Coming Soon: Heart of the OHR Contest Archives

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Pepsi Ranger
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Coming Soon: Heart of the OHR Contest Archives

Post by Pepsi Ranger »

Hey Everyone,

I thought I'd move this discussion out of the Heart of the OHR 2020 thread and into its own thread since everything I'm doing moving forward is for the contest archives and not just for the 2020 results. That said, I think it's time for an update, especially if you've lost touch with a contest that ended almost a year ago and promised complete results that are now nine months overdue.

Again, sorry about that.

Here's what I've accomplished so far:

-The main page, including contest timeline, is finished.
-The pages for 2010 and 2012 are finished.
-The pages for 2014 and 2016 are basically finished, but I still need to assemble the components and add photos to their respective articles.
-The page for 2018 has all of the prepublished material and related links installed, but I haven't gotten to the game blocks or articles yet. Those are next. Because this is the largest contest season, this will also take me the longest to finish. At least a week's worth of work. Probably longer given historical reference.
-The page for 2020 is still nothing more than a shell, but the content, save for the introduction and related articles, has been written. I've started on the introduction, but I'm only a few paragraphs in. I can finish it in an evening. Then 2020 will be ready for archiving. Again, the archival process will take several days if history repeats itself. My page builder is quite slow and finicky.
-The statistics page is still blank. I also have to figure out how I want to integrate the charts. I also have to decide on which statistics to display. I'm considering adding mode and median scores to the list of existing statistics. Note: I have already updated the end-of-contest statistics to account for 2020's contribution. The 2020 season has contributed to four new records, including highest average contest rating.

To be expected, life has eaten up much of my time, not to mention this project has become so large that I've lost much of my energy for it, so I still wouldn't expect it before the end of the holidays. But I am chipping away at it, little by little.

And because of that, you may wonder why I'm even putting so much time into a contest archive. It's a fair question (if you're asking). It's simple, really. This is the best way I can think of to preserve a piece of OHR history, especially when so much else is lost to broken sites or chaotic message boards. This way, we can remember a good chunk of ten years' worth of OHR history without having to dig too deep for it. So, yeah, it's time-consuming and way beyond reasonable given the inevitable low ROI it'll achieve. But it'll also be awesome, so I intend to finish it.

That said, I've got two more teasers and a question for you:

Teaser 1: A comparison of the original contest results page to the new page (2010, Hero entry)
Teaser 2: An exclusive article written for the archives (no longer exclusive, I guess, if I also post it here)
Question: Would you rather read or listen to the articles, or both?

Note: The graphic for the new page will look broken because the background has a parallax view and doesn't capture properly as a screenshot. On the real page, the content blocks scroll over the parallax background. The first image is a clip from the original announcement on HamsterSpeak #45; the second is a clip from the new page; the third is what happens when you click on an achievements button.

Teaser #1: The Comparison

Heart of the OHR Results Page Comparison (50 percent).jpg
Heart of the OHR Results Page Comparison (50 percent).jpg (757.97 KiB) Viewed 1394 times

Teaser #2: The Article

Note: The following article is over 3,600 words long, so I will post just the first half to give you an idea what to expect of the archives. You can read the rest when the archives are officially announced in a few weeks. It will be the third article posted on the 2014 contest page. Yes, that implies if you want to see all of the content, you have to check out all of the pages! Also note, this clip has not yet been edited, so the final version may be slightly different than what I'm posting here.

"The Prestigious WTF Award"

___

When I assembled the first end-of-contest report for Heart of the OHR 2010, I had this wacky idea to present not only scores and voter trends, but also "fuzzy descriptions," "audience consensuses," and most ambitious of all, "achievements" for each game. I'm not quite sure what prompted me to do this, but it seemed like the perfect opportunity to add more life to a series of contest games that had already earned their places in the final results. Perhaps because the achievements concept was gaining momentum on Steam and Xbox Live, and certain games were already adding them internally, I thought it might be worth it to try it here, too. So I did.

Funny enough, the idea was well received.

"Whose idea was it to include ACHIEVEMENTS for voting results
great gravy, that's brilliant" –Baconlabs, (via "HamsterSpeak 45 Online" Thread on Slime Salad)

Of course, because all achievements were new in 2010, I didn't yet know which ones would be unique and which ones would become recurring, but as the seasons came and went, some achievements made a triumphant return, so I thought I'd highlight a few of them here to cement their significance to Heart of the OHR.

Note: I'll be listing them according to frequency and impact.

