Every day I check this forum to see if there is any news on the judging of 4E6 or any news about a new contest. But every day I'm disappointed, still no news. A while ago there were some promises about judging and even prizes I believe. But since then: not a single word. Off course there is the excellent topic by Avatar God which gives the contenders some nice feedback on all their efforts. And that made me think: should the contest be organized completely by the community? Off course, this is risky, I know a lot of forums where contests are organized that eventually are dying slowly because nobody is participating anymore. But on the other hand: the current situation isn't exactly encouraging either. So what are our options? What does a contest need, let me put up a list:

• Rules
• Strict deadline
• 4 Elements
• Submission system
• Judging
• Prizes?

The rules could be almost the same as the rules of 4E6, the only thing that has to be changed are the minimum system specs I think. A strict deadline can easily be chosen, again last years contest can be an example, we could choose a deadline sometime in April or May 2009. Then which elements to choose? This gets a bit harder, but I think we could handle this as well. For example we could choose a deadline for sending in suggestions for elements and after that we randomly choose 4 elements from all suggestions. Now the harder parts of the contest: a submission system. Well maybe one of the contenders can put up an ftp server and give every contender an account for uploading his/her creation. Or maybe we could even lend last years submission system. The real hard part: judging I'm thinking about contenders that judge the entries themselves, but this causes some new problems. Most people are probably not able to judge entries for every allowed operating system, so how should this be handled (maybe vm-ware or live cd's can be a partial solution)? And how to make sure that the entries are judged reliable? For judging also a deadline could be set, say: every contender can judge entries till two months after the submission deadline. The advantage is that everybody knows when judging is finished and we are not waiting ages before that last contender finally has send in his judgings. After the judging deadline the judgings that were submitted are averaged and the winners will be known. Some kind of standard form can be created which lists points that have to be judged, so that judgings of different contenders are all comparable. Another advantage is that there will be more judges and thus feedback from more people on your creation. Finally: prizes. This point isn't really important for me, I just want a nice project to work on this year. I don't really care if there are neat prizes or not. We could try to email some corporations and see if they are willing to make some prizes available, off course the chance they are willing to do this, depends also on how well the contest will be set up and the level of the submissions. But again: I don't really care about prizes. The real motivator for me is being part of a group of people which all have the same goal: create that game in a few months time, all using the same elements as a basis. No dependence on a single person/group The thing I really wanted to avoid is the dependence on one person or a specific group of persons. Because this dependence is a weak link in a contest: that person or group might not be able to do whatever he/they has/have to do and the whole contest comes to a halt, just the way it happened with 4E6. So after setting up some rules and deadlines the contest should more or less run itself: of course there must be some kind of submission system ready and someone who calculates the averages of judgings, but I think these are not really big problems. What do you think? Maybe this is just premature, maybe the new contest is already in development and maybe the judging of last year is even almost finished. But I think a change might be necessary to motivate existing and new contenders. The proposed setup depends completely on the community so if nobody cares there won't be a contest. But the good thing is: if enough people care (and I guess that everybody who has enough motivation to complete a game for submission does care), there will be a contest and there will be judging. With the proposed setup you will even know in advance when judging will be completed. So what do you think? Could this proposal be the way to go? Or should we wait for the gamedev crew to announce the judging of 4E6 and the new contest? Could a completely community driven contest be a reality, or will it suffer from problems that occur because people will loose interest or don't care about judging? I'm also hoping for some reactions from the gamedev crew, I am interested in their opinions and their thoughts about the current setup of the 4E contests.

I thought this was over already. Not heard anything on it in a while.

You could just start your own contest, but it would be nicer to have it officially hosted by GD. They have submissions systems in place for example.

How about judging being entirely community based? Every member can score every game. Individual biases should get ruled out, although other biases could remain - if people start saying one game is great & another useless, the number of people bothering to play each game might be affected.
However there are scoring systems which can cope with this. But someone with good knowledge of different scoring systems would be needed to decide a good system for the contest.

As for prizes, GD should be able to leverage it's reputation (that it claims it has). I've seen small sites get decent prizes, somewhere like GD already has people advertise with them (and even sponsor articles) so I would have thought getting prizes like laptops, consoles etc from big firms could be quite feasible.

Quote: Original post by d000hg
You could just start your own contest, but it would be nicer to have it officially hosted by GD. They have submissions systems in place for example.

I completely agree that it would be nicer if GD officially hosted the contest, but with the current 4E6 contest there is a problem I think and that should be solved in some way to keep contenders motivated. I guess a hybrid approach could also be taken, in which GD is the official host that provides rules, elements, a submission system and maybe prizes. But the judging still done by the community with some deadline on judging.

