Saturday 2 September 2017

Choosing a Voting System for the Mini-Comp 2017

Now that the games for the Mini-Comp have arrived, I have to choose a voting system. The most straight-forward approach would be to use a ranking system where players vote for their preferred game or choose their favorites.

I've decided to go with a rating scheme where players actually rate the games in each of the six categories. I think this provides more useful information to game makers because they can find out which areas their game is strong in and which areas their game is weak in. A rating scheme is also more fair to games that some people can't play. If a game doesn't work on a Mac system, then Mac players will never vote it as their favorite game. With a rating system, it's still possible to use ratings from other players to compare the games with each other.

10 comments:

  1. It's a bit laborious, but also right for who has worked on this games.
    How you want to decide the final winner? Using the overall rating is better for comparing games in case of people that cannot play for external reason (like having a mac), but at the same time each people have a different valutation of the categories, maybe for one a 5 on the sex or enjoyement categories is sufficient for decide that that game is his favourite acen if the overall in less than others.
    Maybe a separate best game or best 3 game in order ...
    I think that if you use this system could be also a good idea toput an honorable mention for the game most played.
    Even if the overall is less than others if a game is voted from most people respect others means that the author has done some choices than please the community, could be simply that the game plays on more systems, but also that his base idea was interesting for more people,...

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    1. It's true that the overall has some problems, but each system has something and I don't think that complicate too much the voting system helps.
      But I would put a little modifier for number of voting, if are near is ok, but a game that is voted with high rating but the people that are played are half that another game could distort the poll, because probably our community is too little.
      For this I can only ask that who wants to vote for the minicomp need to try to play all the game, even if they think that don't like them, they are little game and it's also for thanking who lose time for creating them.

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  2. IFComp has games rated 1-10 and best average score for each game puts them in a ranking order. If voters do not vote for a game because they didn't or could not play it, it does not harm the game's score.

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    1. With the IFComp system the average score is calculated on the actual number of scores a game receives - A game with three scores of 10 has an average of 10, where a game with fifty scores of 9 averages a 9. The game is only competing with its own range of scores instead of games being scored "against each other".

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  3. Slightly more complicated is to have voters list "top three" games in order in each category, and their #1 game scores 3 points, #2 scores 2, and #3 scores 1. Then the game with the most points is 1st place, game with second most points is 2nd, etc. This system does disfavor games that don't get played as they won't appear on a voter's list who didn't play them regardless of merit. It's also a little more work to tabulate.

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  4. I'm thinking of going even simpler with the rating system by only allowing voters to choose between Okay/Meh, Good, and Great in each category. I think 1-10 is more information than is necessary. I was also thinking of just a thumbs up/thumbs down, but that might be too simple.

    I will decide on how to convert the ratings to a selection of winners later. There's a bit of an art to that, and I want to have some discretion available to account for anomalies in the voting. I want to avoid the situation of a game that only received a single vote, most likely from the author themselves, with top scores in everything. I'm not saying that this will happen, but I want some discretion in how to tabulate the scores to produce a "fair" result.

    Maybe I'll throw in a popularity category for "most voted" game. Really, it's impossible to make something objectively fair, so I'm just going to go with my gut on this one.

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    1. You can only hope that the numbers of votes are high, if they are too little it's impossible a fair result if there are games played by too little people

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    2. I participated several years ago when there were only 3 entries, and I think there were perhaps 100 votes? Not bad.

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    3. Yes, In 2013 there were only 3 entry, 5 or 6 is a good number.

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  5. I'm still working on the voting system, but if you'd like a headstart on playing the games, you can temporarily download the games that I've received so far at the following link:

    https://mega.nz/#!N2g3zDiK!uUwPwFRRI7g-LJh3em_8dKbUy5Xmf88Vt3WnJ2W-fIY

    I'll do a proper release of the games and a proper release announcement in the next couple of days.

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