The democratic process. The very process that crowned George Bush Jr. the lord of the apes, perched high atop a throne of mis-punched butterfly ballots, gently scratching his simian buttocks with the very finger he used to march a million babies to war. It is said that an infinite number of apes could inevitably type out the entirety of Macbeth. The IGF Judging Committee came up with something just as inane with just 150.

The value of art. When I say value, I mean not the monetary value of art, for what value can we assign to quiet hours after one’s first Passage. No, I refer to that immeasurable thing — that which turns the pixel into an expression; a softly buzzing saw tone into a gesture; a game about mermaids and underwater holocaust into Aquaria. Art is objective, universal, and simple to understand, so long as you’ve an understanding of its history. For what appears to the common prole to be an piss bucket, is, to the intellectual, an exciting re-thinking of Art itself — an object to be engaged not with the cock, but with the brain.

Yet, “here’s the thing – the IGF isn’t judged by [people who know what they're doing]. It’s judged by a [bunch of morons].” I am, of course, paraphrasing the inimitable Michael Rose, the editor of IndieGames.com, the inheritor to our Lord, TimW‘s throne, a magnificant throne which leaves Michael appearing rather dwarfed. He continues, “If a [judge] doesn’t play many indie games, then they aren’t going to be familiar with the ‘style’ and may not get as much enjoyment.“  To sum up:

“If a judge doesn’t ‘get’ the game, then it’s likely others who play the game won’t fucking get it either. So who’s fault is that?“

Indeed, whose fault is it? Surely not the game developers, who, despite the absolute confundity of their works, managed to drum up interest amongst fellow enthusiasts and gamers alike, utilizing PayPal and Kickstarter to cover the costs of throwing money at the IGF.

It’s surely not the indie games community, a dedicated legion of nerds who’ll read into anything with ambiguous lowercase text, so long as any displayed pixels are left unshaded. Here’s 13 pages about a five letter word.

Here’s one sentence about a game that consists of many letters worth of code:

“There are just too many pixel games (esp platformers) coming out of the tigsource crowd these days, it’s kind of lost its charm.“

Here’s another:

“most of these ideas are straight up derivations of the Mario Bros. series: the platforming, the stomping on enemies via jump, changing of blocks when you activate a power“

Believe it or not, this last one isn’t a reference to Super Meat Boy (IGF Seumas McNally Grand Prize Nominee).

“So what is the answer? Make sure the whole judging panel is full of indie gamers? That sounds like the opposite of what it wants to achieve.“

Ah, yes Michael Rose. Let me illustrate you a little something about the INDEPENDENT GAMES FESTIVAL.

Breakdown of IGF Judges

Breakdown of IGF Entries

*Raises thick rimmed glasses*

There are 151 Pokemon in the original Pokemon series. You can easily complete the game with about 6. The reason for this is because for every one good Pokemon, there are a thousand worthless nerds. Sure little fish-mon might turn into giant dragon-mon, but that’s only after you deal with about 12 hours of lugging around a worthless flaccid cock, pathetically taking it out for a few seconds before putting it back in your pants to let the big boys continue fighting.

There were around that many judges in the 2010 IGF Judging panel.

But fear not, the judging was left to  capable hands. Captains of industry. In fact the IGF press release mentions:

“To ensure the highest-quality judging for the IGF, more than 150 leading indie and mainstream game industry figures — from 2D Boy’s Ron Carmel through Spore’s–”

– ah… wait. Oh no. What? Wasn’t that…?

There is a phrase that involves soup, chefs, and chinamen that immediately springs to mind. However, in the interest of good taste (a pun), I’ll avoid that bigoted saying, and instead say this: one chinaman (Derek Yu) and a couple of chefs (I’m going out on a limb here and assuming Phil Fish and Terry Cavanaugh did not achieve critical body mass without a predeliction to food) could’ve shat out a soup better than this.

When you assign random games to random people, you run into this widely studied phenomenon called “sometimes people don’t like certain things.” This is made worse by this condition called “people who don’t know a thing about something won’t really know how to appreciate them.” Sometimes you also run into this thing called “Being given a random selection of games, you tend to rate your games relativistically against one another, which makes your scores based on what you’ve been assigned more than how they really stack up against the other entries.” Judging a book by its cover is stupid, but judging a book by assigning each of its pages randomly to people is >>fucking<< (language alert) dumb.

It’s a little telling when there are press releases attempting to “demystify” the judging process. And judges having to use their journalistic muscle to post entries justifying their decisions. And the Nuovo Award — a category in the Independent Games Festival, a festival, for independent games, used to distinguish, in this festival of independent games, the best independent game, which is not, contrary to popular belief, the best game that is submitted to this festival, this festival of independent games.

But enough negativity! Congratulations to all who got nominated. I look forward to playing your games on Wiiware!

“Frankly, what it looks like is that the judges have no idea what measure to use. Some went by their personal likes and dislikes, some reviewed the games like a fucking Kongregate player with an attention span of six seconds, and some just didn’t like a game and latched onto whatever failure they first saw in order to explain their hate. That’s why the IGF renamed ‘Innovation in Graphics’ to ‘Excellence in Graphics’ (and will soon rename it to ‘Good Graphics’) and Nuovo will become Jason Rohrer’s Sadlet Award.”

- Zaratustra

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Not Indie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.