Quote: Original post by d000hg
How about judging being entirely community based? Every member can score every game. Individual biases should get ruled out, although other biases could remain - if people start saying one game is great & another useless, the number of people bothering to play each game might be affected.
However there are scoring systems which can cope with this. But someone with good knowledge of different scoring systems would be needed to decide a good system for the contest.

I agree, this is not an easy point. For the reasons you mention `top 3' approaches should be avoided. Every judge should judge as many games as possible, giving each game a rating at several points. Using the ratings from each judge, a final score should be calculated in some smart way.

Quote: Original post by d000hgAs for prizes, GD should be able to leverage it's reputation (that it claims it has). I've seen small sites get decent prizes, somewhere like GD already has people advertise with them (and even sponsor articles) so I would have thought getting prizes like laptops, consoles etc from big firms could be quite feasible.

Again, this could be achieved in a hybrid approach where GD is the official host. But of course GD has to agree with the proposals, so this only is a possibility if GD thinks this setup could work.

Perhaps you should organize your own contest, like others have done before (Trapper and Prozak spring to mind). Other than perhaps it's history, there's nothing inherently special about the four elements contest.

I bet you can use GameDev's forums for communication, but don't make it or present it as a 4E alternative. Keep it small in terms of length and prize pool. Smaller competitions allow a wider range of people to submit something of similar quality. Less entrants and quick games make the judging easier. Humble prizes make possible legal arrangements a non-issue (law still applies of course, but having a book or game as first prize should makes it easier/cheaper to follow up on promises). Also, limiting the choice of hardware and software platforms will make it easier to judge all the entries. And I bet you can find some non-participating members that want to serve as dedicated judges.

Quote: Original post by WanMaster
Perhaps you should organize your own contest, like others have done before (Trapper and Prozak spring to mind). Other than perhaps it's history, there's nothing inherently special about the four elements contest.

I bet you can use GameDev's forums for communication, but don't make it or present it as a 4E alternative. Keep it small in terms of length and prize pool. Smaller competitions allow a wider range of people to submit something of similar quality. Less entrants and quick games make the judging easier. Humble prizes make possible legal arrangements a non-issue (law still applies of course, but having a book or game as first prize should makes it easier/cheaper to follow up on promises). Also, limiting the choice of hardware and software platforms will make it easier to judge all the entries. And I bet you can find some non-participating members that want to serve as dedicated judges.

You are completely right, but the goal of this topic is not `organizing a contest'. The goal is `have another 4E contest'. I am a bit worried about how 4E is organized now, because I think the current judging process is not motivating for new contenders. So I am a bit worried if there even will be a new 4E contest in this way, therefore I started this topic with a proposal that could be picked up if there is enough backing. Of course nobody wants to end up with two big contests (an official 4E contest and a community driven contest), so if there is backing for this idea, it should also come from GD. Thats exactly why I am also curious about meanings of GD crew.

Quote: Original post by TheFlyingDutchman

Quote: Original post by d000hg
How about judging being entirely community based? Every member can score every game. Individual biases should get ruled out, although other biases could remain - if people start saying one game is great & another useless, the number of people bothering to play each game might be affected.
However there are scoring systems which can cope with this. But someone with good knowledge of different scoring systems would be needed to decide a good system for the contest.

I agree, this is not an easy point. For the reasons you mention `top 3' approaches should be avoided. Every judge should judge as many games as possible, giving each game a rating at several points. Using the ratings from each judge, a final score should be calculated in some smart way.

Like I say, if all members can vote, it gets better - with enough votes cast you don't need everyone to vote for every game, it should balance out. There'd need to be discussion about whether scores are visible until the judging period ends etc.

Original post by d000hg

Quote: Like I say, if all members can vote, it gets better - with enough votes cast you don't need everyone to vote for every game, it should balance out. There'd need to be discussion about whether scores are visible until the judging period ends etc.

It is true that more voters means better averaged scores, but on the other hand: you want to avoid people only be voting for the games they think they will like because they have better graphics or so, or they already have high scores. Therefore you also want people to vote for as many games as possible, this also gives the advantage of comparing between games which should give more balanced votes.

Anyway: I am sure a good voting system exists for these kind of things, but it is not chosen lightly and it should be well discussed.

Quote: Original post by WanMaster
Perhaps you should organize your own contest, like others have done before (Trapper and Prozak spring to mind). Other than perhaps it's history, there's nothing inherently special about the four elements contest.

Since it's been brought up, I'll probably be hosting another one week contest later in the year once I get the time to manage it. Probably some time in November or December.

The problem with a really long contest is that you'll most likely not get that many entrants. The Four Elements contest gets people involved because it's backed by the site. I'm not sure how many people will invest several months of their time on a contest without some clout behind it.