behind the times

Just caught up on the new changes to the IGF judging system.

On the surface, I like them a lot. I have long been opposed to numerical rating systems as any sort of judge of quality (People who knew me Back In The Day on the GMC may remember me going into huge rants on the subject when people were all so eager to give or receive feedback in terms of X/10) and it's especially meaningless when spread across multiple judges who have different tastes and are not playing the same games, so they can't even establish a baseline.

Results should be MUCH more consistent if it instead becomes a matter of the initial mass of randomly-assigned judges simply doing a make-the-cut pass to look for games they think might be competitive in the various categories, and then having a category jury play all the games that make that cut so they can be properly compared against each other.

At least, that's the theory. Will it work out? We'll see! Systems rarely function perfectly as designed when you throw people at them...