The Rasta Santa pixel art competition

Hello, Origins community! We hope you had a restful time over the holiday period, and managed to play at least a bit of Origins.

We wanted to address the feedback we received from many of you about the Rasta Santa pixel art competition. There was a lot of frustration in our Discord about the fact that players who had reused assets in their work still placed in the top 10 on each hotel, sometimes in the top 3, even after we’d made it clear that this sort of entry would rank lower in the original article.

We’d like to start by providing some background information about why this happened.

Due to overlapping staff absences, one staff member wrote the article, while another staff member judged it on their return to work. The judge felt that the rule about reusing assets ranking lower felt unfair, as there were many entries that did reuse assets, but were nonetheless very creative.

⭕ Re-judging the competition

We’ve taken the decision to not re-judge the Rasta Santa pixel art competition or distribute any further prizes. The feeling on the team is that doing so would set a precedent for future competitions where players are unhappy with the results.

We appreciate that this may be an unwelcome decision for some of you. We’re sorry about that, as this is on us. We ask for your understanding, and to trust that we’ll get it right next time.

📃 Action points

To ensure the success of ALL future competitions, including pixel art ones, we’d like to set out some commitments from our side going forward:

• The person or people who organise competitions will also judge them.
• With competition briefs and objectives, wherever possible, we’ll provide as much detail as we can to ensure people know what is required. Aside from the Rasta Santa competition’s rule about reused assets, we feel the briefs we’ve provided recently are quite detailed. We also want to avoid being overprescriptive to avoid everyone making the exact same thing for their entries. However, in some cases, we accept that more detail could make sense; for example, providing visual examples of what we’re looking for or giving extensive text-based examples.
• Competition winner articles will have at least some level of detail beyond a list of names. For example, they may include a broad explanation of our choices, acknowledgment of entries that were good but that didn’t make it into the top bracket, and, in some cases, more detailed explanations of our choices.