2025 IFDB Awards are Open! (Closing Feb 15th)

Competitions
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The IFDB Awards are now open!

Here are the rules:

Full Text of Rules

The IFDB Awards is an annual competition designed to award excellence in creating interactive fiction.It is held from February 1st to the first weekend after February 15th each year on the Interactive Fiction Database, and take the form of polls.

Votes are public but anonymized. Every IFDB member is eligible to vote, except for one special poll, the Author’s Choice Poll. Eligibility to vote in the Author’s Choice competition is determined by having a game linked to your IFDB profile (this can be found by editing a game page and use the ‘Link to Author’s Profile’ feature. Authors added incorrectly to a game will not be permitted to vote (for instance, if someone associates a random game they didn’t make to their account).

Rules for discussion and voting
-Voting must be in good faith and be based on personal experience with the games involved.
-Campaigning or organizing voting for games is not allowed if it breaks the above rule.
-Discussion of games on merit is allowed and encouraged.
-There is no hard limit on how many votes a person can cast in each poll for different games. A player voting for so many games that it makes voting difficult for others (such as voting for every game from the whole year) may have their votes removed, but only after warning.
-Author cannot vote for their own games. Such votes will be removed so that the running tallies are correct. Authors can post about their own games (for instance on intfiction) as long as doesn’t encourage people to break the rules (such as telling people to vote for your game even if they haven’t played it).

Code of conduct

-Voters must abide by the IFDB Code of Conduct. Harassment of other voters (including on other platforms) and creating multiple accounts for one person are prohibited.
Moderation

-Votes that are cast incorrectly (for instance, voting for a Twine game in a Choicescript poll) or fraudulently (for instance, using sockpuppet accounts) may be removed.

Eligibility
-For most polls, games are eligible if they are listed on IFDB and have a publication date during 2025.
-For system-specific polls, games additionally must have the appropriate system on their IFDB page under the specified field.
-Each poll will have a link to an IFDB search listing suggested games. Outside of system-based polls, users can vote for any game they feel fits the criteria.
-Any IFDB user can edit game pages to confirm eligibility. However, malicious editing (such as adding every genre to a game or adding incorrect systems to a game) will be reverted or removed.
-Any game author can opt out of the competition. Adding a note to the game page during the competition may be helpful to let others know not to vote for it, but opting out should be officially done by messaging the organizer (me, for now).

Results
-Results will be clearly visible throughout the poll. However, there will be a grace period of up to 3 days at the end to allow checking of votes before the official announcements, which will be made on Intfiction and IFDB.
-Polls with very low traffic will not have a winner awarded. This is left up to organizer discretion, but low traffic may include less than 5 votes for the winning game or less than ten votes total cast.

Future of Awards
One of the main purposes of these new awards is to be community-owned and regular. They need to keep working even if I don’t keep working.

The awards begin on February 1st of each year. If Feb 1st passes without the current organizer having created the polls, anyone can create the polls themselves.

The community can propose new changes to awards or new organizers via public discussion. A public yes/no poll on intfiction with more than 50% voting yes can be used to add new organizers. Current organizers can also add in other organizers or successors, subject to a public veto.

Answers to FAQ’s:
-You can vote for as many games as you like in one poll, as long as its not disruptive
-You do not have to vote in every poll. It is fine if some polls don’t get enough traffic.
-You cannot campaign for specific games, but you can campaign for people to vote in specific polls (i.e. trying to get people to play games from a specific category).
-You are free to publish what you voted for and why, as long as it doesn’t break any other rule.
-Anyone can vote in any poll except the Author’s Choice poll, whose eligibility is described above
–A good rule of thumb for voting for people coming from other communities is that you should probably recognize at least some games on the linked IFDB searches for the poll you are interested in. If you don’t recognize very many, you should likely play some that you see to get a feel for the category.

