For many submissions for both Springs I've contributed, I have desired having a 4th likert scale for Technical Merit.

Many submissions involved a ton of work "behind the scenes." Either custom languages, engines, theories, algorithms, data structures, or compilation pipelines -- often done during the jam -- that I believe deserve their own dedicated 25% of the score. It would also mean folks who spend the 10 days on more difficult foundations still get celebrated as highly ranked in the fourth category.

However, I could see how this could be against the spirit of the jam, and totally understand if it would divert the focus from the core intentions. Just thought I'd share since it's a repeat thought for two years now.

I’ve thought a bit about this, and I think it’s reasonable that entries demonstrating something wild like a completely new lisp implementation should probably get some bonus points for that; filing it under “creativity” is maybe not quite fair.

In a past jam, we had a 4th category for “Language use - how well was Lisp incorporated into the design” and I think that was added in order to address the same thing you mention: (this was before I was involved in running the jam)

https://itch.io/jam/lisp-game-jam-2019/results/language-use-how-well-was-lisp-incorporated-into-the-design

Unfortunately it was not very well-received; people felt that it was unclear how to interpret and rate based on that criteria. I do think that if we used “Technical Merit” instead that it would be clearer than “Language use”. But it is rather difficult to gauge this by playing the game; would this mean that you need to read the source before you can rate the game?

I don’t know; I’m not against it altogether, but I’m interested in hearing what the rest of the community thinks.

What about educational, technical lisp demonstration, programming concept (I say as one of the people the dot matrix was referencing ;p). I have seen feedback like "I had no idea I could use that compiler like that"