Shorter Judging Period, Please?

Call me impatient, but don’t you agree the Ludum Dare judging period is too long?

It’s too late to change the period for LD33, but I humbly request that for future Ludum Dares, the organizers shrink the judging period from 3 weeks to a single week. The week would start at the end of the Jam, so generally speaking we’d have from that Monday to the following Monday to play games and register our votes.

Why so short?

1. We wouldn’t have to wait as long to receive our results. And I’m impatient.
2. A shorter period would maintain momentum and focus. After three long weeks I find that the energy, the enthusiasm, the mood of the Ludum Dare event is long gone. I’m out of the moment; I’ve moved on. Completing the judging within a week would allow us to rate games and receive our ratings while still “in the moment.” By the time the results come in, I can barely remember what happened three weeks ago. It’s harder to learn lessons, harder to care about the results. As it is, many of us write “post mortems” that aren’t even “post”–they’re written long before the end, when we don’t yet know what the result of our work is. A shorter judging period focuses the Ludum Dare event into a coherent moment.
3. Most of the voting is finished in the first week anyway. I mean, I don’t have general statistics for all games, but my own games seem to receive 99% of their votes within the first three or four days. How much difference does another 2.5 weeks really make?

Ludum Dare has been around for a long time and I’m sure there were good reasons for giving it a three week judging period, but I don’t see what they are. Do those reasons still hold? Wouldn’t a week be even better?