Community Submission Box - Summer E Games Input

[Spinwhiz]

Community Submission Box - Summer E Games

The Summer E Games are two weeks worth of fun and interesting events. This year's E games are quickly approaching, and we want your suggestions on what sort of events you'd like to see.

The Summer E Games will begin in a few weeks and we're looking for event suggestions. To get an idea of what we're looking for, check out a list of our past events:


Flash Game Playoffs: hosted by Kongregate - Participants will compete in 10 different flash games (1 per day) for medals.
Legacy Battle - Community members choose 32 of their favorite legacies from a list of 75. Chosen legacies will go head-to-head in a bracket, with The Escapist community voting for the winners.
Epic Quiz - 6 different categories (Gaming, Movies, TV, Current Industry Events, Miscellaneous, and The Escapist) with 25 questions of the hardest trivia we can dig up.
T-Shirt Contest - Create a t-shirt involving our brands (Zero Punctuation, I Hit It With My Axe, etc.) and the winning T-shirt is produced and put into The Escapist store.
Haiku Contest - Send in your haiku and vote on your favorites.
Photoshop Contest - Photoshop the craziest, funniest videogame mash-ups you can think of, and the community votes on its favorite.



Now, these are all awesome events, but we want more even more. Please send us your ideas for the upcoming Summer E Games! Just post your submissions below. When sending us your ideas, please keep the following things in mind:

Can there be a clear winner?
Will the event be interesting and fun for a large group of people?
How much time will be required to participate?
What will we need in order to run this event?

 

[Spinwhiz]

Invent a Badge:
Contestants submit a badge icon and conditions for earning that badge. The staff pick the five most creative/appropriate badges and the community is polled to determine a winner from those five. When the contest is concluded, the badge becomes available for all community members to earn and display on their profiles.

A large number of users have [a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.153887-Create-your-own-Escapist-badge#3709822]their[/a] [a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.159575-Ideas-For-New-Escapist-Badges#4011963]own[/a] [a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.190929-Create-an-imaginary-new-forum-badge#5966413]ideas[/a] [a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/18.108051]for[/a] [a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.135451-If-you-got-a-badgemaker#3051251]a[/a] [a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/18.178678]badge[/a], so the event will have no shortage of submissions. Moreover, the only necessity for creating a submission is an image manipulator.

As for time, this could be run on the same schedule as the the Haiku and Photoshop contests.

The only resource needed is a means for users to upload a 32x32 pixel image and a short text description regarding the conditions of awarding the badge. Obviously it would be prudent to place a limit of one submission per user, otherwise it may be inundated with hundreds of entries and excessively time-consuming for judges to wade through.

Edit: Also, you may want to move this comments thread to Off-Topic. I'm not sure many people will see it in Featured Content...

Good idea and we'll take it into consideration for sure! Also, thanks for the edit.

 

[Tharwen]

I have an idea, but it's not particularly well-formed at the moment:

[HEADING=3]Battle Reports[/HEADING]

As the title suggests, you could hold a competition to see who could write the best battle report between two fictional characters. Maybe you could limit the characters to a certain game or list of games (or even Escapist shows).

Pros:

There are lots of writers on the forums.
It might finally put an end to versus threads

Cons:

It would take a very long time to read through and moderate them.
The submissions could be fairly repetitive.

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

How about members write a short games pitch and the community votes for the best?

 

[Tekkawarrior]

Escapist Radio

What better than to read and listen to our favorite content made by out own escapists,
the radio channel can have multiple sections such as Music, Discussions, Poetry etc.

People can submit their shout-outs, jokes, stories and opinions or anything
related to the discussions.

We have video and text, why not have sound too .

EDIT: My apologies if I misunderstood what kind of "events" you mean.

 

[Jack and Calumon]

Escapist Radio

What better than to read and listen to our favorite content made by out own escapists,
the radio channel can have multiple sections such as Music, Discussions, Poetry etc.

People can submit their shout-outs, jokes, stories and opinions or anything
related to the discussions.

We have video and text, why not have sound too .

Shush... You'll ruin the surprise!

Calumon: How about a Short Story Contest?

Think about it, you could have people write up a story for anything they want in the world and you get to decide the best one. Perhaps with different categories, like Fantasy, Horror and Comedy, just to make it fair to those with different writing styles. You could even get a celebrity judge, someone who has wrote a book obviously. Maybe one who has a book we can pre-order from Amazon and Amazon.co.uk. I dunno... my head feels funny.

Jack: There, there Calumon. Now rest. It's not every day you pitch into the Escapist like that.

 

[Erana]

Hrm....
How about a 'scapist cooking contest? Its hard to really do a taste test over the internet, but it could be judged based on the relevance of the ingredients, its edibility, and how geeky the final product was. It wouldn't be easy to tell a clear-cut winner, but it hilarity would ensue.

Also a "Design a 'scapist website skin" contest would be interesting; this Fallout look is wonderful, but I know there are a lot of people out there that like to play with graphics 'n HTML 'n what not.

 

[Geamo]

Taking an idea and running with it slightly...
Similar to the Haiku contest - the 50 Word Story contest?
People write up a story in 50 words, no more, no less and people vote on their favourite to win.
Idea taken in part from here(by Tim from LRR).

Only problem I see with this is that it might be too similar to the Haiku contest.

