Here is my opinion and suggestions for opening up the Ludum Dare to outside voting:

I love the idea of opening up voting to people who didn’t make an entry. However, they should be clearly delineated from those who did contribute an entry. The votes of the entrants and non-entrants should be tallied and displayed separately. It will be very interesting to see if there is any overlap between the two final results.

The reason I think voting should be opened up is that it will give people who are not game authors but who are gamers a chance to see and rate our games. The more eyes on the games the better. I don’t know how many non-entrants play the games, but I doubt there are many. If they do, they probably wait until the results are in and sample the top games. Opening up voting to non-entrants would allow authors to get additional feedback on our games from the much larger pool of gamers. Non-entrants would feel more compelled to play the game if they knew they could rate them.

As far as the comment section goes, non-entrants should be allowed to comment, but once again there needs to be a clear delineation between entrants and non-entrants. My idea would be alter their avatars and their screen names in the comment sections so it can quickly be seen if they contributed or not. Whatever is chosen or technically feasible, it should be clear on first glance that the person making a comment did not contribute anything to that Ludum Dare. As an alternative, perhaps a mirror site could be made that was like Ludum Dare, but was just for outside voting.

I think allowing outside voting would encourage more active participation in Ludum Dare because there may be times when I wasn’t able to make a game but I could still participate. It would keep Ludum Dare in my mindshare and encourage me to participate next time. Outside voting would be a nice feature for previous entrants as well.