Personal Growth & Accountability
Aspects of Judging
Also available are archives of live broadcasts, where the Program Director goes over the lesson, answers any questions that folks may have and sometimes goes on tangets about other elements of judging. You can find the playlist of broadcasts on youtube.
Click for Translation
While proper translation and localization are among our long-term goals, we are currently offering Google Translate on the page. Please keep in mind that the translation is automatic, which means that specific game terms, names of cards or mechanics, or technical language used to describe the game may not translate well. As with the documents for the game itself, the English page is the authoritative document in case of any confusion or discrepancy.Join the discussion in our Discord and talk with other judges about what you learned, and ask any questions you may have!
Hello there!
Welcome to the Aspects of Judging lessons. As always, I’m your host Jonah, and this elective lesson series is going to cover the Aspects of Judging - just like it says on the box.
In this lesson, we’re going to talk about Personal Growth & Accountability. This is a continuation of the exploration of personal skills and subjective development. This skill is less about how you interact with the event and other participants, but more about how you manage yourself.
This is a particularly important skill because for many judges at many events, you’ll be the highest authority present - you decide what is and isn’t allowed in the event, and you don’t have other judges in your environment to give you advice and support.
The ability to recognize areas of improvement and work on them, on your own recognizance, is particularly valuable when you’re working independently. Furthermore, when you are in a position of authority, your bearing and how you hold yourself are important for how others perceive you and the community that you’re a part of - people will take guidance from you, whether it’s intentional or not.
There’s certainly a lot of overlap between Personal Growth & Accountability and Interpersonal Skills & Communication, but it’s a bit more focused internally.
We’ll go over each of the sub-categories and the details within them, discuss what they mean, talk about how you can improve them in a broad sense of the skill, and outline the expectations for judge levels one, two, and three.
Maturity
When we say “Maturity”, we’re talking about knowing yourself and others. You’re absolutely allowed to make off-color jokes and banter with your friends, but someone with appropriate maturity knows when it’s not appropriate to make those jokes, or to identify when they’ve crossed a line and own up to their errors.
Someone who is mature is always striving for the best experience of those around them and is sensitive to the connections that they make.
Accepting Responsibility
One of the greatest signs of maturity is accepting responsibility. While someone who is mature can identify reasons for errors or failures, acknowledging that it was their actions that led to the circumstances is an important step. Furthermore, it’s critical for growth - if you’re not willing to recognize that your own actions lead to the consequences, you will struggle to understand how you can change your behavior to get different outcomes.
Accepting responsibility also means accepting praise and appreciation appropriately. Recognizing when you’ve been successful, even if it makes you feel full of yourself, is important in maintaining the behavior that got you that success.
Being sure to accept the feedback you receive, whether it is from an external source or something you recognize on your own, whether it’s positive or negative, will allow you to adapt and grow.
Respectful Attitude
The other key element of maturity is simply being respectful. Whether it’s a player who isn’t paying attention to you, a TO offering unreasonable compensation, or another judge undermining your authority accidentally, it’s important to maintain your composure.
Even when you’re not being respected by other members of the community, staying calm and professional helps elevate yourself and reinforce your authority not only in the moment, but your long-term position.
It also ties into the concept of being “always on” that we touched on when talking about charisma - people are going to treat you as your certification, which means that as a player, your actions will be reflected in the perception of you as a judge.
Now, a respectful attitude doesn’t mean you can’t engage in playful trash talk with your opponents, providing critique of tournament organizers or game publishers, or making jokes with your friends - it just means being aware of who your audience is, and balancing it appropriately.
“This store sucks” on the store’s Discord is vastly different from saying to some friends who ask about stores in your area “This store has a history of relatively low prize payouts compared to the entry fee, so I wouldn’t recommend them.”
Telling your friend, “playing against you is always a free win”, takes on different connotations when you’re seated next to the new player at your store.
Level One
Judges of all levels are expected to be mature and respectful, and to recognize their own faults. However, at level one, it is predominantly about understanding the environment of their local game store, and fitting in appropriately there.
Level Two
At level two, judges are expected to fit in at their local game store, but also be able to adapt to the environments and communities of other game stores that they travel to.
Level Three
Level three judges are expected to be able to adapt to the culture and environment of destination events, which can vary widely, depending on location and number of players. Even within a destination event, with different areas of the event space (vendor halls, competitive play areas, relaxed play, and the feature matches, to name a few) there can be different atmospheres.
Higher-level judges are also more likely to encounter contentious players, and are expected to maintain their composure for those interactions.
Improving Your Maturity
Improving your maturity isn’t something that’s easy to do. Being told “just stay calm” carries the least amount of weight when you’re not calm. There are lots of resources out there that can provide some guidance, but they boil down to “slow down” and “think about it.”
