that are not intuitively similar. This competition provides a nice setting for developing and exercising these skills. I guess it is fair to say that poor writers don't read well enough to correct their mistakes. And this is a good opportunity to compare the way we read.

Yes it is a shame there hasn't been more discussion on any discussion on the entries. Perhaps this has been because of the popular voting system as people have said, so I'll shorten it to 3 days for round 2. Or what about this 5 days of disucssion followed by 2 days of voting? Let people explain their pieces or points view, get feedback from everyone and then let people decided which is the most best entry?

There isn't enough info to decide what we should do, because we haven't started discussing. After an actual discussion begins we will know how we should do the voting and discussion. Maybe none of us can make a good discussion so it is just a dream. Or maybe most aren't interested in such discussion, and it is seen as a burden.

The contestants shouldn't need to explain anything outside the entries. You can eliminate this need by giving sample entry for future rounds, so that there will be no question: "is it creativity or is it rule breaking?"

Well, I believe that this is exactly what we wanted out of the first round. It was after all a sort of test round for the competition to see how things work and possibly discover how to improve on them. I agree with you Estok that we should actually have some deep discussion about each entry in turn and also a place where entries can be compared and contrasted to better analyze the best out of all for that round.

I remember those good'ol days in high school and college where we did peer critiqueing of our writing and an open discussion. To have someone read what we had writen would weed out any inconsistancies, confusion, and grammer mistakes that we had. It would also make us more aware of how other people interpret our writing. Alas that type of system would be akward in a contest setup. The 5 days of discussion sounds like a good idea.

It might be a good idea to come up with a new structure for the competition changing how the voting is done and what it is we are trying to accomplish here, whether it be to make the contest just a fun way to get people to write or whether we want to finely tune peoples skills at game writing. Cause ultimately the people who read these entries and participate in the voting or discussions will go on to make their own games so therefore, we should want the games that they create to be better than they would be without this competition.

Although I believe that incorporating all of those objectives would be the ideal structure. Since, we are writing about games and games should be enjoyable so we should have fun writing about them. Also, anyone wishing to get better at something must practice and in practice its better to have someone watching you so they can tell you your mistakes; a lot of times we overlook our own mistakes. And finally, this is about a game a piece of software to be exact there are certain formats that would be more beneficial to a programmer, level designer, concept artist, or what-have-you than to a regular book reader. Are we attempting to add that into our competition? Should that be one of the judging criteria?

In addition I think that we should choose a genre for all the rounds since there are a lot of people who could base their votes on the simple fact that they like or dislike the particular genre the game introduction implied. We should choose a writing genre, romance, comedy, sci-fi, fantasy, noir, etc... And we should also choose a type of game, adventure, fps, strategy, puzzle, abstract, etc... or just make it creative say ask people to be as original as they can be with the game genre. It would help bring the entries closer together for comparison and allow a higher level of competitiveness.

Oh and Estok you do freak me out and you definitely are a 'nutcase'! :P

I think the anonymity is what stimeys the discussion. Authors don't want to give away what's their's, and I think it's hard to get people interested enough to read all that. That's a lot of reading.

I'd love a discussion, though. Critique is fun, and I've only picked out a few comments about mine, only one of which contained some of it's flaws. I'd, personally, like to know what I'm doing wrong so I can fix it and pwn all you hookers in the other rounds. ;)

Anonymity is good, though. I'm new here, so I don't wanna lose just because of who someone is, or who they know.... I'm just saying that's probably a big part of it. Some may feel entries shouldn't be discussed because it's anonymous.

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mistakes. And finally, this is about a game a piece of software to be exact there are certain formats that would be more beneficial to a programmer, level designer, concept artist, or what-have-you than to a regular book reader. Are we attempting to add that into our competition? Should that be one of the judging criteria?

The applicabilty critera reflects this, as half the points are for whether or not the entry is in a suitable format for a game introduction. Rather then a them being a short story or backstory. That said in terms of format I personally feel that entry 5 followed by 3 where the best formatted entries.

