So I would assume there was some reason/problem that caused them to remove voluntary judging.. I wrote to say I could judge 20-30 other games I had been playing, but I was told that this year they’re trying out the restricted approach in order to avoid people complaining that judges were picking games they love/hate/know and in doing so making things uneven.

Anyway I think this year was the best in terms of discussion.. there *was* some! I agree it’s not perfect though.

p.s – sorry for just now getting to the conversation :)

i agree with most of the suggestions in this thread; i proposed some suggestions in the tigsource thread on this topic as well. the main one is that i suggested fewer judges but a longer judging period, with rounds, so that basically all games are played and judged by all judges who can play them. that seems more fair than to rely on randomness and pray the judges you get like your sort of game (or even tend to give games higher scores than the average judge).

but… i have the fullest confidence that virtually all suggestions will be ignored, and perhaps a minor suggested followed incrementally by way as something to use to say that they’re listening to the community.

These were the categories for scoring:
Excellence In Design,
Excellence In Audio,
Excellence In Visual Art and
Technical Excellence

I feel the categories for Design, Audio and Visuals should be split in two, one that rewards quality and polish and another that rewards innovation, because these qualities are almost contradictory.

what i consider to be the real missed opportunity of the igf (partly as a result of the issues i identify above, which are problems that CAN be easily addressed) is the opportunity to present more challenging games to a wider audience. i mean “challenging” not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of confrontationality: games that provoke discussion, challenge assumptions and force their players to become more fluent. and these games are certainly less mainstream, but i don’t think that makes them less approachable for an audience that’s less fluent in design.

there are plenty of games that come out of the “indie game scene” (and i would never say that the indie game scene is close to encompassing all the people who make games outside of the games industry, by the way) which require their audience to have some formal knowledge of games, some familiarity with or knowledge of platform games in general or even of particular indie games or trends.

but i think that many of the games that were entered into the igf and i feel lost their place – with the help of a clearly broken judging system – had a lot to say to a wider audience than just “the indie scene,” and i would have liked to see them gain that audience. the igf may always be less “challenging” (or more “mainstream”) than i like, but it doesn’t have to always be broken.

I see myself as a person interested in game mechanics, but it feels that the “indie game scene” has moved on to an entirely different level that is wholly beyond my reach. I check the IndieGames Blog and TIGSource and such, and in the last year or so it seems the games being released are intended for an audience I’m not a part of. The games released are trying to be subversive on a level I’ll admit to not totally grasping, and at a certain point I started to think that the games being made weren’t being designed as games, but rather as statements.

The IGF system, while I can understand the flaws that everyone is saying it has, does seem to rise up games that are more likely to be games than statements–that while I utterly detest rating games by their “graphics” or “sound” I think it’s useful in terms of making sure that it’s not just the extremely innovative but unworkable that make it to the top of the list, but also the solidly constructed but perhaps derivative. I’m not saying that derivative is what we should strive for, but quite often I don’t want a genre to be redefined so much as refined.

I’m not 100% sure of the IGF’s mission statement and such, but I think the Independent Games Festival supporting the development of different kinds of independently-developed games, rather than just the cutting edge of “games as art”, is entirely appropriate. That the system’s flaws allow this kind of result to occur doesn’t mean those flaws shouldn’t be fixed, but I also want to say that, well, I’m me, and there are other people like me perhaps who feel like the “scene” shouldn’t just be about only the extreme edge of innovation.

It feels like despite the criticisms you list (which do sound like flaws in the system) that you are also upset about the ‘mainstreaming’ of the IGF, which is something I actually welcome–to an extent.

Good luck with your future projects (and no, i do not mean that in a sarcastic way).

I did say what i did say. I did not say what i did not say. In other words: Your interpretation is neither what i wrote not what i meant (and that includes your impression of me thinking low of you. Actually, if that were the case, i wouldn’t have cared to invest the effort of writing my prev post. It also includes that i intentionally put a lot of focus in my post on making clear that the primary problem is NOT the size of the audience but rather the changes in intentions: modification of a topic (i.e. scope) because oneself likes it is one thing – modification simply to increase the audience is another matter).

To close with a statement, which i (for the first time) actually mean condescending: It would be fair, if you would either invest the effort of thinking about a post before replying(instead of quickly skipping through it), or not reply at all.