Candidate for Best of 20##

Even though the OHR was a hotbed of activity from 1998-2007, production on games seemed to decline each year, until only the contests produced the majority of releases we'd see in a year. By the time Heart of the OHR entered the scene, independently released games were few, and the odds of a game getting any release depended almost entirely on whether it was tied to a contest. This meant that one of the perks to becoming the winner of the Heart of the OHR was that also becoming "Game of the Year" was practically inevitable. This was certainly true for 2010's winner, Motrya.

That said, winning Heart of the OHR was only part of the condition for winning the "Best of" achievement. The game also had to score an average of 8.0 or higher. Anything less, and the contest was considered lower quality than the annual average, and a top achieving game didn't necessarily equal most memorable of the year. That's why some Heart of the OHR winners didn't earn this award while others did.

Most/Least Voted On

Another guarantee of any OHR contest, especially Heart of the OHR, is that some games will attract all of the attention while others will gain very little of it. Contests where ranking is required will likely get more voters rating more games, even if half-heartedly, but Heart of the OHR anticipates voter selection by requiring a scaled score, offering players an out if time or conscience comes against them.

Historically, players have been good about playing the "hot" games like Motrya or Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy, and they've been good about playing through the original releases. But many times, especially in early days, they've been less prone to play through rereleases, and even less willing to offer a rating when it's unclear which parts they played were new for the contest. Likewise, players who play a game that they believe violates a contest rule (too short or not enough like an RPG are the top violations) may abstain from offering it a score (even though it's in the contest and has been approved for voting). And, of course, some players who are also participants may decide not to rate their own games, even though the contest both permits and encourages this practice as the final score may skew negatively against them if they don't, especially with the two-thirds rule in place.

For these reasons, voter turnout has rarely been consistent across all games, and because of that, I wanted to include a seasonal achievement that highlights the most and least voted on games. Even though the contest is weighted on the score value and ultimately determines its winner according to highest average score, it's nice to know which games are the most and least popular among players, especially when the second place game scores the fewest unique voters (Vikings of Midgard, 2010 release). Does the score even matter if so few have played it?

Waist Level Champion (and Below the Belt Champion, Below the Knees Champion, and Chest Level Champion)

One of the things that sets Heart of the OHR apart from other contests is its rating system. Where other contests require comparison ranking to determine winners, Heart of the OHR requires scoring on a scale from 1 to 10. So far, this system has garnered little controversy and reasonably accurate impressions of a game's quality. By itself, it's just a bank of numbers boiling down to a single average, and the average is all that the end user will ever see.

But statistics are part of the fun of learning about a game's reputation among players, and the contest's high-low values tell a more nuanced story of just how well a game is received. For example, a game that averages 4.2 among 12 voters may sound like a below average game. The three people who score it a 2 certainly think it's way below average. But what about that person who gave it a 7? To that voter, the game is pretty darn good, not just average, and certainly not below average. Is an average score of 4.2 really representative of every player's perspective?

While the average score is designed to place a game within a contest's ranking system, it does not represent the view of every voter, so I thought it was important to include the highest and lowest ratings of each game to show its potential on either side.

Note: On the statistics page, I may offer even more insights into a game's true performance, including mode and median scores. Stay tuned.

To better represent the true appeal or revulsion a game offers to players, I've included achievements based on scoring ranges that represent positions on the body. These achievements include:

Below the Knees Champion: Game receives no score above 3.
Below the Belt Champion: Game receives no score above 4.
Waist Level Champion: Game receives no score above 5.
Chest Level Champion; Inflated Chest: Game receives no score below 7.

Note: Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy (2018) had never officially received a "Chest Level Champion" or "Inflated Chest" achievement because it had already gotten 15 other achievements when I usually cap out at nine, but it was certainly deserving of it, and if I were to add new achievements to old games, it would certainly earn it this time.

You'll note that I never established an achievement for games that score a minimum or maximum of 6. That's largely because games with a minimum score of 4-6 or maximum of 6 are so common that to offer them all achievements would be overkill. Retroactively, I'd award them an "Above the Waist Champion" achievement if their rating situations were a rarity.

Likewise, because no game had ever ended with a high score of 2 or a low score of 8 or higher, I never had the need to create special achievements for those situations. But if I had, they'd look like this:

Bottom Feeder; Spider Eyes: Games that score straight 1's would likely get one of these two achievements (or something similar).
Feet Level Champion: For games with a high score of 2.
Neck Level Champion: For games with a low score of 8.
Head Level Champion; Above the Fold: For games with a low score of 9.
Elysian Resident: For games with a perfect 10 across the board.

