Re: GDQ Submissions Process

Here we go.  This is not a negative pastebin, I'm not criticizing anyone or any group of people, merely suggesting something to make the submissions process for GDQ's more interactive between the GDQ Staffers and the community as a whole.

I was reading Golden's pastebin about the 120 stars 120 players submission and one part in particular stuck out to me in his conclusion:

     "I wanted to submit X, but it will just be rejected (again)..." We hear this a lot, too. I'd personally love to see a
     "community choice" block appear in each GDQ. Allocate 5-10 hours of the marathon and let the community say, "You know, we really
     feel like <game> deserves a shot this year." This helps alleviate that one-way road I talked about above. It places some
     responsibility and trust back in the community's hands.

This is something that I have had in the back of my head for a while.  The marathon lasts 7 days x 24 hours approximately.  That's 168 hours and give or take a bunch of hours for setup lets say we have a conservative 140 hours of gaming content.  Each GDQ there are runs that get rejected that deserve a chance.  However, the community (this includes the runners, the viewers, the staff, the attendees, everyone involved with the event) really doesn't get that much input.  I was originally thinking of a larger block of time for Community-Chosen runs, but I think 10 hours would be perfectly reasonable.  So as a suggestion to go alongside Golden's idea of letting the community pick some games to be in the marathon.  If that is rejected for whatever reason, why not let the viewers/donations decide on some runs.  We've had donation wars before.  Heck you could even do some sort of bracket showdown for runs that get waitlisted to fight for the last few spots.

I think it is completely reasonable to allocate 7% of the marathon to community choice.  Especially when you have the other 93% of the runs already hand selected by the committee.  And to make the GDQ staff happy, just make sure they set the list of games in the poll/bracket/etc.  Some games are rejected for reasons that render them ineligible for this selection as well, but there are a TON of games that just dont get in because there is a better choice in the committees view.  Let the community have a role in selecting some of the games.  Not only will it alleviate some tension, it will make for some fun competition.

I would not expect to see something like this implemented for SGDQ 2016 (that doesn't mean it couldn't be done) but I think that something like this would be a really nice bridge between the GDQ Staff and the community.