During the judging phase of every contest, I do my best to remove myself from the decision making process whenever possible. I know that even if I make every effort to be 100% objective, that might be an unrealistic goal. I know who sends in every entry. I know who has won a contest before and who hasn't and I fear that if I act as judge on these things I'll let outside influences creep into my decision.
What kind of outside influences? Well, I might think to myself "well, so and so did the best job, but they just won a contest a few weeks ago so I'll give them 2nd place" or I might think "so and so hasn't won a contest in a long time, so maybe we'll give them 1st place."
Sure, my heart would be in the right place, but that wouldn't be fair at all. Not only would it be an unfair way to pick the winners, but I would invariably leave someone out or forget that one person didn't actually win a prize on such and such a contest.
So whenever I can, I bow out of the judging and leave it to people who don't know (a) who made each entry and (b) who has and has not won contests before. For example, when we did the Australian Art Contest I had Mav and Animal judge the pics without knowing who made what. I even covered up the signature on Rotscale's picture so they wouldn't know who they were voting for.
Of course, that's not always possible. This writing contest presented a unique challenge when it came to finding an objective judge. See, I could leave off the signature lines, but if I gave some of these stories to any of the Myachi Masters, they'd know good and well who wrote what. Just by the nature of the stories they would be able to pick out certain Myachi Maniacs.
So to judge this contest, I relied on a strange mix of non-Myachi players. Basically, I got a bunch of blogger friends of mine to read them all, critique them and arrange them in 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. Then I looked at everyones choices and averaged them out to get the final top 3.
It seemed like a fair system and we got a pretty good mix of entries at the top, but last night I realized that there was a slight problem that made the contest horribly unfair for one of our contestants.
See, one of the entries was working from something of a disadvantage. This is something that I should have shared with my impromptu panel of judges but it never occurred to me. One of the entries was submitted by someone for whom English is a second language.
Now, I think it's fair to say that it is way harder to win a contest like this if you can't use your native language to do so. I mentioned that to one of my judges (my little sister) last night and she admitted she would have scored things differently if she knew that. With that revelation I realized that the whole contest was in jeopardy of being judges unfairly.
I wrestled with the issue last night and this morning a solution dawned on me... 1.5th place. I'm simply going to add a 4th prize to the contest and reveal yet another suspense building story as me move closer to 1st place.
Considering the winner, the prize will be either his choice of 5.0s or a Blueberry Leopard... his choice.
How I got to know MYACHI!
by Myachi Max
So here I am sitting in the airplane feeling a bit sick. I'm on the airplane to New York so happy to once see Toys R Us or FAO Schwarz. My mum told me all these cool storys about NY and how big Toys R Us is! I can now already see the airport from NY feeling horrible!
We get a Taxi and go to the hotel, my mum says I should eat something, so I go in the lobby of the hotel and I order a spaghetti! But then... I eat and the worst thing happens... I need to throw up! We go to our room and I go to bed. I ask my mum when we'll go to FAO Schwarz and my mum just rolls her eyes. So I know it won't be tomorrow... cause I'm sick. :(
...But because I really wanted to go we went in the afternoon.
And then I see it FAO Schwarz!!!!!
I go in and see something called "Myachi"?
I see 2 people playing this game called Myachi. I think it looks cool so I go over to see what is going on. Then this guy (Bones) throws a myachi to me and I stick it! He shows me a few tricks and I master them. He says to me, "You've got talent bro!"
I ask my mum if I could buy combo pack with 2 Myachis in it and a DVD, we go back to the hotel and I start learning a few tricks! Next day I again go over and I buy Brave Heart Red! I start playing Myachi Fu with Bones and he gives me his Brave Heart Blue and I was so glad!!!!
And nowadays I always get better and better, only because I once went to NY!!!
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