It's probably good that none of these unused achievements ever saw the light of day because the low end winners would depress their authors (likely) and the high end winners would give their authors a fat head (possibly), but it's still nice to know what's possible should Heart of the OHR continue past 2020 or return at another time.

Fun Fact: "Waist Level Champion" is the first achievement ever issued in this contest. It was given to ncw64’s Hero (2010) for having, well, a high score of 5.

Working 9 to 5 (and others)

Like the "Waist Level Champion" style achievements representing the extremes of voter trends, I also have achievements for high-low scores representing numerical codes or jargon.

For example, office and professional type achievements, such as "Working 9 to 5," "Banker," and others represent any game that draws a high score of 9 and a low score of 5, in honor of the traditional workday schedule.

Likewise, communication achievements, like "Good Buddy" and "Over and Out," represent any game that has a high score of 10 and low score of 4.

These achievements that play on numbers add to the lore of Heart of the OHR, in my opinion, because they are based not on the game themselves, but on the players' response to them, and I think any contest that includes achievements should also recognize the players, not the just the author or game content.

Fan Favorite (and Audience Favorite)

As I mentioned earlier, just like Rotten Tomatoes's and Steam's average score system (which works just like Rotten Tomatoes's positive-negative system), the overall score does not always accurately reflect the user's enjoyment of a game. It just takes the sum total of the grand user experience and boils it down to a concrete number. For this reason, a single low score can bring down the average of a game with predominantly high scores. If this gash out of the average high score is significant enough, it can cost a game its high, if not winning position within the contest.

Several times throughout the Heart of the OHR's lifespan, this situation has occurred, and games with high praise still end up coming in second place or worse.

For this reason, I wanted to issue a special achievement to any game that scored predominantly high marks among most users, but failed to win simply because it missed the mark with one or two players (usually due to mismatched genre preference or outright spite for the game or its creator).

That achievement, "Fan Favorite" (or "Audience Favorite," in the case of 2020's achievement winner), reflects the "spiritual winner" of the contest, even if the numbers go to someone else. This award can be given to games with not only mostly high scores (6 and above), but also to those that are praised incessantly on the message boards.

So, even if a game comes in second, third, fourth, or worse, any game that has the "Fan Favorite" or "Audience Favorite" achievement clearly won as far as the majority of players are concerned (and probably would've actually won, had the contest been based on comparative ranking).

(end sample)
_____

The above article goes on to discuss ten other popular or recurring achievements, and you can read more about them when the archives are ready and announced in a few weeks.

If you're still reading, please be sure to let me know if you'd prefer audio versions of these articles to go alongside them, as well as if you have anything you'd like to add to the archives, like unboxing videos, for example (I put this request out a couple of months ago and no one responded to it, so I'll try again here), and whether you'd like to see an encore season in 2022. I'm still in favor of retiring the contest, especially since 2020 gave us a good contest to end on (the only good thing 2020 gave us), but putting these pages together has given me a few ideas for the next one in case we decide to do this one more time.

But yeah, I hope you enjoyed this sample. Note that the complete archives are massive, and you'll need several sessions to get through it all, so prepare yourself. (Seriously, my content document is the size of a short novel and I'm only two-thirds finished.) I was tempted to release them in segments, similar to how we used to release HamsterSpeak issues, but I also want to maximize the likelihood that they'll get read, so I'm still planning to release everything at once. You can let me know which you prefer along with answers to my other questions.

And if I decide to release them all at once but any of you want to peek at the early pages anyway (for feedback purposes, of course *wink*), send me a PM. I appreciate feedback, especially when one of you tries to view the main page and none of the images load (thanks to my cookie manager blocking them, which it should no longer do). Yes, that happened.

Let me know. Hope you all are still looking forward to this.
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Hedera
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Re: Coming Soon: Heart of the OHR Contest Archives

Post by Hedera »

I'm interested in this, if only to see how these games have aged and also because there's a lot of work put into these.

also also because I want there to be an HOTOR 2022
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Pepsi Ranger
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Re: Coming Soon: Heart of the OHR Contest Archives

Post by Pepsi Ranger »

Just another quick update in case anyone's losing sleep over this:

I've finished constructing every page up through 2016. This includes each contests' original charts and supplemental content. It also includes the new companion articles that help shape the OHR's story in context to Heart of the OHR.

