Voice Report #12 - The One Where Nothing Rhymes With Orange
Hello Everyone! Got a bit of a short but important update to report on today. Poetry, and its many complications, are changing.
Po’ Poetry
Poetry, in its many beautiful forms, has always been in a bit of an odd place when it comes to DJB competitions. For a while now, it's been attached as a “fiction” thing, meaning it adds to the CI word bank, gives INQ credit, and has to go through the Voice’s office for approval (both opening and closing the competition). Given it involves writing words down this was just the easiest way to slot it. But not all writing comps really need to be attached to Ice, INQ, and Voice stuff. Battleplans, Wikipages, and the like are all their own thing.
However, we have had a lot of road bumps over the years with utilizing poetry in this fashion. We have no real good way to create a standard rubric for poetry, as they can vary so widely. Haikus and sonnets work vastly differently. Poetry can range from very literal descriptions to very abstract. They often don’t even tell a narrative, and in our case, utilize out-of-universe terminology to be completed. Poetry is a very subjective thing to score and judge.
The most common approach is to either attach the Fiction Rubric (which doesn’t make a ton of sense in poetry, as it isn't really designed for it) or to make up new criteria, which are harder for a participant to know exactly how that translates to placement. Creating a universal poetry rubric is hard, and honestly, given how infrequently poetry shows up, not really worth it. Even then we still run into issues. A short while ago there was a lot of discussion regarding Haikus specifically, as different online syllable counters actually count words differently.
Then even if there is a good judging scheme in place, poetry always gives a minuscule amount of words towards a CI, when the standard is 1 CI needs to be earned in a competition. Even longer poetry formats, like a sonnet would require writing approximately 5 (just going off the length of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18) of them just to qualify for a CI. Our most popular poetry format, the haiku, would need approximately 55 haikus written (average 2 syllables a word so about 9 words per haiku).
So that has all led to a great deal of DC discussion on what to do with poetry as a competition type. We certainly don’t want to get rid of it, but also need to be realistic about the issues it constantly faces.
As such, we are decoupling Poetry from the Fiction Archetype for competitions. To run a poetry competition please select the “Regular Competition” option when creating a new one. Poetry will still be available via the dropdown for “Competition Type”.
This change will mean it no longer goes through the Voice office, will no longer count towards Clusters of Ice, and no longer count as INQ progression. Poetry will still be available as an option for those who enjoy running and participating in them but just without the unneeded overhead of things that don’t really make a ton of sense to be connected to them.
This change is not retroactive, but only going forward, You will not lose INQ points from past poetry competitions, or lose whatever credit towards a CI you have currently.
I am sure this will be pretty controversial for some of you, seen as a good choice for others, and a general sense of apathy from most given how few and far between heavy poetry submissions are.
Important Links
- Fiction Resources
- Fiction Center
- Fiction Rubric 3.0
- Voice Feedback Form
- [Log in to view e-mail addresses]
Thank you for reading. As always if you have any Fiction related questions, concerns, comments, snide remarks, feel free to message me on Discord or send me an email [Log in to view e-mail addresses].
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A logical and well thought out change. Poetry can be fun, but there absolutely was a lot of overhead for something that, in the end, didn't really add up to a whole lot.
Yep, good call on this one. It doesn't make sense for it to award CIs, especially when most submissions are probably in the tens of words in size and you need 500 for a single CI.
A sensible change.
Makes sense to me.
Makes sense. I’m sure the metrics would support very few people have written 55 Haikus for their one Cluster of Ice.
Challenge accepted, Kam.
People say that you can't rhyme with 'orange' Because they don't know about 'sporange.' Forget about 'door hinge' and 'porridge with George.' Oh damn, I forgot the fifth line!
A fair change that'll slightly speed up the review process for creating and closing out poetry competitions.
Blech, Markdown.
Atty; good luck!
I’ll say this to poetry. Teaching it this past year has given me a new found respect for it. I definitely understand the change,
What if we wanted to run comps in the future that required massive epic poems to be used as a way to write poetry? Think Canterbury Tales like fictions.
Dek: Those can be run as a "Fiction" archetype, with notes on specific formatting. It can work basically like any comp that goes "Write in first person." or "Only write in dialogue." I do imagine however participation would be on the lower side just due to the high wall of difficulty it is to write epic poetry. That said, 100% on board for having it around.
Thanks! I wanted to do that for a comp at some point.
Just in time for a Period of Poetry. It's like you're intentionally going after what I went after. Let's all remove clusters because Creon decided to bring back poetry and we don't want too many people getting clusters over it.
I'm done.
Poetry has been in discussion for ages. The trends in our competitions show the only poetry comps that get meaningful participation are ones that are haikus. People aren't getting many CI by writing a haiku. We had 11 poetry comps in the last year, and the only ones with big numbers were haiku, and even then those were usually attached to bigger clan events. Honestly, this means it's EASIER to run a poetry competition as you no longer have to pass the Voice Criteria for them. As I mentioned in reply to Dek, more than glad to support an "epic" poetry-type fiction comp that has a 500-word min and formating restrictions for a competition. Everything not that should be run as a regular competition.
On the prior, I seriously doubt this would ever be the case, Creon. Please stop being overly-dramatic.
On the latter, how many competitions are you planning on creating for poetry? My experience has aligned with what Idris pointed out above: MOST of the entries I get are either six to eight lines bits or haikus/haiku-variants. It takes a lot to get to 500 words (the going rate for a single Cluster of Ice with couplets, quadtrains, and even most 'simple' poems like I read in childhood.
This is an interesting attempt to bolster activity, I just don't understand what would be sustainable or beneficial to the club as a whole in the long run.
Then again, this is coming from the guy who put together a series of flash games and a series of Sporcles in an attempt to bolster activity, so take what I say with a grain of salt if you must.
Krathy, but makes sense. Just like how I stopped giving incentive CEs for playing flash games and solo gaming competitions.
Very good, Xen.