Where Are All the RPGs in the IGF?
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One of the issues may be a function of the way judging occurs. In 2010, judges had an average of 2 days per game over the course of a month to play and judge each. Now, with each judge responsible for 20 games, 2 days per game becomes a best-case scenario. Further, the reality is that IGF judges are volunteers. Outside of the IGF, they have full-time jobs and schedules that limit the amount of time they can realistically spend playing games each day. They are also human beings, which means that they tend to procrastinate. According to Alex May, (many judges, like me, left it quite late before starting) in 2010. In short: two days per game is a fantasy. It seems far more likely that most games get no more than a few hours of consideration from any given judge.
This is really bad for RPGs. You can get the measure of a shooter or a platformer in a few hours; not so a serious RPG. RPGs tend to be slow-burners. It takes a significant time investment to really appreciate what an RPG has to offer. Worse, because RPGs are built upon the making of irreversible choices, many of them cannot even be fully appreciated without multiple play-throughs! Unless a judge is unusually committed and organized, allotting ample time in advance for play-throughs of his/her RPG submissions, the judge is unlikely to have enough time to get a good sense for the RPGs he or she is assigned to judge.
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Mechanics-wise, the RPG genre is very bound-up in tradition, and that's reflected in many of the entries. This dovetails with the point about narrative focus above. People who get into developing RPGs are oftentimes more into the story and the setting than into doing something innovative with the game's mechanics. Necessarily, if a developer pours most of her energy into the narrative and setting, that is not going to leave her much time to focus on doing something truly interesting with the guts of the game.
To be fair, not all indie RPG developers are interested in story. Many are primarily motivated by a desire to return to mechanics that were once standard in the genre, but have since all but disappeared. The one thing you don't generally see, though, are indie RPG developers who are interested in pioneering radical new twists in RPG mechanics.
One way or another, the result is the same: these games end up having very familiar systems. Most of the RPGs I see among the entrants to the IGF are either using some variation on the old Final Fantasy battle system, doing a variation on Puzzle Quest, doing a variation on Protector, or going for a side-scrolling beat-em-up approach. I don't mean to suggest that that is as a bad thing. However, it does have major consequences for a game's chances at winning the IGF's grand prize and design-focused awards.