I've also finished and uploaded all of 2018's supplemental content, links, and articles. I just have to finish constructing the game chart. Once again, it takes an average of 15-20 minutes per game to construct the chart. Because 2018 had the largest turnout, I expect this to be the hardest chart to make (my web theme loves fighting with me whenever I give it too much to process, and so far it likes to choke after six or seven entries--I shudder to think what it'll do with 21 entries). I'll likely spend another few days on it. Maybe a week if it gets really stubborn to work with. But I do have the lowest four (ranks 21-18) built and ready to go.

That brings me to the new stuff...

Just a few minutes ago I finally, finally, finally finished the Microsoft Word Document chart for 2020. This is basically what every contest report gets before it goes to the web host. So, the chart you all are used to seeing at the end of each contest, with its introduction, conclusion, stats, and game components (including fuzzy descriptions, audience consensuses, and achievements), that chart for 2020 exists now. Finally. Again, sorry for the delay. That said, once I write the five companion articles for 2020, I'll be able to upload the final elements of the contest archives.

That'll just leave me with the statistics page, which I'm still figuring out what I want with that. I'd like to post pie charts or bar graphs if I can. But once that's done, I'll post the official announcement that the archives are ready for viewing.

So, that's the latest news. Keep an eye on this space. The archives will be complete soon. Thanks for your patience. The bow on it is almost tied.
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Re: Coming Soon: Heart of the OHR Contest Archives

Post by charbile »

Any updates??? How many words do you write per day? Seems like you might be at that professional 5000 a day level already Everyone in discord is on the edge of their seats, some have already fallen off

Look, everyone's thinking it so i'm just going to say it: this is classic ohrrpgce time, it wouldn't feel right without endless delays. It's ok. We'd be happy with the demo!
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Pepsi Ranger
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Re: Coming Soon: Heart of the OHR Contest Archives

Post by Pepsi Ranger »

We're in the final stretch.

Slime just got real.

Heart of the OHR Archive Teaser 2 (50 percent).jpg
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What's left?
-I've got to post the final seven 2020 games to the archives.
-Then I've got to revise the 2020 articles and find companion media for them.
-Then I've got to put together the statistics page.
-Then I've got to verify that everything's working.

Then I'll be finished.

Then I can pass it along to you guys to relive 10 years of Heart of the OHR history.

Just a little longer...
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Pepsi Ranger
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Re: Coming Soon: Heart of the OHR Contest Archives

Post by Pepsi Ranger »

Hey Everyone,

I'm in the final stages of finishing these archives. As of now, I'm putting together the statistics page, but I'd like to know what you all would like to see. If you could take a moment and tell me the type of statistical information you're interested in, let me know here.

What I've already included:

-The usual end of report chart with updated records for 2020. Note: 2020 sets four new records.
-New statistics based on series participation totals and averages. These include:
--Total games entered (with categorical breakdowns)
--Total games disqualified
--Total games rejected
--Total participating authors (including unique participant stats)
--Total participating voters
--Total votes cast
--Average votes cast per voter
--Average game releases per year
--Total contest average score
-Mini-chart for contest averages by year
-Mini-chart for seasons with new and returning author participants
-Top participating authors by number of seasons entered
-Top participating authors by number of games entered
-Top 10 games by score
-Top 10 authors by high score
-Top 10 authors by average score (requires two or more game releases throughout contest history)
-Mini-chart for voting totals by year
-Mini-chart for number of voters by year
-Voter frequency by game rank per year (this is just a bird's-eye record of which games got how many votes)

What I still plan to include:

-Highest and lowest voter averages by year
-Highest and lowest voter average for contest series
-Mode and median values for specific categories (still trying to decide which ones need this)
-Dynamic tables and graphs showing comparison charts across like categories (participating authors vs. voter frequency, for example)
-Dynamic table demonstrating previous records by season (or, more accurately, a re-post of the records charts from earlier season reports)
-Downloadable vote-tracking template (Excel sheet, the same one I've been using to track scores and records since 2018)

What I'm also considering, as long as it's not overkill:

-Breakdown of how often a score from 1 to 10 is cast (total and per year)
-Contest window size by year

Note: For now, I plan to base stats on those adhering to the 2/3 rule, as those are what have determined the current rankings. I don't know yet if I want to include a section for raw scores, as the rule has affected only a handful of games from the 2014 and 2016 seasons, and not by much.

I'm on the fence about Bottom 3 game stats. I'd think authors of the lowest ranked games would not want to be immortalized in this way, so I'm leaning away from including it. Nevertheless, I'd still like your opinion.

And that's all I can think of at the moment. Is there anything I've missed that's reasonable to track? Let me know.

Thanks.

The archives should be ready for viewing in the next couple of days. Certainly by this weekend. Everything else is ready-to-go.
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