Banner Photo by: Gressloek
Going forward, Magicon will make some adjustments to the sign-up process for these competitions:
- Duo
- Craftsmanship
- Master
- Classic
- Performance
- Idol
Competitions not affected:
- Photo
- Catwalk
- Norwegian K-Pop Championship
Why Are We Changing the Rules?
There are 3 main aspects we should consider when deciding how the sign-up process should work. These are: 1. The Competitors, 2. The Audience and 3. The Organisation and its volunteers.
For years the industry standard has been “first come – first served”. This has worked fine, but has several flaws.Its main purpose is to give us some feeling of fairness on who gets to compete, but it completely fails to consider the 3 aspects mentioned above thoroughly.
1: The Competitors
Today you have to make sure you’re free to fill the form at the exact time of its release to even have a chance to join. This is not very inclusive for people who work shifts or for other reasons may be unable to sign up at that specific time. Most competitions fill up in just a few minutes, making this experience very stressful and prone to mistakes, which I’ll get back to later. It also completely ignores what you’ve done so far or have planned to do, which brings me to the next aspect.
2: The Audience
As organisers that make competitions, it’s sometimes easy to forget that 99% of the visitors at Magicon aren’t competing, they’re in the audience cheering the contenders on. They are the ones who’ve paid for the vast majority of the tickets, enabling us to actually make this all happen. In my opinion they deserve a varied show. Depending on the current trends, we may see several of the same performances or 90% dancing entries in the same competition. None of these scenarios are inherently wrong, but with the vast variety that exists in the community we should enable as many as possible, it’s after all diversity that makes this community so amazing.
3: The Organisation and its volunteers
With 8 cosplay competitions over 2 days, I hope you can appreciate that the current process is stressful for us as well. We also have to be ready at the exact moment of release, and closely monitor when to close (or change) the form when it’s full. We then have to validate the submissions, contact people who made mistakes, adjust the information and so on. Due to the stress people come under with the current model, mistakes are all too common, which adds unnecessary work and strain on our volunteers.
Photo by: JujuintheBox
So What Will Magicon Do?
Well, we’ve already tried a light version of this with the Duo competition for the last 2 years. It greatly improved the experience for the competitors and for us. Let’s go through the new method step-by-step.
1. Information about the competition and the sign-up requirements will be published several months before the form opens.
2. The form opens and will stay open for 3 full days before it closes.
3: The competition crew will then anonymize the application list and hand it over to the internal committee to avoid any potential bias. The competition crew will not be voting.
4: A diverse internal committee will choose which competitors will join the competition. They will do so after considering an extensive list of variables, including, but not limited to: innovation, variation, originality and having well-thought-out concepts.
5: All applicants will receive their answer 3-4 days after the form closes. Those who are not chosen will be given the option to stay on a waiting list.
We believe this will remove stress in the sign-up process, give people who’re unable to sign up at that exact time a chance to participate, reduce the amount of mistakes in the application, enable a more varied show/competition, and less stress with more flexibility for our volunteers.
Change is scary, I know, but Magicon believes the Norwegian cosplay competition scene could benefit from some minor adjustments to improve everyone’s experience. I know fully well that people are afraid of favouritism/elitism, but as explained above, that is not the goal here at all. On the contrary, it opens up for more people to get a chance to join, based on the ideas or concepts they’ve created, rather than just how quickly they’re able to write their name in a form because they happened to be able to do so at that exact time.
Today’s method of “first come – first served” is being used in the name of fairness, when it is in fact far from fair.
/ProducerChan – Christopher – Chairman of Magicon
Photo by: Gressloek
