pouët.net

Hi all!

Some comments on the evoke thread made me want to rant about something that's been bothering me very often: the impossibility to vote at many demoparties and their (imho) weird schedules.

Usual scenario:
saturday evening: main compos
sunday fucking early morning: voting closes

What usually happens:
saturday night: main compos take place after delay (and we're all drunk)
saturday night night: the voting for the compos that just happened is only opened like 30 minutes after the compos, because all the orgas forgot. we booze outside instead and pass out.
sunday fucking early morning: voting closes, only the fulltime-party-IRC'ers voted.

I believe the problem is clear: votes suck, because a only a small and non-representative subset of the audience voted.

I would also like to propose a solution, stolen from outline. I'm not saying outline is perfect schedule-wise, but at least we got this one right. I think. Oh and I think BCNparty also did it this way:

Saturday evening (pretty early): main compos (get run *on time*) (ish)
Saturday night (directly after compos): voting is opened and people are actively and loudly encouraged to vote. make sure people can finalise their votes right away (i.e. if using the partymeister votekeysystem, make sure they have the votekey or get it asap)
Saturday late night (1-1.5h after compos ended): prize ceremony! The votesys computes the results instantaneously, so that works fine. No matter that siegmeister didn't work, it never does. Just run the damn ceremony. Print a sheet.
Saturday late late night: booze booze hooray end-of-party-it-was-so-nice wildness.

I like this schedule a lot better. It takes care of the always completely empty and boring waiting-for-the-prize-ceremony sunday morning, it gets more people to vote, a prize ceremony is much more fun when the democompo-thrill-vibe (with beer) is still going on, and the party after it is often much nicer because people feel "free" - there is no need to get up early next morning except for transport home.

Downside is obviously the tighter schedule on the compo organisers. However, for me (compodude at outline 06-08) this has in fact worked out positively - because we simply could not afford delays (or else have a prize ceremony at 05:00, would be unacceptable for many foreign visitors), we started thinking about preparing the main compos much earlier than we probably would've otherwise. The "oh no, this must go right!"-stress sortof made it happen. We bugged people who missed the deadline, made them hand in preliminary test versions, and in general the compos went pretty ok. I think (please correct if you disagree).

not BCNparty I think... well at least not those 3 years I went there
but yeah that might be a cool idea
some will have extra reasons to booze : EPIC COMPO WIN (celebration)
some will have extra reasons to booze : EPIC COMPO FAIL (forget about it, lol)
:D

skrebbel: your problem seems to be easily fixable by just being on time, really :D

i would imagine the larger scale of evoke makes it harder to communicate as much with visitors as smaller parties can afford to do. also, the fact they have a bunch of corporate sponsors might dictate certain (imho understandable) limitations in the partyschedule.

having said that, i do agree wholeheartedly that it would be nice to do the voting and prizeceremony before the celebration boozing starts, if somehow possible.

This solution works great as long as the compos are not delayed, so I think that is where compo organizers (present company included) should invest their efforts. :)

havoc, i don't have the idea that evoke is really much bigger than outline. sure, it's at least double the size, but what i mean is that it's the same order of magnitude. unlike for example on breakpoint, a clear microphone announcement (twice, maybe) + a clear message on the beamer actually reaches everyone for both evoke and outline, and most other parties for that matter.

gargaj, true, but then there's still the empty sunday morning. prize ceremonies at night rule!

oh and gloom, i'm not shitting you: having something important some time *after* the democompo magically makes many-hour delays impossible! really, it works :)

skrebbel: I would love to have some time to party as well, so I'm all for your solution. :) Look no further than Solskogen 2009 to see this implemented. :)

skrebbel: i believe empty sunday mornings are reserved for a hangover.

that said, hungarian parties traditionally hold the prizegivings almost after the democompo too - at 2 am. (i never understood why.)

sunday morning is reserved for the hangover and the thrill of finally being able to go home.

haha ;)

good point. i'd even say that compos should be held from saturday late morning until saturday late afternoon, after which one votes until lets us say 8pm-9pm max and the ceremony will take place at 00:00

this also forces people to finish their productions earlier and thus allows more time for the fun part of demoparties: watching prods, having talks and drinking.

ok maybe the size aspect isn't as important... but i still think the sponsorship part of my argument is valid, you simply don't invite your corporate sponsor to a "prize ceremony that'll probably take place somewhen between noon and 3am, depending on the promillage" ;)

niels, well some people do like the party-coding aspect very much; your scenario leaves very little time for doing that, especially on a 3 day party.

havoc, good point. if sponsors wish to see the prize ceremony, they need to be accommodated. then again, if i sponsored a demoparty, the prize cerem would be the last part i'd want to see :-) i don't know, if it was very thrilled i'd watch a recording of it later.

and it would be nice to have less compos. i might be stepping on some toes here but i could really live without all subclasses on all platforms and on top of that stuff like wild, anim, 4k procedural et cetera.

maybe it wouldnt hurt to just drop a selection of competitions. this draws more attention and perhaps more productivity to the ones you do offer and other parties can opt to have different compos instead, and those compos will once again potentially gain focus and quality.

just an idea.

:( my toe hurts!

and less strain on the compo organizers (less hardware/configs perhaps, less votes to process), and less voting crap to remember for the visitors.

ok, end of rant.

yeah, let's have just one compo with 'productions' and people can submit whatever the hell they want. This compo is held early friday afternoon so the rest of the weekend can be spend with boozing and puking in nearby rose gardens!

announcing that you will drop a certain compo is probably the most stupid thing you can do as an orgo. it will scare away parts of your visitorship, and the work you are avoiding by not organising less popular compos is minimal anyway. also, by the time compos get less than 3 entries, it take minimal effort to convince entrants that it's a good idea to combine compos. so why not just let things develop naturally? :)

okkie: that whole compo thing isnt working out too well anymore. perhaps its time we ditch it. we could fill the time with more bands instead!

anyone fancy a trip to glastonbury demoparty 2009? :)

skrebbel: also, if the prizegiving is saturday night, doesnt that raise the problem of people leaving to home immediately afterwards? i mean that kinda makes the whole sunday pointless.

gargaj, well people tend to leave whenever they want to... we did it once on sunday (back in 1999), the result was that half of the visitors was not there for the prize ceremony, leading to lots of complaints. since then, i've insisted on the 2nd last evening of a party for the prizegiving, and received basically no serious complaints anymore.

i really doubt if dropping a few (sub-)compos here and there (by the way I embrace the 'combined' compos) would scare away many visitors from a big party. in fact, i even doubt if it would scare away visitors from any party. yeah okay, if you drop the pc 64k compo or the amiga demo compo, then perhaps..

i know that there still are some sceners left who in the first place come to compete in a certain type of compo but hey, they'll have to pick their party.

combine what you can combine and let parties have their own fancy more obscure compos. in general i just get the feeling that there is A LOT to watch and it gets dull. and a lot of stuff doesnt get the attention it may deserve because the majority of people dont want to spend all their time inside the compohall waiting for delayed compo number x.

more action packed competitions/ceremony, more time for relaxation. sure i'm not an organizer and thus probably should not communicate my general feeling about this according to some, but it so happens i feel this way :)

but then again, that kinda leaves sunday as empty apart from curing the hangover, which i'd assume most people would rather wake up to at home, so unless you're outside the urban area, most people will just leave home immediately afterwards, wont they?

you can organize some kind of breakfast thing or whatever on sunday I guess. i dont think many will leave (certainly not when drinking) before some sack time and the sundaymornings are dreadful anyway. wake up -> go home. sounds good to me.