It’s a compliment that a lot of the outside communities, centering around a particular tool or technology or whatever that cropped up on the internet one day, come here with their finished works when their authors look for recognition.
I’m all for acceptance of various tools – Undum, Choicescript, Adrift, Inform, TADS, etc. – and I have no problem with the new-school CYOAs making us “prove” the value-add of a parser. …Especially a parser as old as the one I just translated. I could feel in which decade different parts were written in. Software doesn’t age like wine. Quite the opposite.
I think we’ve stagnated a bit on our expectations for parsers.
In less flametastic news: we’re still planning on putting together a pseudo-official review panel to give focused criticism of the games, category-by-category.
If anybody would like to sign up to review some of the categories, let me know, and tell me whether you have an interest in doing a particular category. (We probably won’t be publishing those reviews until around the time of the ceremony, so you’d have about three weeks to get 'em out.)
Here are a few of my thoughts about what might and might not help with next year’s XYZZY.
To clarify, here’s the problem as I understand it: a lot of ChoiceScript players voted for ChoiceScript games (exclusively) in XYZZY, without even playing the parser games.
There are three parts to the problem, each of which can be addressed separately:
There were so many ChoiceScript players that they could control the popular vote.
They voted for ChoiceScript games exclusively.
They didn’t even play the parser games.
The most important point here is #1 – ChoiceScript players are numerous, and, if I keep doing my job, they will continue growing rapidly in numbers. I don’t know how many total votes were in XYZZY last year, but there were 109 total voters in IFComp 2011; it wouldn’t surprise me if there were over 100 ChoiceScript voters in XYZZY this year, completely swamping other votes.
With that said, let me identify a couple of ideas that, IMO, won’t work (by themselves):
Have CYOA/ChoiceScript competitions. Choice of Games has planned to do this for a while; we will do it. But as long as ChoiceScript games are eligible for XYZZY, I think our authors will reasonably want to try to win, and as long as the rabid fans know about XYZZY and are willing to pull the lever for ChoiceScript games, problem #1 will persist.
Create a “Best CYOA” category, leaving all games eligible for “Best Game”. If XYZZY had included a “Best CYOA” category this year, Zombie Exodus would have been nominated for it. But that’s no help if it wins “Best Game” too!
My proposed solution is to end public voting in the XYZZY awards, allowing only a pre-selected panel of judges to rate the games. This is the gold standard for indie game competitions.
If we did this, I think we’d also need to somehow reduce the list of eligible games, e.g. at least requiring each author to submit an entry form.
(Other indie game competitions require a small payment to enter; the payment can go towards prizes, and towards paying the judges a stipend. That would make more sense if more IF games were sold for money.)
As for who selects the judges… uh, I dunno. Condorcet voting? [emote]:-)[/emote]
Ugh, judges elected by popular vote sounds terrible. At a minimum, if judging is going to be limited to a select group – and I am not at all convinced that it should be – its members should have some type of qualification, same as the Oscars are voted on by film industry professionals (Academy members). All authors who were shortlisted for round 2 of the last year’s awards, for example, perhaps along with all winners from any category from any year in the past.
voting in the XYZZYs, particularly in the nomination round, is typically rather lower than in the Comp.
ChoiceScript voters were not as numerous as traditional IF voters; they did so well because, having far fewer games to choose from, they were much more focused. (To put it another way: even in the second round, trad-IF voters need to outnumber ChoiceScript voters nearly three to one in order to win a four-choice category with one ChoiceScript nomination.)
A high proportion of the ChoiceScript voters voted totally straight-ticket, ignoring not only parser IF but all other ChoiceScript; there’s no reliable way for me to tell how many of them are ChoiceScript community members, and how many are just members of the respective authors’ social networks who were voting for their friend’s thing.
This is a good hint that CYOA needs to be separated. Its audience is familiar with CYOA books. There’s no reason why they should care about something that comes from Zork. They might have never played even a single text adventure in their life. They vote for CYOA works because that’s what interests them and ignore the boring, hopelessly outdated stuff that no one bothers with these days.
Dan, for me the problem is #3. Not so much in the xyzzys, but in the general ChoiceScript-IF rapprochement. If ChoiceScript players aren’t going to start exploring parser games, what are parser fans getting out of this rapprochement? I sometimes feel as though you’re trying to convert us to your community rather than bring the communities together.
And, you know, you are very enthusiastic about the idea of ChoiceScript games and you do this for a living. I wouldn’t say you should spend a lot of time trying to get your community members to play Taco Fiction if it doesn’t do anything for you and your business. But if the model is going to be that ChoiceScript players don’t move to playing parser IF, but parser players play ChoiceScript sometimes, then maybe the communities are separate with occasional tourism between them.
[color=purple]Marcellis Wallace: Thing is Butch, right now you got ability. But painful as it may be, ability don’t last. Now that’s a hard [EXPLETIVE DELETED] fact of life, but it’s a fact of life your ass is gonna hafta git realistic about. This business is filled to the brim with unrealistic [EXPLETIVE DELETED] who thought their ass aged like wine.
I like this idea because it means I get to vote [emote];)[/emote] , but I don’t like it because it more or less obligates me to vote, and then (by my own morals) I’d have to play all the nominated games, and I just don’t have the time and stomach for that.
I also like it because it gives the XYZZYs more year-to-year continuity, and helps winning to actually mean something, making the award into a reward. But then back to the other hand, I don’t think the “the Old Ones run the community like a shadowy cabal” crowd needs any more fuel for their imaginations.
I like this less, because I think the relative independence of the IFComp from the XYZZYs is good for the community.
I counterpropose that the panel be composed of everybody who has posted at least three times to this forum.
EDIT-ADD (a few minutes later):
That wasn’t as rhetorically clear as it could have been.
