I just learned Discourse has a poll feature, so let’s try it out!
- Yes, I’ve already rated at least 5 games
- Yes, I plan to rate 5 games by November 15th
- No
0 voters
I’m an author-entrant so am I voting (Miss Congeniality) or not (Judging)? I ticked YES, but I’m not so sure.
Good point. Looks like I can’t add or remove poll options, so let’s say Miss Congeniality counts as voting.
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I voted yes. I’ll expound 11/16, because reasons.
How much effort do you generally put into playing a comp game before it seems fair to vote on it? I know there’s no rule that you have to finish a game before voting on it, but I’m curious about what approaches others take. (I was starting a new topic but the forum told me it was similar to this one, so I put it here.)
I’ve tried to finish each game when finishing it is quantifiable. One game had achievements, so I replayed several times to get them all. When it’s not obvious how much more there is to do, it’s a judgment call: the game I played last night probably had another ending, but I didn’t care enough to find it. In another game, at the two hour mark I still hadn’t finished and it seemed like there might be a lot more, so I rated it and saved to pick it up later.
If I’m enjoying a game I’ll usually try to finish. I know I’m suppose to stop strictly after two hours, but if I’m deeply engrossed in the game, let’s just say I’m not paying scrupulous attention to the clock (shh; don’t tell.)
But I don’t feel obligated to finish every entry I start. My usual metric is this: if I feel like I’m having less fun playing the game, than I would be doing whatever item of work I’m procrastinating in order to play the game, I’ll stop and record a score (usually not very high). This comp, my reasons for an early abort have ranged from frustration at the bugginess of the game, to feeling like the game was a “troll entry” designed to deliberately waste my time, to simply not being engaged at all with the themes of the game (although if the game is well-crafted I’ll at least leave games in this last category with a middling instead of low score.)
At the risk of going slightly off-topic, I adopted that strategy for playing games in general. I mean, there’s a HUGE amount of games out there, and I want to try them all because the underrated, undernoticed games released to little fanfare may turn out to be the best game I’ve ever played.
Or, with a little less hyperbole, there are games - recently it was Legion - that I heartily enjoyed that I wouldn’t otherwise have known about. And I still have fond memories of “Deadline Enchanter”, strange as it is.
So I sometimes have to adopt that attitude, even with games that are spectacularly good. Most recently, it was “Make It Good”, and it did make me sorry to have to say “No” to that particular gem. I just wasn’t having fun; the complexities of manipulating NPCs was beyond me, and beyond my level of enjoyment, even if everything about the game was sheer excellence. I kept thinking about giving the game one more chance, then I’d think about the playing experience that awaited me, asked myself “Is it fun? Was I having pleasure, and would I foreseeably continue to do so?”, and the answer was simply “Not really”.
I had a similar time with All Things Devours, and presumably will do with Varicella. Great games, I wish I could enjoy them, but I can’t.