Take time to make your decisions, don’t just say or do the first thing that jumps into your head, consider the potential consequences, and when something does go wrong, stop acting, and pay attention to why it went wrong so you can see it coming next time.
It’s also important to learn not to take it personally. Everyone fails, and so falling short of perfection shouldn’t be something that undermines you. With that said, it’s also an attitude that can be difficult to adjust to if you have a history of being penalized for your failures. This community, not just judges but players as well, are forgiving of errors, especially those made with earnest intent to do good, and when they’re acknowledged.
When a player does demonstrate frustration, they most likely have you as the center of their attention because you’re available and arrayed against them. They might be actually unhappy with their own performance, or the way policy is written, or bad information that they got somewhere else. They may just be having a bad day. Understanding that sometimes, that often, it’s not anything you said or did, that they would be having the same reaction to anyone who issued the same ruling, can help center you.
Stress Management
Events have a lot going on, and remaining calm throughout as things fall apart around you is an uncommon skill. While “things fall apart” may be a bit apocalyptic in its language, it can often feel as though things are falling apart, whether it’s larger scale logistics or just taking too long on a call.
Quality of Performance
The most visible metric of your stress management is the quality of your performance. If you feel very stressed out, but are still able to perform your tasks as expected, that’s good in the framework of the event. Of course, working while stressed is not ideal circumstances, and so it’s important to be able to express your stress.
However, managing to handle a complex call that you’re not confident in without giving away to the players your nervousness, or making announcements on a microphone despite stage fright, or simply just launching the next round despite compounding logistical issues - these all lead to event success.
Perception of Stress
The other metric by which stress management is judged is the perception of stress on you. Some people carry stress more visibly - whether it’s in their body language, their actual language, or their actions, for some people it is easy to identify when they are stressed. Of course, some people also have a demeanor that appears more stressed, even when relaxed.
The consequence of this perception varies - if a judge in a leadership role appears stress, judges under their authority may become more nervous or stressed themselves. If a player recognizes that stress, they might become less confident in the judge, even if the source of the stress is unrelated.
Expressing Stress
Despite the importance of presenting yourself as relatively relaxed, that doesn’t mean you have to be stone-faced and stoic all of the time. Having healthy ways of venting that stress is key to its management.
If you need to take five minutes off the floor after a very intense judge call, or need to talk to a friend, or to take some time, consider it, and then rant at dinner at the end of the day... It’s important to take care of yourself.
There’s a line to balance between managing stress and impacting the event. Most actions you take will have some impact on the event. Taking a quick break is relatively low impact. Yelling at the player who was uncommunicative during the call and made the experience worse for you is high impact. This is where a sense of logistics and maturity comes in.
Level One
L1 judges are expected to be calm and collected while handling tasks and responsibilities they have experienced regularly at the LGS level. Being stressed while handling outliers or new tasks is generally expected. Expressing stress isn’t seen by unknown players.
Level Two
L2 judges are expected to be calm and collected while handling tasks and responsibilities expected of an L2 - this includes issuing game losses, performing deck checks, and making announcements. Like with L1, being stressed while handling outliers (disqualifications) or new tasks is generally expected. Expressing stress isn’t seen by players.
Level Three
Like with the other levels, L3 judges are expected to be calm and collected handling rote tasks for an L3 that they have experience with. Likewise, being stressed and displaying that stress with new or infrequent responsibilities is in line with expectations. Expressing stress is the same as L2. The significant difference is that L3 judges are more likely to encounter situations that could be stressful for a judge - there is a higher frequency of handling appeals or other contentious situations.
Improving Your Stress Management
To improve your stress management, learn what works for you to help reduce stress. Some people run on tension - it provides a drive for them to continue to work and improve, and so stress management is all about keeping things on the line where they’re motivated, but not overwhelmed. For others, it’s their peers and support structure, others require solitude and the time to think and re-evaluate.
Each person is different, and each person handles and response to stress differently. While you shouldn’t seek out stressful situations intentionally, when you find yourself stressed, whether in daily life or as a judge, figure out what got you to calm down, and figure out how to mobilize that. If it’s just time passing after the incident, is there a way to accelerate it - does being with other people hasten the pace of recovery or slow it?
Self Evaluation
Often times, you’ll be the only judge present at an event, whether it’s a small competitive event, or a local weekly play. Even more commonly, you’ll be the only judge to observe your behavior, whether it’s a call you take at a Sector Qualifier or how you swoop for a deck check at the Galactic Championship - even with other judges on staff, the only person who will be there for everything you do is you. This makes you the best source of knowledge about your behavior.
Of course, self-evaluation doesn’t mean solo evaluation. You can and should speak with other judges about your performance and your observations, and what you can do to improve.
