Dear Participants, 

the winner of this jam edition (and a few other games) raked in 12 ratings. That means about half of the people having submitted a game played it. I understand, that it is a challenge to try out every single game. However, I believe, that it is our responsibility to do so, And it is fun too! We took time out our busy schedules to programm and submit a game, we should also plan the time to rank our fellow participants. However I understand there could be several barriers to do so. I would like to understand what these are:

1. Technical issues in getting the game running
2. My OS is not supported by the game
3. Lack of time
4. Lack of interest
5. Others

I would be happy if some people from the community will chime in. 

Typically when I don’t rate a game, it’s usually because it’s hard to get running on my machine; like if it requires installing a specific version of a compiler that isn’t in apt-get, or if it needs a newer version of OpenGL than my machine supports. The jam description specifically recommends web builds because then it’s easier to get people to run and rate your game. But in practice, sometimes games with web builds still don’t get that many people to rate them.

In previous years we’ve had a rating period of only 3 days; that usually felt like it was difficult to try to play and rate all the games in that time. That’s why we expanded the rating period this time around. I personally felt like it was much better; I didn’t feel rushed. But as you note, overall it didn’t make that much of a difference, so I suspect the actual problem is probably not lack of time? I don’t know.

Thanks for sharing technomancy. I agree, in the past it was quite stressful to try all games in only 3 days. This time around one could really enjoy each game. 

Perhaps in future jams we can communicate the expectation that one should rate all other games (or as many as possible) right at the start of the jam (perhaps even on the front page) and see if that makes a difference. Perhaps people are not aware they are expected to rate everyone else.

If that does not drive ratings up I could imagine stronger incentives : for example, one would only see ones rank but not the ratings across the 3 categories if one has not rated more than 1/3 (or 1/2) of other submissions. Thinking out loud here.

Certainly the fun of game programming outweighs this issue, I just wanted to bring it up as I had run a quick analysis of my past contributions and noticed the low ratio of rating to submissions.