What I am getting at is: switching over to a juried award – quite aside from being a huge change, with all sorts of implications beyond the what-kind-of-games-are-we-playing issue – would not address this problem at all. It would just shove it back a stage. By agreeing on a set of judges, we would de facto be deciding what kind of games should be “allowed in”. If that’s the plan, do it up front.
If we were going to take this route (and it’s not my preferred one, at the moment) I would definitely want a very broad qualification, rather than a very narrow one.
Why not just appoint me as the sole judge as the awards? I promise to be totally impartial, just and unbiased. If my game wins every category, even the ones it’s not nominated in, even the ones it’s not eligible for, that’s not down to voter bias but simply the fact that it was better than anyone else’s game. Period.
If anyone would like to discuss this, and get my contact details for the sending of cheques/bribes/large sums of money to guarantee their game gets a fair consideration, PM me.
Yeah, I know that’s what it sounds like. But in my case it’s just that I don’t like popular votes. It is not democracy. It is a mess, the unknowing mess.
Well, maybe it IS democracy. Which is usually an unknowing mess.
I don’t understand this at all. How can you “reasonably want to try to win” a XYZZY? Since it is an award for a game that you already made, there is nothing you can “try”. Well, except for blogging about it and trying to get as many people as possible to vote for your game, which would be bad style (on the part of the voters as well, of course).
The main problem is that, apparently, the basic premise on which the XYZZYs are based is no longer true. That is the premise that most voters will have played at least a representative selection of the games on offer, and that they will seriously consider the merits of all these games and try to reach a serious judgement on each category. In other words, the premise of the XYZZYs is that the voters will behave as judges, not as fans. While it is conceivable that the many people who voted for “Zombie Exodus” in every category really did play at least some of the other serious contenders and just decided that “Zombie Exodus” was the best game in every respect, this seems very unlikely. Much more likely is that they were behaving as fans; that they were just voting for “Zombie Exodus” without considering the merits of the other games. If so, they violated the implict social contract of the XYZZYs and made the basic premise false.
Now in saying “bad style” and “violation”, I am being too severe. I fear that having to behave as a judge rather than a fan has become something alien to people; so many contests nowadays are popularity contests that people will expect any random contest to be such a thing. They don’t even realise that they are doing something wrong, because they don’t realise (and have no way to realise) what the implicit social contract is. Morally speaking, nobody did anything wrong, but the results are unfortunate.
The social situation is this: people who come to the IF community will quickly pick up on the implicit social contract, which for many years has ensured that the XYZZYs work – more or less, because there has always been the “IF Comp games tend to win because many people have played them” bias. Anyway, the social contract wasn’t violated. Now, suddenly, there is a big influx from another community which has different set of expectations, and who have not enough interaction with the IF community to understand the aim and spirit of the XYZZYs.
I would like to stress that what is happening her has nothing to do with parser games versus CYOA. The situation is purely one of social structures and expectation, and has nothing at all to do with the content or form of the games. This too is why it is irrelevant for our discussion how well “Zombie Exodus” matches up to the other entries. Even if it were the greatest game in existence (and perhaps it is, I haven’t played it yet), the fact would remain that the social contract has been violated by people behaving as fans rather than judges. If you are worried about CYOA destroying IF, fine, but please take your concerns to another topic, because here it is just muddying the waters.
This would make me very sad. And I’m saying that as someone who’d have a decent chance of being asked for such a panel. The openness of the community is one of the good things about the IF community.
Here is another proposal: as a first stage of voting for the XYZZYs, let people mark all those games on the “eligible games” list that they have actually played. This takes a few minutes, but shouldn’t be too arduous. You can then weigh votes according to the number of games people have played. The exact mathematic are of course a mater of further thought. Clearly, votes of people who have played exactly 1 game should have no weight at all; someone who has played 30 games should have more weight than someone who has played 5 games; and the difference in weight between 150 games and 50 games should probably be very small or zero. (Fancier systems are of course possible.)
Obviously, such a system is not cheat-proof, but it doesn’t have to be. We’re not discussing how to stop cheaters. We are discussing how to make the social contract clear to people from outside the community. What my proposed solution would do, is it would signal to people that it is considered relevant how many games they have played, i.e., that it is considered relevant whether they are in a good positio to judge the field. Furthermore, it would allow anyone to participate, but would just give almost not weight to the votes of a rabid fan base who are not aware of the other contenders.
I agree; these are both very good points. And the parser vs. CYOA thread in the General subforum was created precisely to move such discussion out of this thread.
It’s one potential solution, and fairly easy to implement; just give everyone’s votes a weight of log
(number of games played), with a log base of whatever the organizers want – 2 might be too small (someone who’s played only 8 games has triple the influence of someone who’s played 2), 10 might be too large (someone who’s played 100 games has only double the influence of someone who’s played 10).
But of course, any technological solution is easy enough to implement; as you point out, the real problem is social conflict and mismatched understandings. Solving social issues in a way that leaves most people happy is a much more difficult problem. If people already ignore the “What is this contest about? Who can vote? How should I vote?” pages/FAQs on a site, are such people likely to behave as expected of them when faced with an automated honor system like you suggest?
There is a big difference between not reading the FAQ (which is at most a sin of omission) and filling in false information about which games you have played (which would be active cheating, and recognisable as such to the voter). So I think it might work.
Appointing judges seems rather elitist. I personally wouldn’t like that. I still think a COYA category would be best. Not only for the XYZZYs, but for the IF Comp (and other comps) as well. It acknowledges CYOA as a related genre and avoids the issue of voters from the CYOA camp ignoring parser games.
Even if CYOA and parser IF are to converge and in the future we will only have one type of IF, this hasn’t happened yet. If and when it happens, then we can put away with the two different categories.
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.