Sounds great! Especially with so many categories, feel free to take as long as you need.
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I have votes almost half of the entries by now. Very awesome great work creating and implementing this 2022 IFDB awards!
- Jade.
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I’m finding that I’m having to edit quite a few games I want to vote for in IFDB to add the relevant genre so they come up in the search results for specific categories. For anyone else who struggles to find the edit option for a game it is at the very bottom of the game page. Eg I’ve just been adding two games as mystery and fantasy. So folks should definitely not be afraid to add missing genres.
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I didn’t plan with it in mind, but if games get tagged better in general with year, genre, system, etc. I think it will help a lot with just day to day IFDB searches.
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I’ve been sharing the fact that these awards are seeking votes on Twitter, Mastodon and with my friends on Facebook and the UK IF group there. Definitely share the word out there folks! As I’m saying if people have enjoyed even one IF title released last year please vote 
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Also just shared on the interactivefiction subreddit.
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I might be a bit thick, but what exactly is the difference between player’s choice and author’s choice?
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Players choice is open to everyone and is public.
Author’s choice is anonymous and only voted from people who have games listed on their ifdb profile will count.
Part of this first awards tryout is to see if having that distinction is useful and makes sense. If it doesn’t, we’ll just combine them next year.
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Should authors vote in both polls? As I read the rules we are allowed to but it feels a bit unfair.
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I intended authors to vote in both polls.
Basically the public polls serve as a kind of faster voting that lets a lot of games get nominated but which is more vulnerable to gaming the system by groups of friends.
The anonymous polls require some verification and some experience so should result in more measured opinions. It should be hard for people to game the system as a group of friends would all have to have created games of their own to vote in a bloc.
It may be a bad idea, but that’s we are trying to see. So far I’m not really seeing the value in separate polls for next year, but it’s still early.
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Me too. At first I completely overlooked this problem with genres so I added a game I was sure belonged to that category. Others will probably do the same so perhaps for genres, the search-link in the poll should only be recommended? I don’t think a game being in the wrong genre poll will ever win that genre poll anyway. If it wins a genre category, it is most likely in the right category but not listed correctly.
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This is probably rather difficult to change, but I wish games were allowed to have multiple genre categories. (E.g. I would say that Archivist and Revolution could count as science fiction, post-apocalyptic, or slice of life…)
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It is possible. The searches will be right but sometimes when you click on a genre while looking at a game listing, it thinks that the genre constitutes one long genre name.
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Up above someone asked about that, and it’s allowed right now. For instance, the game Wry has multiple genre categories.
Only genres on the IFDB list of genres that have at least 5 games in them have their own votes.
If you want to add multiple categories to your game, you can, as long as they are appropriate and actually describe the game.
(Edit: ninja’d by Denk, who is right)
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I wonder how the voter base composition and number of voters will compare to the XYZZY awards. Did we ever know how many people voted in any of the XYZZYs?
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I was just searching through past intfiction posts and didn’t see anything about numbers.
For these new awards, I’d say the main Best Game award is getting 15-25 voters, which is perfect for me, and the Twine award is similar. Several awards still have 0 votes, including Spanish and German games (which makes sense for an awards announced and written entirely in English).
Given recent ties in xyzzy awards, I assume they have less than 50 voters, but that’s just a guess.
Edit: Also, I found this old post by Zarf that basically contained all of the arguments he had about the ifdb awards, but years earlier. It was fun to read!
http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2016/04/if-awards-and-how-we-think-about-them/
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I’ve announced the awards on the German forum, so hopefully some votes will accumulate before long.
People were a bit overwhelmed by the number of categories at first glance; and there’s the issue that the German roster consists entirely of Grand Prix entries, so there was a feeling that we’d probably just replicate the Grand Prix results. But I hope enough people get around to voting. And of course, if anyone reading this understands some German, feel free to play the games and vote – you can always ask for hints here or at https://if-forum.org/. 
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Are there more German games that aren’t already on IFDB to round out the roster?
Not that we know of, really; or rather, we stumbled upon two further games, but I contacted one of the authors, and he said that the story isn’t really finished and intended for release at the moment.
I haven’t asked the other author yet, not sure if his game is complete and if he’s aware of IFDB and our corner of the IF scene; I intend to contact him today or tomorrow.
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This was really interesting. I especially liked the sentence: " The point of the XYZZYs, if there is a point, (
) is to discern what the IF community thinks is best in IF this year."
I guess “the point” is what we decide it to be. I personally hope that IFDB Awards will be quite different than the XYZZYs going forward, either the categories or the winners. I see intfiction.org as the all-embracing community whereas we can go to more specialized forums when we want such as CASA for old school parser games and Sub-Q for choice-based IF etc.
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