What are some creative ways to score a performance competition?

March 29, 2018 9:16 AM

I am hosting a competitive performance show, and I am looking for some alternative ways to award points and name a winner.

This competition is a sort of variety show where the competitors perform multiple times in the show. In the past, most hosts have scored each component based on their own whim or the audience voting (either as a whole or just a few audience reps).

I was inspired by a previous host who had a different method. She gave each contestant a little cup of pennies and asked them to reward the other contestants with a penny when they liked each other's work. What she didn't tell them was that the first contestant to award their pennies would be named the winner at the end. I liked the creativity and supportive nature of this method.

What alternative scoring and winner-choosing methods do you know of? I would appreciate some fun, interesting ideas!

posted by TrarNoir to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (3 answers total)

the application scene of "men in black" - along with the Brazilian netflix show 3% would definitely spark your inspiration for this brainstorming.

In men in black, I think there are two challenges? A written exam where will smith pulls the desk towards him, scraping loudly, across the room. The next an accuracy shootout where he decides most of the "mean looking" monsters were actually alright, but the little girl with the physics books was up to something.

The 3% is a medium-good made-by-brazilian-netflix-with-dubs show, but it's about children going through different contests to narrow them down to the 3% good enough to make it to the orbiting space station utopia. There's all sorts of things but the "alternative grading" solution is usually who's most competitive or most smart.

In the books enders game there's a few "break the system" ways of winning different challenges, similar to the 3%. However, if there is a "right answer" that isn't made obvious immediately, it's common to have no contestants figure out the "right answer".

I would encourage to design the different competitions where they are both entertaining and self-grading - eating contest, peanut-butter-hands-dart-throwing-contest, etc.

If it's things like, interpretive dance, it doesn't make for an excellent spectator sport because, well, you can interpret it however you want!
posted by bbqturtle at 9:31 AM on March 29, 2018

Best answer: - Random audience member scoring but they have like, a kitten, a firetruck, a candy bar and a rose as possible scores. One round person with most kittens wins. Another round person with most roses. Don't tell them beforehand and just announce the results.

- The servers/waitstaff/barbacks rate who was the best customer, said thank you the most, etc and that person wins.

- The winner is the person who has seen the most Fast & Furious movies

- The contestant who watched the most performances by the other contestants wins
posted by Emmy Rae at 10:43 AM on March 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

Something that the IFComp used to do (dunno if they still do) was the Golden Banana of Discord. I'm not a stats person, but it was something like -- each entry gets a numerical rating from each judge, and in the end the entry with the highest standard deviation of ratings would be awarded the Golden Banana of Discord (i.e., it provoked the widest range of reactions). Now obviously "range of reactions" is kind of limited in scope when all you have is a single numerical rating per judge, but I could imagine this flavor of award being done with less quantitative/more qualitative types of rating as well, perhaps.
posted by inconstant at 11:31 AM on March 29, 2018