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As part of staffing Big Bad Game-a-thon, I (among others) had the enviable and/or unenviable task of reviewing all the submissions to pick and choose what we wanted in the marathon. This was a first for me; I'd submitted runs to many marathons, but never been on the other side of the table.
At its core it's a simple task: watch over submission videos and decide if a given run would do well in the marathon or not, then review these feedback snippets and decide what gets in. Of course, the execution therein is a bit more complex: you have a limit to how much content you can fit into the marathon because most marathons have a duration decided before run selection, not a duration decided by run selection. As such, there's going to be a percentage of run-time you have to decline, and that percentage may be more than you would really want to decline.
That was the case with BBG. Submissions came in heavy at the end of our submission period and we ended up needing to decline roughly 50% of the submitted run-time. This is a pretty stark contrast from 2017, where we accepted 97%. As a result, the selection committee was forced to be pretty picky and things that would have not been looked at harshly in a marathon 5 or 10% over duration became really big deals. We declined quite a few good, solid runs unfortunately.
I think part of this is a lot of runners simply don't understand how a run selection committee thinks and does their job. I know I didn't until I actually had the task thrust onto myself. I hope to touch on some of the things I saw here and reveal some of my thought process to hopefully help other runners out.
I should note, BBG is nothing compared to GDQ, ESA, etc. We accepted half our submitted runs; events like GDQ accept less than 10%. We received about 100 hours of submissions, GDQ receives many times that. So take what I say here with a grain of salt and understanding that I'm talking about small marathons; I'm sure the process is entirely different for a GDQ.
( Our Selection Process )
( The Golden Rule for Getting In )
( The Little Details )
At its core it's a simple task: watch over submission videos and decide if a given run would do well in the marathon or not, then review these feedback snippets and decide what gets in. Of course, the execution therein is a bit more complex: you have a limit to how much content you can fit into the marathon because most marathons have a duration decided before run selection, not a duration decided by run selection. As such, there's going to be a percentage of run-time you have to decline, and that percentage may be more than you would really want to decline.
That was the case with BBG. Submissions came in heavy at the end of our submission period and we ended up needing to decline roughly 50% of the submitted run-time. This is a pretty stark contrast from 2017, where we accepted 97%. As a result, the selection committee was forced to be pretty picky and things that would have not been looked at harshly in a marathon 5 or 10% over duration became really big deals. We declined quite a few good, solid runs unfortunately.
I think part of this is a lot of runners simply don't understand how a run selection committee thinks and does their job. I know I didn't until I actually had the task thrust onto myself. I hope to touch on some of the things I saw here and reveal some of my thought process to hopefully help other runners out.
I should note, BBG is nothing compared to GDQ, ESA, etc. We accepted half our submitted runs; events like GDQ accept less than 10%. We received about 100 hours of submissions, GDQ receives many times that. So take what I say here with a grain of salt and understanding that I'm talking about small marathons; I'm sure the process is entirely different for a GDQ.
( Our Selection Process )
( The Golden Rule for Getting In )
( The Little Details )