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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: bad reviews for foreign language games (like Begegnung am Fluss)
Message-ID: <Gn2xJB.D5t@world.std.com>
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 03:25:59 GMT
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Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Xref: news.duke.edu rec.games.int-fiction:66777

Andrew Plotkin  <erkyrath@eblong.com> wrote:
>As to your proposed rule, or recommendation: _Begegnung am Fluss_ came
>in 37th out of 52. Anyone who wants a recommendation can read it
>there. Anyone who wants to buck the trend will do so in any event.

Personally I don't think that's where it SHOULD have
finished; if you think that's an APPROPRIATE place
for a foreign-language game that those who speak
the language would have ranked much higher, then
I refer you to the part of my previous post that
points out that having a de-facto English-language
comp which doesn't admit it is an English-language
comp seems, umm, linguistically arrogant to me.

>It's the same argument every year, the case has never been
>convincingly made, the IFComp stumbles along. We don't make any effort
>to call it the "Short, Non-Buggy, Finished, Portable, Nearly Always
>Text Interactive Fiction Competition" either.

No, but the Spanish-language comp is, I'm assuming,
unashamedly a spanish-language comp.

Of course this just comes back around to the same old
"how do you vote" question; BUT this is the first game
where we've seen serious divisiveness over WHETHER
to vote; the vast majority of judges who didn't read
German chose _not_to_vote_on_it_, leaving the final
score excessively weighted by those who interpreted
their judicial obligations differently. (Few people
fail to vote on long, buggy, or unfinished games.)

We've always had the issue that the meaning of the
scores is up in the air because different voters
base their scors on different metrics; but this seems
like a behavior of a different kind, since some voters
abstain and others vote. Without some kind of clarification,
we're going to continue to see this--those who feel
it's appropriate to vote in this situation will have
a disproportionate affect on SOME games (those in
a non-native language).

I think the more apt comparison is games on platforms
not available to some judges. You even mentioned portability
in your list of things the comp isn't called, but I don't
think you were making a valid assertion there--I think
there would be just as much uproar if many judges said "this
game had no interpreter for my machine; automatic 1".

Although this is not specifically covered in the
rules either, the community seems to have interpreted
this in the obvious way--people who can't play a game
on their platform, despite having some "reaction"
to the title, author, and blurb in comp*.z5, do not
vote on it. This lack of voting is observable in
the vote counts and in the lack of a huge spike at '1'
for such games despite their reduced vote counts.
Indeed, the community takes this for granted; in
discussing less-portable games, people frequently
site the "must get ten votes to be ranked" rule
_as_if_ the only people who will vote on it are
those who can run it.

Indeed, I stand by my claim that the comp rules *imply*
that you should play a game to be able to vote on it,
and I don't think people who don't speak the language
are in any better poisition to claim to have played a
foreign-language game than another person who views
a gamefile through a hexdump because no 'terp is
available on their platform.

Perhaps "play to vote" should be stated outright
instead of implied, but unless it is stated what
"to play" means in the rules in terms of a foreign
language game--or such games are simply outlawed--
it's going to come down an unfortunate, repeated
divisiveness over the issue every year, with some
judges feeling disenfranchised because they're
playing by "rules" that other judges are not, and
the authors in question getting even more pissed-off.

I see only two plausible avenues: make the comp
English-only or make a rule against judging a
game in a language the judge doesn't know. The
latter seems more complex and less likely to get
past the people who voted 1s, so I proposed the former.

Please note that the scenario doesn't really require
25 English games and 25 German games to cause
serious conflict; all that is required is 1 good
German game and a large number of
German-but-not-English-speaking voters to effectively
split the comp results. I don't think that's outside
the realm of possibility, but it was harder to
explain so I went with the simpler one because
I had no idea you were going to be picky about
hypotheticals with what is clearly an actual,
real, practical problem, and one which we can
easily (I think) nip in the bud now rather than
it causing further frustration down the road:

"This competition is primarily for English-language games."

Sean
