Posted by Kim on April 20, 2016, 12:44pm
In all the excitement of Epic Week, there's an important detail that never gets talked about: How the official Epic Week contests are judged! This leaves room for a lot of speculation and concerns of favoritism. That's very understandable, especially in a community known for being close and having strong ties to one another.We're concerned about it, too, and have for years been working to make the judging of Epic Week contests as fair and unbiased as humanly possible; and then, tiredly, have forgotten to tell you what those measures are once the beautiful chaos of the event starts! That's why I'm going to tell you now, a few days before the fun begins.
Most Epic Week contest winners are decided by a panel of judges. For the last few years we've tried to select judges who do not use the RP Repository at all, but who understand the essential essence of the contest at hand. Past judges have been literary editors, professional game designers, artists, and people who are generally awesome at RP but for one reason or another haven't joined the RPR bandwagon. If they need context to understand a contest, they're thoroughly briefed. (If possible, we also avoid people who play Furcadia, since so many of you are also Furcadian players too!)
In this way, we hope to prevent judging based on any kind of favoritism, sympathy, guilt, bribes, or even a misplaced attempt at "fairness" by preventing one talented individual from winning multiple contests -- the contestants are strangers to the judges, so the entries have to be judged on their own merit.
Qualifying entries are placed into a spreadsheet with clear scoring categories, with the names of the entrants typically omitted. For example, in an essay contest, the scoring categories might be: spelling/grammar, how closely the essay sticks to the assigned topic, and how convincing its arguments are. You can find out what qualities a contest will be judged on by reading the rules closely, and we're going to try and make it especially obvious this year.
Each judge is then asked to score the entries in each category, from 1 to 10. The entries with the highest total score then become our winners.
There's an exception to this system, and it's the genre jumble art contest. That's the one where artists try to create a mascot for a specific genre of RP, and the winners are combined into a jumble for our front page like this one:
This contest is judged by myself (Kim), and there's a greater element of chance to it -- the ultimate goal is to create a balanced composition for our front page, with a wide variety of genres and characters represented. That means that sometimes, incredible submissions that happen to be in an over-crowded category can push each other out.
I published a fairly detailed walk through of how I came to decide last year's winning genre jumble entries here: http://www.rprepository.com/community/forumthread.php?t=17377&p=9#2152582 and I'll be doing so again this year.
Comments
@Mina - It sounds like you're detecting aspersions where there are none. As the article stated, we don't use judges from the RPR, either, and I hope it's pretty clear that I adore the RPR community. Much as I like Furcadians -- I play there myself!
By choosing judges who are not on either the RPR or Furcadia, we attempt to eliminate concerns from contestants who worry that they might not be judged on their own merits due to past personal conflicts, not being a "known personality" in the community if this is their first foray, etc. These are valid concerns, in any community. Subconscious bias is a real thing for all humans, even the best intentioned ones. So we're taking all possible precautions to keep the playing field fair for everyone.
By choosing judges who are not on either the RPR or Furcadia, we attempt to eliminate concerns from contestants who worry that they might not be judged on their own merits due to past personal conflicts, not being a "known personality" in the community if this is their first foray, etc. These are valid concerns, in any community. Subconscious bias is a real thing for all humans, even the best intentioned ones. So we're taking all possible precautions to keep the playing field fair for everyone.
hey now, Furcadia players can operate without bias!
@LyrianChase - Check the community page. 
There's often cool stuff there! 
There's often cool stuff there!
LyrianChase
April 21, 2016
5:03am
@Dragonfire
What countdown clock? Is there one? There should be one on the main page so I don't forget lol. I'm already working on a thing.
What countdown clock? Is there one? There should be one on the main page so I don't forget lol. I'm already working on a thing.
*eyes dat countdown clock*
I gotta somehow outdo my golem ....
Dot
April 20, 2016
4:32pm
Ooooh. I'm an artist, I might do some art for the RPR Epic Week!!!
Gotta start concepting for the jumble!!!
The Epic Week contests start at the same time as Epic Week itself -- the morning of April 24th.
When will the contest be started? As in, when are you gonna make the topic in which we are able to participate in? I'd love to get myself started on it before I leave to Russia so that I have something to do~
Markifan02April 21, 2016
6:20pm