Judging will begin on October 1, 2001, as soon as the games are released. It will last for six weeks. Anyone who has not written a game that is in the competition may vote, including beta-testers. Beta-testers may not, however, vote on the game or games they tested. All you need to do is download the games, play them, and rate them. Although you are honor-bound to play and vote on as many games as possible, you may still vote as long as you have played five or more games.
You may play each game for up to two hours before voting. If, after two hours have passed, you are still playing a game, you must record your vote before continuing play. You may not change that vote later. Rate each game on an integer scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best. (The final score for each game will be the average of all scores submitted for that game.)
An Inform program Comp01.z5, which is made to resemble a text adventure, will be available to act as a front-end for your judging. Comp01 will list the games in random order, to help insure that you vote on a random sample of games if you cannot play all of them. Comp01 also has information on how to run each game and how to contact the games' authors.
There are three ways to vote. One, you may submit your scores via the voting page. This is the preferred method. Two, Comp01 will output a text file called "rating.txt" containing all of your votes which you may mail to Mark Musante, the vote counter. Three, you may simply mail Mark your votes.
E-mailed votes should have a subject header of "VOTE", and each game should be rated on a separate line. You may submit multiple votes, but only the ratings with the latest date for each game will be kept. If you submit your votes via e-mail, send your message as plain ASCII. Do not not not use HTML or send your votes as an attached non-ASCII file like a Microsoft Word document.
You must have your votes in by the end of the day November 15th, 2001, where "end of the day" is defined as midnight EST. Votes submitted after this time will not be counted.
This year's organizer is Stephen Granade.