Welcome!
Baxil:
Without directly responding to the "social contract" issue - I don't have a problem being patient; gods know that, with my track record, I'd be a flaming hypocrite to say any different.
But I'm a little concerned at JWalt's disappearance. He hasn't posted anything to The Forge, or to the Game Chef site, or to his blogs, since his 9/28 announcement upthread. I'd like to hear that at least he's okay.
(In a worst-case scenario, maybe we could ask a previous Head Chef to delegate an alternate judge?)
Renee:
Agreed. I'm a little concerned too. Missed datelines are common in the rpg community but his absence is conspicuous enough to be worrisome.
devlin1:
I just communicated briefly with Jonathan via Google Chat. He's been sorely beset by work and school, but he plans to post 'round the Web tomorrow and update everyone on his status. In brief: He's planning to have everything reviewed by Halloween.
devlin1:
(A thousand poxes upon whomever has disabled editing. Nothing against you personally, but c'mon.)
Okay, I thought I'd remembered this correctly, but hoped I'd be wrong. From the Game Chef 2010 rules:
Quote
The Game Chef Finalist that has been played the most by the end of October (Halloween!) wins Game Chef 2010.
Initially, I only had one problem with this: The number of times a submission is playtested by the public is pretty meaningless, IMO, when it comes to determining which game is the "best." Best-case scenario, we'd only have two weeks to playtest, what, let's say a dozen games. That's nearly one a day. I don't know about anyone else, but these days I don't manage a dozen RPG sessions in a year, let alone a fortnight. I have a kid -- I can't go galavanting off every night for two weeks to playtest games and leave my wife at home to deal with everything by herself. But let's say I could do that. Now I've played every finalist game once. So... that's a 12-way tie, then.
Let's say instead we fall in love with Finalist #5, and play that one another seven times instead of moving onto #6. So now #5's in the lead, but we've had no experience whatsoever with more than half of the finalists. How exactly is that a fair assessment of... anything?
Now, of course, I have another problem with this plan -- namely, that there won't be any finalists until Halloween, making this play-as-much-as-you-can-by-Halloween thing utterly meaningless. As it stands, the four current finalists have a huge lead, in that they've been declared finalists for weeks now, and therefore people have had more of an opportunity to playtest them. Say #59 gets a finalist spot -- will it even matter?
So it would seem that now we are totally without a metric by which to select a winner. Whatever happened to a panel of judges sorting this thing out? Was that so wrong?
As has been said, it's not totally about the competition, but it's at least a little about the competition. With no practical way to determine a winner, where's the competition?
Renee:
The judging was hard on people in the past, and not necessarily the most objective means either. There isn't going to be a perfect solution. Part of the play-test thing hinges around your ability to advocate for your own game (publicizing it, getting people excited about it, etc.), as well as just flat-out making a good game that grabs peoples' attention and makes them want to play it.
As far as the first 14 having an advantage, I presume the clock wouldn't start ticking until all of the finalists are announced. But to a certain extent I agree; maybe no reviews should be posted until all of the finalists were determined.
All of which is a moot point because Jonathan has gone absent.
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