Overview Of Judging Process

How Games Are Judged

The judging for the IGF has been streamlined significantly for this year, bringing it more in line with comparable competitions in the film and other media worlds.

Main IGF Competition

The main IGF competition now has two judging bodies - a Nominating Committee, and the Judging Committee.

The Nominating Committee, which includes representatives from major independent gaming websites such as DIY Games, GameTunnel and TIGSource, as well as a number of indie veteran judges from the previous IGF judging pool, works on the initial submissions, assigning 1-100 scores to each game in these categories:

• Visual Art
• Audio
• Game Design
• Technical Excellence
• Best Web Game (if applicable!)
• Overall (Game Of The Year)

Following multiple votes in each category for each game, the Nominating Committee's scores willl then decide the five nominees for each category (three nominees for Best Web Game), which will be announced in early December 2005.

Once these nominations have been announced, the main pool of IGF judges will be unleashed on the nominated games, and will be asked simply to pick the winner (from the nominations!) in each category. The game with the most amount of votes in each category will be the winner.

The Audience Award is based on a popular vote of Conference attendees visiting the Festival Pavilion, as well as those voting online (time and location TBA), and all nominated IGF main competition games are eligible.

IGF Student Showcase Competition

The jury for the IGF Student Showcase is headed by student-experienced game veterans, and consists of a number of indie experts committed to picking the best student games, given that games created for educative reasons often have a different emphasis than commercially released titles.

This jury works on the initial submissions, assigning 1-100 scores to each game regarding their suitability in being a Student Showcase finalist, and ensuring that there are multiple votes for each entry. Then the scores are tallied and an average calculated for each title.

There will be eight Student Showcase finalists chosen using all original elements (the eight highest scoring of those titles entered with that stipulation), and two chosen using middleware elements (the two highest scoring of those titles entered with that stipulation.)

IGF Modding Competition

Information about the IGF Modding competition juries, which will be small groups of specialized experts for each game, will be released later in the year when the games have been picked and entries are underway.

Questions about the judging process? Contact the IGF Chairman.