pouët.net

And...? Did you tell them? :)

It's difficult to keep it secret - you can simply watch me sitting there nervously until my tune gets played. Then I exhale in relief and booze :P

I'm always afraid I won't make it to the bigscreen...

i fully agree with gargaj. this is why at evoke we never bothered to do anonymous compos.

You mean you started that rumour to get votes? :)

I agree wholeheartedly with Gargaj and I find his last three points especially convincing.
And if someone in particular fear namevoting, he/she always can release stuff under another handle.

AceMan: But there's a difference between keeping it a water-tight secret and announcing it loudly up on the big screen. It's not a binary thing.

what i loved the most was an anonymous entry title including the name of the group, very hard to figure out who it belongs to :p

ps: Unreal solved this problem in 2014 even more bluntly :D

So, Gargaj more or less summed up everything we talked about. From a purely ideological point of view I'm all for anonymization. Although I do not believe it will have any huge ramifications on the overall results and fairness. Some elaborations:

1. Even though it's hard to quantify the extent of name voting, it will exist without complete anonymity. As Gargaj mentioned there are two types of name voting. The passive one and the active one. Now the passive one we're all subjected to. There's a ton of scientific evidence suggesting that we, as humans, are extremely susceptible to bias. The fact that we know who made what will color our impression no matter how hard we try to be fair. But then there's the practical difficulties of achieving completeness. As several has mentioned, some artist have such a distinctive style it would not matte what kind of restriction you put in the rules. In this regard I don't believe it will be possible to eliminate bias.

2. It's in the case of active name voting I think rules enforcing anonymization will have an effect. This is to do with peoples mindsets, to discourage a culture where this kind of behavior is ok, or even a norm. I cannot speak for others, but I've experienced this more often than I care for. If might seem ungrateful towards the people voting and supporting me, but it's very unsettling having people vote me up or even down voting every other entry on my behalf. So from my point of view this is a problem that exists. And I believe upholding the anonymity rules is a way for organizers, the closes thing to demoscene authority, to say, "this should be the norm". One might say, "hey, it's nice to take a stance and all, but the orgas can't go around controlling how people vote." But I truly believe a strict line here will have an effect on peoples attitudes. Take for example the demoscene compos at assembly. They will force every gamer to turn of there screens for every compo. You'd think they have to spend tons of time and energy on it every time. But the amazing thing is that they almost never need to do anything! People just fall in line. They've successfully created a culture among the gamers that respects the scene. But to achieve this effect the rules needs to be enforced. The way things are now, it's more like a formality.

Now, I would have argued harder for my views if the scene was all about the compos. But it's not! :D And I was personally pretty much won over by the time we realized how much we both enjoyed talking to the various artist about their work after the compos. And I wouldn't want to sacrifice the social and creative exchanges.



Radiant: Because 1. the usual suspects are great artists, and they usually make great stuff, and 2. anonymity the way it's now doesn't work.

AceMan: 4. It's not about making people objective. I strongly value peoples subjective taste. It's about being unbiased. It's about voting for a prod based on it's values, not the values of it's creator. And that I think has room for improvement.

I'd like to see a demo compo where the authors weren't announced and neither logos nor credits were allowed in the demo. A toggle: "compomode". :) Because honestly, that's usually where namevoting actually makes a difference.

In music or graphic compos, it isn't 1993 any longer, and I agree with Gargaj and Offwhite.

Eh, I don't know about that. I've never bought the idea what namevoting is really a thing among realtime productions. Like in what instances do you think that has happened in and what evidence supports it?

I think overall namevoting is probably a lot less of an issue than is made out to be, with the exception of Assembly music compos that I think should absolutely stay anonymous because most of the vote comes from an audience know next to nothing about the scene and sure as hell aren't going to be bothered to listen to every entry in the compo. At Revision or other more "real" demoparties though, not so sure. I don't really mind it personally, but some of Gargaj's points regarding the social aspect certainly seem worth considering. Still, I don't think it's particularly harmful either and I'd imagine it still manages to mitigate at least some namevoting, however little there is to begin with.

A possible half-way solution:
Have the names shown on the slides, but not in Partymeister.
It would at least weed out those that blindly namevote just because they have no idea.

My issue is what I said in the first post - how would we know? We can't really A-B test.

1. successfully revive at least one scene mag containing charts
2. worry about people namevoting
3. goto 2016+

A bit like saga is saying. Show the name at the post-entry slide (which today is the same as the entry slide), but not on the pre-entry slide (so we can keep the guessing game and avoid initial bias), and neither in the voting system (to avoid fast name/friend voting from those that didn't really bother to check out the compo or entries). No need to anonymize on ftp either. For the music compos you could reveal it halfway through the track.



I saw it as a welcome step on the way - now just take it the last step, such that you only take screenshots (and maybe add render time to the info) and pass the compo running on to the graphics compo team and their lovely viewer :)

*crossplatform (scene mag)

there will always be namevoting, it's part of human nature to favor people closer to your heart. i dont think anonymizing solves it, but lets not pretend it doesnt exist anymore. it's more the case that we are used to it and dont really care much when it happens anymore because it's more or less already expected.

i remember a dozen years ago we had heavy debates if there should be public compos at all, instead of just showing all entries submitted and get a jury to give out a few honorable mentions as prizes to people who clearly were more applauded by the audience for one reason or another. but the fact remains most sceners participate in compos for the competitive nature of it, to see how high they can get. so it's not likely to ever go away.

i think anonymizing is just veiling the name voting issue, it does not really solve anything, i'd much rather know who a track is from, i'd remember it better aswell when it's time to vote.

The level of being a responsible scener varies. At least at Booz^H^H^H^HAssembly, there's ... some amount of "I have no recollection what any of these music compo entries are, and I'm not going to bother finding out either" voting. ;) So people might ask around like, "which entry should I vote, do you have an entry here or some of your friends or someone someone knows?" Having names shown might steer that voting somewhat. But it's just fun and it's a part of the scene. Trying to squeeze out some sort of objective measurable fairness with systems and rules is just futile and lame. The scene is not a machine, or a company, or a government bureau, it's just a group of people having fun.

Gargaj: Come to think of it, we don't need to know the extent of the problem. Even if there are only a few that actively down vote, it can have a pretty big impact on the scores. A quick count of this years revision results gave 17 candidates for top 3 that had a margin of 25 points or less, and 5 of them had a margin of 5 points or less.

I usually rank production well for those who have improved their skills, not having names displayed makes this difficult and what happens is that I vote for those who I know have done X piece of art or have a very distinguishable style and they have improved their musical or graphical skills.

branch: If you vote for improvement, then you're voting for the scener and not the prod itself.

Offwhite: is there something wrong with voting for a scener rather than the prod itself?

yzi: Well, that's what bias is. I don't think the compos should be about who's the best musician or graphician. It should be about the actual stuff you see on screen.

yzi, correct. why is that so bad? i want there to be more productions and better ones in the compos so i abuse the voting system so that it happens. why voting has to be just a vote for the best one. isn't voting for improvement one way of doing things?

branch: If as you say, you're aware that you're abusing the voting system, then that would be your answer ;)