The Judging system this year will be very similar to the previous years':
Everyone but authors is able to vote, including betatesters for games entered. Beta testers may not, however, vote on a game which they tested. All you have to do is play every game that you are able to, bound on your honor to play as many as possible and give each of them an equal chance. Rate each game on an integer scale of 1 to 10 (not 0 to 10), higher meaning better. You have 2 hours in which to rate each game. At the end of 2 hours, if unfinished, you should stop and rank the game immediately. You may continue to play the game after that, but you may not change your rating of it based upon anything you find after the 2 hours are up.
Do not worry about how many games you played. If you played as few as 5 games, you should still submit a vote.
STOP PRESS: As we have more prizes than games this year, we will run a Miss Conegniality contest. Authors, please send your picks for your favourite 3 games (not including your own) in order to Dylan O'Donnell at dylanw@demon.net. AUTHORS ONLY. Top 3 games get the 3 unclaimed prizes.
An Inform Z-machine module, comp98.z5, made to resemble another text adventure, is available to act as a front end for the competition judging process, a sort of starting point. The program puts all the games that the user is able to run in a random order, and outputs a list of them (alongside any scores you've given) as "rating.txt". This way, if a judge plays the games in this order, but is unable to play all of them in the voting period, no biases will enter into the decision which games will need to be left unplayed. Comp98 also has information on how to run each game on your computer, and contact information on the authors.
Two voting formats are possible. Comp98, the front end, has a feature for scoring the games, and will output a formatted text file ("rating.txt") that can then be e-mailed to the vote counter for the competition, Colin Turnbull, at ct@ecs.ox.ac.uk. Judges may, of course, decide not to use Comp98, and simply mail their votes the same way.
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 latest dated ratings of each game will be kept. Any game that does not receive at least 10 votes on it is removed from prize consideration. (This should have encouraged authors to make sure their game could be run on several platforms. The best way to accomplish this is to use a pre-existing authoring system.)
The deadline for votes is the end of Sunday November 15. Votes submitted after the voting period expires will not be counted, so if you won't have access to the net at that time, get your votes in early! You can always change them later.