Strengths
When evaluating yourself, it’s important to recognize your strengths. Knowing what you’re good at allows you to build a strong foundation. Often you can cover for areas of improvement with your strengths. If you know that you’re very good with people, but aren’t as strong with your rules knowledge, you can enter into judge calls with confidence and sell that you’re verifying your ruling with a colleague and both players and judge won’t think less of you.
If you don’t have a lot of presence, but are a strong mentor, you can individually work with folks until you build up that reputation and people tend to look at you because of long developed trust - it’s more work, but it leads to the same result.
Understanding what your strengths are, and how you can apply them to other areas is what can help you advance.
Weaknesses
Of course, you also need to be able to acknowledge where you don’t have strengths - if you think you’re perfect, you’re wrong. If you don’t think you’re perfect, well, then there are ways to improve. Knowing what to avoid or what to get practice in will help you develop.
Sometimes this is easy - you look at your exam and realize that every question you got wrong was about triggers. Sometimes it’s much harder - you realize that over time, you’re finding less success giving feedback to other judges and you don’t know why. But with this second situation, you’ve at least identified the area to focus in.
Paths for Improvement
Once you’ve identified your strengths and your weaknesses, figuring out what steps you want to take is, well, the next step. Some folks will identify that they’re happy where they are and don’t feel compelled to push themselves, but for many, figuring out what you can study, and how you can apply either your strengths or the strengths of your friends and mentors will allow you to dive deeper into judging and find more exciting roles and opportunities.
Real Examples
When evaluating yourself, having real examples is important. It can okay at times to judge based on vibes when evaluating other judges, because perception leads to reality, but when evaluating yourself, you have more data - you have the examples of your behavior and the results that it had. Having more concrete examples will allow you to develop patterns as well as express your understanding to other judges, particularly those mentoring you.
Saying “I had an off day today” isn’t super helpful, whereas “three players asked if they could appeal me, and usually I only have one” is a bit more concrete, and gives you more direction.
Receiving Critical Feedback
As mentioned, self-evaluation isn’t solo-evaluation, and that means that at some point you’ll receive some critical feedback. In a way, every interaction you have with someone else is feedback - if the TO hires you again, that’s positive feedback. If a player appeals your ruling, that’s critical feedback. Now, that feedback might be warped - the TO may just hire you because you’re the cheapest and the player appeals even though they agree with you because they lose if you’re right, but it’s still something you can take into account.
Furthermore, you’ll sometimes receive more explicit feedback - someone telling you that it felt like their deck check took forever, or a player frustrated with the explanation they received for a complex ruling. Being able to accept and acknowledge that feedback, and then eventually addressing it (either as valid or invalid, and responding appropriately), is fundamental to developing yourself as a judge.
Writing Self-Reviews
You can always write a review of yourself - these are a great tool to help benchmark your performance as a judge, and identify your growth and trends.
You can have something as simple as a review saying “B- day” with no details, and tracking that over time, or you can have something more comprehensive that goes into every aspect and each sub aspect and discusses your performance. Taking the time to consciously consider your performance is a great first step, and writing something down helps ensure that you do that.
Level One
At level one, you’re expected to know generally which areas of the rules and policy give you challenges.
Level Two
At level two, you’re expected to know where in the rules, policy, and logistics you struggle as well as having an idea of how you can improve.
Level Three
By the time you get to level three, there’s some expectation of more active introspection - you’re expected to have an understanding of the aspects, and know broadly which ones are your strengths, and your weaknesses, in addition to the more event-specific awareness that comes as an L2.
Improving Your Self-Evaluation
For several of our recent “improve your skills” categories, the answer has been “listen more”. Here, one piece of advice, in addition to listen more is to talk more! And to talk about yourself!
This trait is about understanding yourself, so expressing your perception of yourself is pretty key to that - people can let you know where their perception doesn’t line up with yours, which can help you better grasp your standing.
This is another skill that’s also just enhanced by experience, but unlike conflict management or stress management is relatively low risk. Self-reviews are one way of doing so, but taking notes about your day, writing tournament reports (which are like self-reviews, but more public), or thinking about your performance as you head home after an event are all great ways to develop these muscles.
And that brings us to the end of Personal Growth & Accountability. Now that you have a framework on how to maintain and grow personally, we’ll transfer some of our lessons learned to developing other judges, with Evaluation & Mentorship of Judges in the next lesson.
If you’re watching this on YouTube, and you want more lessons in your feed, go ahead and subscribe. Join us after new lessons on twitch.tv/swu_judges for live broadcasts covering the content of these lessons as they are released, and join the Star Wars: Unlimited Judge Program Discord to join the community in discussion of this and much, much more.
Until next time, good luck and have fun!