 

[Jedamethis]

I'm terrible at being creative, so I vote for this

Invent a Badge:

And this.

Calumon: How about a Short Story Contest?

 

[Spinwhiz]

I like the ideas people. Keep them coming!

 

[Mr.Pandah]

Whats the deal with Legacy Battle...what exactly are we picking?

 

[Tallim]

Might be a little corny not sure very tired but....

Scavenger Hunt/Paper Trail

Have a list of things that need to be found throughout the Escapist website, they could be hidden in pictures/articles you name it, I am sure you can squeeze them in.
They could just be a master list or you could start with one item and then have it (or something nearby on the website) be a clue to another thing to find.

Might also get people to look at content they might otherwise not have looked at yet. Spread the love!

You could even spread it out over the two weeks so that people only have to find one or two things a day.

Might be a bit of work on your end though.

Then at the end whoever sends the "answer" in first is the winner.

 

[TimeLord]

Invent a Badge:
Contestants submit a badge icon and conditions for earning that badge. The staff pick the five most creative/appropriate badges and the community is polled to determine a winner from those five. When the contest is concluded, the badge becomes available for all community members to earn and display on their profiles.

A large number of users have [a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.153887-Create-your-own-Escapist-badge#3709822]their[/a] [a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.159575-Ideas-For-New-Escapist-Badges#4011963]own[/a] [a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.190929-Create-an-imaginary-new-forum-badge#5966413]ideas[/a] [a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/18.108051]for[/a] [a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.135451-If-you-got-a-badgemaker#3051251]a[/a] [a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/18.178678]badge[/a], so the event will have no shortage of submissions. Moreover, the only necessity for creating a submission is an image manipulator.

As for time, this could be run on the same schedule as the the Haiku and Photoshop contests.

The only resource needed is a means for users to upload a 32x32 pixel image and a short text description regarding the conditions of awarding the badge. Obviously it would be prudent to place a limit of one submission per user, otherwise it may be inundated with hundreds of entries and excessively time-consuming for judges to wade through.

Edit: Also, you may want to move this comments thread to Off-Topic. I'm not sure many people will see it in Featured Content...

I was going to say this as I have waaaaaaay too many badge ideas going through my head!

 

[Dorian]

Hrm........
Hrrrmmmmmm........................
HRRRMMMMMMMM.............................

*Snaps fingers with an idea*

I've got it! How about a contest about who can make the best caption/subtitle of a picture? You could have X different pictures that are all independent! True, there could only be so many entrants in each one, but the restriction could be remedied by not allowing repeat contesters. And to find out which is the most favored, you could have a poll, but not allow anyone to vote for their OWN submission.

And the best part! The winner of each one gets their OWN CUSTOM BADGE! It's the picture with their own submission as the description!

 

[Verex]

[HEADING=2]Avatar Contest[/HEADING]

Each person makes a set of 5 avatars featuring/relating to The Escapist. Users will then vote on their favorite set and the winner will have his/her avatars put in the default gallery.

[HEADING=2]Flash Fiction Contest[/HEADING]
Flash fiction is basically a short-short story that is 500 words or less. A person could submit one story of any genre and users could vote on their favorite.

 

[soapyshooter]

Hmm I don't know if this is what you are looking for but a

DESIGN YOUR OWN BOX ART CONTEST

Contestants design cover box art for a game that they make up. So you first come up with a game title and snappy cover art that would be featured on the box if your game was real. Escapists vote on the best looking design. We could even have different categories based on different game genres.

 

[ProfessorLayton]

I like the T-Shirt idea. A lot, actually.

Well... there was a thing going on a while back where we tried to put together a Left 4 Dead Tournament and it never actually got off the ground. I think if the Escapist sponsored it, we could actually go somewhere with it. Like have teams of four with one leader, three members, and one backup in case a player can't make it where the leader names the team and creates a team logo and spray... Except this time, make it Left 4 Dead 2.

1: There will be a clear winning team... whoever wins every match wins the whole thing. We'd have a big bracket with all the teams March Mayhem style and each pair could either play one match or do best two out of three. There could also be one for the PC gamers and one for the 360 gamers.

2: Everyone loves a good tournament. Anyone who has Left 4 Dead 2 could play and if someone on each team has fraps or a camera they could record the games and upload them to YouTube for everyone to watch.

3: It depends on a lot of things... how many people enter the contest, how quickly teams get filled, how long the matches end up being, how quickly your team gets knocked out of the tournament... etc.

4: Everyone will need an internet connection and Left 4 Dead 2... See, I could make the brackets myself and organize everything... the reason why the last one didn't go anywhere was because... well, no one knew about it. If the Escapist could put an ad for it here and there and sticky the topic, I could keep track of everything and update the thread.

The way I'd like to keep score is have the team leader message me and say who won and the scores for each... or take a screenshot of the final scoreboard or film the whole thing.

I'd like to have feedback from... anyone, really. Hopefully I did this right... If I did it wrong, tell me so I can think of a new idea.

 

[Sam G]

I really like that "story of limited words" idea that's cropped up a couple of times... It fits all the criteria, it would be fun to do, everybody can participate as it doesn't require anything like specific software or a particular game, and what's more, being so that there are only a finite number of characters one can use, it'd be really quick and easy to do.