Wouldn’t that make the CYOA category kind of pointless though? In the IFComp last year, there were three entries that could be classed as CYOA. Winning a competition with only three entries isn’t a big deal.
It would also be a pretty easy thing to abuse. Assuming, for example, I’d written a CYOA and wanted to enter it in the IFComp but didn’t want it to end up in a category by itself. All I’d need to do was include a few parser commands, even if they’re not needed to finish the game, and it wouldn’t be a true CYOA and so therefore would qualify for the main body of the IFComp.
Then hopefully there will be more entries. It’s not something the comp has any control over anyway.
This is true for every genre. Someone could make a 3D game and put a crude parser in, and then ask people from the mainstream 3D indy game scene to vote for it in order to win the comp. So the problem is already there, it’s not CYOA that introduces it.
Yeah, that was my thinking when I delayed announcement re my game a few years ago. The fan-community I built it for is tiny by any reasonable measure of fan communities (fewer than 300 fans on the mailing list at that time), but they are something close to 100% outsiders to IF … and they’re very groovy, enthusiastic fans who might have innocently (honestly without meaning any wrong by it) rippled the XYZZY pond enough to have had an unfortunate skewing effect.
Indeed. And there are plenty of IF authors who have similar heft in other parts of the Internet. (There have been a few smaller incidents of this kind before, I’m told, and they were mostly one-off deals that didn’t recur.)
I’ve been following this closely for this reason - I could envision something like this happening with Harry Potter fans and my game, if I weren’t careful of who I asked to write about it and where! (For instance, if it were ever nominated and I made the mistake of asking MuggleNet to write about that - and they did, which is not a foregone conclusion - oy that would be bad. Like, miles and miles of bad in every direction.) I don’t know how the XYZZYs can really control that, though; I mean, individual authors couldn’t necessarily control it. (I can imagine a horror situation where one of my friends in the Harry Potter world decided to do me a favor by trying to get people to vote for me! Then how could you walk that back?) But…
ETA Um, hopefully that didn’t sound preposterously puffed-up: I don’t know that my game, which is still unreleased, would ever be a XYZZY contender. But, you know, if it was, as a thought experiment.
I’m not sure I precisely understand what you have in mind here. Are you saying that we’d keep all of the existing categories, but also add a “Best CYOA” category? Would there still be just one “Best Game” category? Would all games be eligible to win Best Game?
Or are you imagining that there’d be a “Best CYOA” category and a “Best Parser Game” (?) category, and no “Best Game” overall?
Then why do you want a CYOA category? It seems to me like a quick, ineffective fix for a problem much larger than what this voting system experienced this year.
A reminder: the final round of voting closes at midnight Pacific time, March 2nd – which is to say, Thursday, March 1st is the last day of voting.
And the ceremony, of course, is on the following Sunday, March 4th, at 1 PM Pacific, on ifMUD. Hope to see you there!
(If you haven’t visited the MUD before, I recommend making a visit beforehand – it can take a little getting used to, and people will be more able to help if they’re not preoccupied by the awards ceremony.)
#1, you most certainly can play Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis online, although, yeah, not with an iPhone or Android device as far as I know. Which is to say that this is a link to the Quixe page. Hey, I worked hard–well, I worked–to get the entire Stiffy Corpus playable online. Undiscovered Country is the only one of those games where that really doesn’t work well.
#2, I had my Atari 2600 adaptation of Fellowship of the Ring disqualified from the very first IntroComp because I went and announced it over in the Atari retrogaming community, and they did the same thing that the ChoiceScript people have done, which was to say “Hey, I am going to vote for this neat thing I like, and I don’t care about those other things,” and drown the competition by sheer force of numbers. And, yeah, I was rankled that I got DQed, largely because it WAS the only IntroComp game to actually get finished that year. Sure, you could argue that since I had a hard limit of 4K, finishing it wasn’t exactly a Herculean endeavor. And, well, you’d be…LOOK! A MONKEY!
Open, rather than juried, voting actually motivates me to play the games I missed the first time around. If I played 3 of the 5 games in a given category, I feel obligated to try the other two before voting, rather than just picking the one I liked best of the three.
Having a strong preference in one category doesn’t necessarily motivate me to judge or vote in all the other categories, though. (I plan to vote in the US presidential election this fall but I will likely skip our local County Assessor of Property race.) Is this typical? That is, do most voters cast a vote for all categories?
It’s been good to hear people say this; I really had very little idea about how much the XYZZYs get people to play more games during the voting period, since reviewing isn’t a traditional part of the event. (My worry is that people feel obligated to try the other two games, don’t get around to it in time, and then don’t vote.)
In the second round, most do. In the nomination round, votes tend to be more patchy; anything with a textbox entry tends to get lower totals, particularly the oddball Technological Development and Supplemental Materials categories. I know there have been years when I haven’t really been able to think of a game that has really great NPCs, say, and didn’t really want to nominate a good-enough game.
So, summing up: no one likes reading anymore, let alone typing. The typeless game wins all thanks to a far wider audience from touchy fruity interfaces. Coming up next: vook interactive games win major XYZZY awards, leaving old textual CYAO farts crying for nostalgia…
we should just drop silly parsers and the written word altogether…
Just drop CYAO from the awards. IF is all about turn-based textual interactions, not selecting what page to read next.
And here’s an idea: games playable online (best if server-side so all formats have a chance) so that the server may count that “judges” actually took at least a minimum of turns in at least a few games. I know Justin would most probably just receive votes more vigorously if you were to submit his fans to a few minutes of Beethoven, but still, at least you tried to raise awareness…