Goals:

• Fill our space with great weird stuff
• Give developers a space to share their work with the world

Meeting - 9/3/2025

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AGENDA:

• Review the current different curation routes in our expo hall, and how things went in 2025
• Build list of what we see as problems with that flow
• Set expectations for what we think we can do different in 2026, and what we might want to explore in 2027 and beyond

END OF MEETING GOALS:

• Understand how our new goals might shift layout/curation needs for the 2026 cycle (i.e. reducing game count / floor space allocations) - Complete ✅
• Assign points of contacts for any other groups we want to get involved in the curation process (i.e. schools, NPOs, etc) - mostly ✅
• Agree on which problems / ideas we don't want to commit time to this year, or that require more than 3 months of run up time - We sure did ✅

Attendees: Matt, Flan, Emily, Travis, Lauren, Socks, Nate weed-wacking

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Current Processes

IA

1. General submission - Initial vet and cleanup by DHS, ranked by small team (5 peeps), Matt handles ties, length waitlist
2. Contractors - Long term legal contracts, we give them $ they fill a space (and follow up with us YoY to adjust things)
3. Guests - Newer way to get games, we work with the Guests dept who helps with stuff like travel costs and visas; unique each year (generally, right now Robin is a bit of an exception because the wall is good)

MIVS

1. General Submissions
   1. Preflight cleanup by DHs, confirms links work, etc
   2. Assigns items to specific judges, each game judged by multiple people; make sure that each team has plays
   3. Judges score on a simple rubric (show readiness, gameplay, enjoyment)
   4. Top accepted, bottom cut, some middle ground for waitlists
2. Quickplay
   1. Open tables on site where attendees can set up their own machines

Problems:

• Repeat games
  • People like seeing how games have grown
  • But also we like to have new games
  • Both teams currently adjust scores based on consecutive years at mag
• Normalizing judge feedback
  • Some judges are just mean
  • IA rubric isn’t nuanced enough
• Variety of gameplay
  • Certain genres just score better
  • Certain genres just don’t work well in a mass-judge-format