The 1st annual Golden Banana awards

[kumakami]

ok Monkeys heres the pitch, One of use sets up a kickstarter for a low goal level (I'm thinking like $1000 american) to fund our own awards. the money will be used for prizes, trophys and advertising. there will be NO demo's allowed in....

as for donation gifts... the 1km1kt shirt would work as at lest one level....

for the forum to desuse and fill out!

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

[koipond]

Now, I do have a question as to why we would need to raise money for the event.

In keeping with the spirit of the event, we could host it on one of the many blog sites available. We don't have a huge list of costs involved with it either. We don't have a big splashy event at Gen Con, we don't have a huge amount of things.

I mean, we could create the flashy image that people could slap on their game, or their website but that's really it.

[Onix]

I'd say that having some kind of valuable prize is important. Sure people would like a $50 gift certificate, but you raise the stakes and all of a sudden the contest gets important. People start paying attention and then the golden banana has weight. Without that chain of events, it's an award that nobody cares about.

[koipond]

A small monetary fee works, but it still doesn't require a kickstarter to get going.

[Onix]

Here's an idea. If a kickstarter has to be a project, and not a charity, what if the idea was not to raise money for a prize, but that 1KM1KT would host the kickstarter project. The Judges would make a video explaining what they like about the game and why it deserves to be kickstarted then the writer would talk it up. Having someone else endorse a project is really powerful. As part of winning the community champions the game as being worthy of having some professional editing done, a nice cover, and a small print run to cover rewards. Any profits get invested in further kickstarters that the winner gets to pick and the winner gets the rewards. And it might be nice to pay the judges a little something for their troubles in organizing all this and doing the work. I'm talking small compensation but something meaningful to keep the wives happy. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta eat.

[kumakami]

I think I like rob's 1mk1kt e-store idea for getting the money for the awards... add in a golden banana shirt..... how ever I might do onix's idea of the compo I want to run where "your game in print" is the main prize. run the compo then use the kick starter for the limited run of the book.....make like the higher level donations get (limited number) a copy of the winners book.

thank you all for the show of support I think once rob's e-store is up we need to start working through getting The golden banana's set up....

[Rob Lang]

I love the ideas. We'll start simple and build it up. I'm looking at the online shop options and will come back with my research shortly.

As for prizes, we should keep it simple to start with. Kickstarter is great when there is a game ready for publish but I've recently discovered with Icar that there is a HUGE amount of work to get it to that point. I would not want to award a prize that then meant the author had to spend hours on end formatting for print.

I've said elsewhere and I'll say it here. The Golden Bananas are in addition to the ENnies, not as a replacement. We should all strive to have the ENnies recognise the works of Philanthropists as well as the rest of the hobby.

[Onix]

I could see it as a problem if a book really wasn't ready. That was my thought though as far as using the kickstarter to pay for professional editing.

Let me just offer also that this would also be right up our alley. None of us have tons of money (well that I'm aware of) so we're speculating that we would be able to raise enough to offer a decent prize. It could work but not really guaranteed.

What we do have available is some time. The judges would be able to offer a vetted choice of game. This is something I've seen discussed on other boards as something people really want. Except we can't just say "We recommend game X" because people will look at that and say "Why do I care what you recommend?" Now, a funny thing happens when a valuable prize is involved. Immediately people care what your opinion is. (ok I guess I said this part earlier in the thread)

Like Rob mentioned, there would be the problem of this just becoming one of us submitting stuff and getting a prize. A couple of ways of avoiding that is, one judges can't win, two If you've won in the last five years, you can't win again. Any entry has to be a full game, not a gimped version of the game. Okay that wouldn't completely prevent the problem but it would slow it down.

I think the biggest issue would be getting enough high quality entries. Of course that would only be a problem the first time around if the kickstarter was successful, after that we'd probably be awash in entries.

Lastly, with Rob talking to the Ennies gents, what if the GB (Glorious Benefactor? No, Golden Banana) was somehow integrated with the Ennies? I guess that's a long shot but it's an idea for harmony.