Some people have said they'd like to change the format for competition if so how? Currently everyone votes for every entry does changing it to pick the top 3 improve things? What happens to an entry that doesn't recieve any votes? Currently there is only a 2 point difference in terms of total votes between the top 4 entries and only 1 has been ranked 1st by anyone. If people only pick their top 3 it would create some large difference in terms of pop scores and possible a large number of zeros. I welcome any suggestions for improvements though.

It's a hard situation, considering the low voter turn-out(heehee).

As difficult as it may be, this is after all just for fun... and the winner only gets that small amount of glory... is it really necessary to do anything other than plurality voting?

If so, then in my finite math class, I think it was the borda count method that usually always arrived at a conclusion that assured that the most popular won. But if it's popularity that's the problem, I don't know.

I'd also like to see Estok write a brief example of whatever it is he's talking about. :|

I don't understand what you're saying, you freakazoid. <3

Maybe there should be a revote.

An example of what? About the voting or the type of writing that surpasses all entries?

I don't see anything wrong with some entries having no vote in the popular vote. It doesn't make much of a difference. In a normal, structure competition with readily comparable entries, the voters can vote for one entry that they believe is the best. However it is not easy to select one so it is relaxed to have three.

I don't think that the popularity vote needs to be added to the overall score. Just as movie critics don't include popularity in their evaluations.

Re: TechnoGoth

You said something confusing:

Quote:

The applicabilty critera reflects this, as half the points are for whether or not the entry is in a suitable format for a game introduction. Rather then a them being a short story or backstory.

In the description of the competition, you allowed narration as an acceptable format, it means that it cannot be a penalizing factor, otherwise, you would be luring contestants into a trap. Applicability given that narration is a suitable format, means that the content of the entry must imply an imaginable game. It meant that we weren't being judge by the format in terms of applicability. Because it clearly stated that Applicability is "How appropriate the submission is to the game medium" not to the development process of a game. So the judging criteria did not reflect what 5MinGaming was referring.


Re: Surpassing

The cheap answer, is that if you believe that there is clear winner, than any well described mistake or improvement leads to another winner in the same contest in retrospect. It is only impossible if none of us can find anything wrong with any entry.

The deep answer was what I gave, that in the perspective that it is a writing contest, none of the entries showed a depth of interaction and integration between the story and the game through the art of writing (not the art of description). By that, I meant that the entry should read like a book, but while you are reading it, you feel like you are involved in a game, and at the same time, you understand that the content of the book can be directly implemented as a game, as if:

- a designer designed an integrated game-story game
- a writer played it and enjoyed it
- the writer wrote a book about a particular experience of a game run, without diverging from the actual experience of playing the game
- a reader reads the writing with an induced experience of playing the game, without the writer explicitly referring to the fact that a game is being played.

This an special interpretation of the criteria of this contest, but not the criteria themselves. In terms of style, this is very good because it is definitely a piece of artistic writing; in creativity, the very method of presentation is more creative than a narration, scene script, or a combination; in applicability, it is 100% applicable because it demonstrates how the game flows through the induced experience of playing the game, it is a demonstration of applicability, not a description of applicability; in popularity, it should probably score well, because, not only does it engages the reader, it induces the sense of involvement that makes the reader feels like an active player.

You may say that a scene script does just that, but a scene script lacks the artistic seamless flow as a flow of writing. In order to understand this argument, you need to understand the difference between a piece of writing that describes a scene and a piece that induces a scene. It is a recurrent perspective that I said in this forum: Just as a drawing based on a story does not simply draw the scenes in the story, a writing based on a drawing doesn't describe the drawing by describing the relative positions of images on the canvas. This is the difference between a piece writing that is art, and a piece of writing describes an art.


I wasn't entirely on crack when I wrote these. These may not be intuitive concepts to you. But if you want to understand it you can try paraphrasing it. In a nutshell, just imagine this:

Can you write a piece of writing that introduces a game by letting the reader play the game through the writing, without turning the writing itself into a scene script or an interactive story? Are you able to convey interactivity through a passive medium?

Can you play tetris in writing? So that everytime you want to play tetrix and you don't have batteries you can just read it and you feel like you played it?

You don't need to pay attention to these if you think that these goals are too weird. But if you master this skill, your stories in a game will be very integrated, because, even if the player is reading something in the game, it will feel like he is playing it.

[Edited by - Estok on September 21, 2005 6:36:43 PM]