Server & Event Culture

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RICE is not for everyone, and that is okay.

RICE Videos should not be publicly available before the event is over.

Blind judging is a central component of RICE, so videos must not identify their editors.
RICE is semi-exclusive. You can submit your video to other places, as long as it's reasonably certain the other RICE participants won't see it and/or know it was made by you until RICE voting ends, which is approximately one month after the submission deadline.

• The video must not have been posted online publicly, and must not have been seen in an identifiable state by other participants of the contest, to the best of your knowledge.
• If there is not a reasonable amount of ambiguity to who edited your video, it will be disqualified from RICE.
• It is generally best practice to refrain from sending your RICE videos to any conventions or contests that announce their winners during the months of February and March.

The RICE event was created as a reward for BentoVid regulars and its community.

New server members are welcome to participate, but know that this event is run differently from most.

• The event is run in a casual manner.
• All information and updates are given via Discord. There are no email reminders.
• The event organizer actively participates in discussions and sometimes video feedback (but does not submit videos or vote outside the Omakase).
• RICE is not actively promoted outside the server, and the coordinator has no intent to do that in the future.

RICE tries to be accessible to people who want to participate, but the core values behind the event (geared toward server regulars, blind judging, peer review, custom categories) will not change.

RICE's goal is for every video to receive some type of constructive criticism and/or feedback.

Please read our server guide on how to give, receive, and ask for critique, and for people have never given critique before, try our Musubi Method.

While there are avenues to exclude your video(s) from certain levels of critique, the main purpose of the event is to provide a forum for feedback from several editing peers at once.

Because of this, you may hear opinions about editing you may not agree with. Assume good intent behind editors' comments.
Our server has many nationalities and communities represented with different ideas, beliefs, and/or linguistic customs.
Give the benefit of the doubt to people who are leaving feedback, and ask for clarification if necessary. But people attacking or disrespecting videos or editing opinions is NOT acceptable and WILL have ramifications: both from the event and the server as a whole.

Differences of opinions, beliefs, goals, and techniques will occur and debating or discussing these things is absolutely okay and encouraged! But respect each other and do not ignore, debase, insult, or disrespect someone just because they are voicing an opinion you do not agree with.
Our server's #1 rule is to not be a jerk! Remember: no one's editing is "wrong."

The contest part of RICE is secondary to the feedback aspect. Categories may be silly. Videos may win because they're funny or "just because."

If a majority of the entrants want to have a serious competition, this is certainly possible, but it is not the default goal.

Watching a ton of videos, leaving a bunch of comments, and of course making cool videos takes a lot of time and effort. We want to reward it!
Even feedback for videos that editors do not plan to change after the event can be useful and applied to future works.
But giving prizes to people based on what type of feedback or how much feedback they give can be problematic for a number of reasons, so RICE has decided to stick with rewarding videos and their concepts instead.

What's problematic about awarding feedback?

Feedback should be catered to each video individually. Giving thorough and useful feedback takes time.

• The amount of words used does not dictate how useful the feedback is.
• The only one who truly knows the worth of the feedback is the person who receives it (did they find it useful?)
• Incentivizing any particular type of feedback, even accidentally, can drastically alter what people are willing to write.
  (Did the person who won "Best Reviewer" last time write mostly positive, critical, or meme-y stuff?)
• Awarding feedback would be the only thing that is not blindly judged in an otherwise completely blind contest.
  You can leave anonymous feedback in RICE, but moderating an event where everyone is anonymous by design would be a nightmare.
• There are a lot of videos. People simply don't have the time to leave feedback on most of them.
  It's easier to dedicate time to making a video over the course of several months for RICE than it is to give feedback to an unknown but usually large number of videos in ~4 weeks.
  Setting aside time to simply watch the videos for voting is difficult. Every year there are people who never finish. Awarding feedback feels like it is devaluing people who cannot commit to whatever the perceived feedback award requirements will be and incentivizing quantity over quality.

The coordinator would personally encourage everyone to give feedback to every video they are comfortably able to, without the added pressure of the comments being competitive.
RICE participants have the freedom to write whatever type of feedback they want, to however many videos they want, without any type of perceived award judgment criteria or competitive rivalry looming overhead.