The competition is over, and I didn't win.

I came fourth.

Of three.

The phantom entry

The competition came down to a four way poll between three of the entries.

Yes, you read that right.

One of the entries, despite being a well written PSP game, couldn't actually win. There wasn't anything wrong with the project itself, rather, the setting and plot was supposed to be a sequel to intellectual property (IP) owned by Bandai, ie. it was a fan-game, as freely admitted by the author who had nothing to hide. Unfortunately, it's not that unusual for fan-game developers to get a visit from a lawyer when they borrow intellectual property, and it's also not uncommon for such games to never hear a peep from the owner either because they're too small to notice or the IP isn't important enough to fight for.

However, the likelihood of a visit from an unfriendly lawyer increases exponentially when the author of the borrowed IP tries to sell the title. I'm not sure if this particular author had read the rules thoroughly or not, but the purpose of the contest was to create a game to sell in Gizmo's shop, presumably in an effort to increase sales of the device since the only existing games for the system are ported emulators. Attempting to make this title available from the shop could easily be interpreted as trying to profit off Bandai's IP, ergo, this entry could not win.

The Gizmo guys have since confirmed that they were aware of this, and that means that they decided to leave the entry in the running, despite it's ineligibility. It ended up taking second place.

Except it didn't. When the results were revealed, it was finally excluded, bumping my effort from fourth to third. How unexpected.

So why exactly did they leave this particular entry in place to score votes which might otherwise have been given to an entry that could have won?

I have no idea, but it didn't really matter in the end.

Democracy in action

A short time after the poll went live, I checked it out, and as one often does, I voted for my entry.

Then I realised I hadn't actually logged in to the site, so logging in, I voted again. Two votes.

Hey, this is fun!

I tried voting for myself again, but unfortunately, my vote was rejected, something about IP addresses and cookies. So, I cleared my cookies, browsed to a free web based anonymiser and voted for myself twice more. Four votes.

This lead to me writing a nice email to the Gizmo guys, quitting the competition to reinforce the point that the poll could easily be gamed.

They were genuinely surprised since they were using a standard poll plugin for Joomla which they believed was secure. It was to a certain degree, but to anyone who had even minimal experience with web applications, it had some pretty obvious flaws. So, they closed the poll to anonymous votes, reset the counters and I rejoined the competition.

With the poll back up, I tested the changes and sure enough only registered users could vote, but there was still nothing stopping a user registering multiple times using different IP's. I let it go because it would be pretty obvious if anyone was faking votes.

Sure enough, there was a large difference in the result, but not because of intentional cheating.

It was more likely the friends dynamic.

Friends, being friends, want to help. So friends will register and vote. And vote they did. I confirmed this for a while, by checking where each vote was coming from and I found a connection to who the vote was for in most cases, at least for the first four days after which I stopped caring.

If I'd known I was entering a simple popularity contest, I'd have baked a cake, not designed a game.

I was left with three choices: cheat, lose or quit.

As I'd already demonstrated that I wouldn't cheat, and I'd already played the quitting card, that left only losing. In this case, losing wasn't such a terrible thing. Knowing that one of the entries could not finish the competition meant that I was guaranteed a "win" of sorts, third place, which came with no money, no console and more importantly, no further obligation. Bronze medal quitting, if you will.

With this in mind, I put aside childish thoughts of using the one-two combo of gmail and a web anonymiser to fake votes, of calling in my vast legion of friends and of raising the white flag.

And sure enough, I achieved my goal with a total of four votes, but it was a close call. If just one of my friends had accidentally voted, I could have come joint second! What would I have done with half a console?!

The runner up finished with five votes, the ineligible entry got nine and the winner came home with a staggering eleven votes.

I'd like to make a special thank you to the stranger who voted for my entry, the only vote I got from someone I didn't know.

But that's not how I'll remember it. In years to come I'll weave a fantastic tale of a battle between the world's top game designers, fighting tooth and claw for the ultimate prize: one of two limited edition Ares consoles. When the screaming had stopped, I found myself standing in a sea of corpses, ahead lay the final two warriors to face, but I was spent. I could not go on. My blood stained sword slipped from numb fingers and falling to my knees, I accepted third place on the podium of winners.

At least I got a t-shirt.

LOL

PS. Good luck to the Gizmo guys and the winners, I hope Ares takes you places!

PPS. Keepers will live on to be released on Linux and Windows!!