List of Categories in the 2025 IFDB Awards: Overall Categories

Outstanding Game of the Year 2025

Author’s Choice for Best Game of 2025

Outstanding Debut 2025

Outstanding Game over 2 hours in 2025

Outstanding Short Game of 2025

Outstanding Underappreciated Game of 2025

Most Sequel-worthy game of 2025

Trailblazer Award of 2025

Outstanding Worldbuilding of 2025

Outstanding Use of Interactivity in 2025

Outstanding Retro Game of 2025

Outstanding Game for Beginners of 2025

Outstanding Multimedia Experience of 2025

Outstanding technical implementation of 2025

Outstanding NPC design of 2025

Outstanding Puzzle design of 2025

Outstanding Plot of 2025

Outstanding Writing of 2025

Language Categories

Outstanding German Game of 2025

Outstanding Spanish Game of 2025

Outstanding French Game of 2025

Genre Categories

Outstanding Fantasy Game of 2025

Outstanding Espionage Game of 2025

Outstanding Historical Game of 2025

Outstanding Horror Game of 2025

Outstanding Humor Game of 2025

Outstanding Mystery Game of 2025

Outstanding Romance Game of 2025

Outstanding Science Fiction Game of 2025

Outstanding Slice of Life Game of 2025

Outstanding Superhero Game of 2025

Outstanding Surreal Game of 2025

System Categories

Outstanding Inform 7 Game of 2025

Outstanding Twine Game of 2025

Outstanding Ink Game of 2025

Outstanding Choicescript Game of 2025

Outstanding Inform 6 Game of 2025

Outstanding PunyInform Game of 2025

Outstanding Game in a Custom System of 2025

Outstanding Godot Game of 2025

Outstanding Ren’py Game of 2025

Outstanding Adventuron Game of 2025

Outstanding Unity Game of 2025

Outstanding Bitsy Game of 2025

Outstanding TADS Game of 2025

Outstanding Decker Game of 2025

Outstanding Dialog Game of 2025

Outstanding Videotome Game of 2025

Outstanding Dendry/DendryNexus Gameof 2025

Outstanding Game in an Uncommon System of 2025

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As a point of discussion, does anyone have any good suggestions for Best Technical Implementation? There are already some good votes for good games, but I’ve found that sometimes the best technical implementation is in demo games or otherwise overlooked games that might not show up for a few pages on the search list. Anyone have any hidden gems?

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For Outstanding Debut, as much as I loved The Witch Girls I don’t think it’s eligible because the author has older works of IF on their Itch page.

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That seems right, looking at the page. I’ll wait for a couple of days and then remove the votes (waiting both for people to see this and in case any new information comes to light).

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For future years it might be worth clarifying exactly what the criteria for this award are. Trying to track down “has this person ever publicly released something that could be considered IF?” is almost certainly going to cause headaches. It’s not like the equivalent award in IFComp where it’s specifically the author’s debut in the comp itself that’s counted.

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A thread listing debuts of which the organisers (i.e. Mathbrush) are aware of?

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I am not really aware of who is new or not outside of if they have games listed on IFDB.

I think there is definitely room for nuance (if someone collaborated on Cragne Manor but later released their own game, I’d argue that Cragne Manor wasn’t a debut, and similarly if someone put up a short demo that someone else added to IFDB but the author didn’t intend for public consumption, that’s probably not a debut), but in the case of Witch Girls, the author has been posting games on itch with the ‘interactive fiction’ and ‘visual novel’ labels throughout the 2020s, so it seems pretty clear that this author is not new to IF.

My current feeling is that it should follow similar rules to what Spring Thing and IFComp use in practice for ‘prior releases’: did the author previously post a game in a way that encouraged others to play it? Was that a game that either they considered interactive fiction or which falls in categories traditionally regarded as interactive fiction? Then to me, that would not be a debut author.

Alternatively, we could let people cast their votes as they see fit, but it feels a little awkward to chase after everyone who voted for witch girls and say, ‘Hey, you didn’t see this, but that author already wrote a lot of games. If you feel like it, you could change your vote.’ I don’t mind finding people and telling them, but I suspect that just disqualifying games from a top-down level would be more convenient and less awkward.

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Alright, IFDB Awards!

I just did a first pass, just upvoting my preferred games that were already on the category pages and adding a few. I’ll have a more thorough look this afternoon to look for more games to add in the appropriate categories.

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For what it’s worth, I believe the “first effort” tag on IFDB attempts to record this information. (Of course, as usual with tags, you have to trust whether some unknown person applied the tag correctly, let alone whether they took into account Brian’s nuance. And not all games meeting the criterion will be tagged as such.)

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Since these are the IFDB Awards, we could narrow it down to the author’s debut on IFDB. Does the author have earlier games in the database or not?

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This tangent began because someone noticed a nominated author with no other games listed on IFDB but previous IF works elsewhere. (See above.)

EDIT: Oh, I see, you were probably suggesting that in future years, we clarify it to mean IFDB debut.

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Yep, that’s what I meant.

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This has the advantages of A) being easy to administer, and B) giving authors a bright line that they can’t be deemed to have accidentally crossed without meaning to.

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The disadvantage is that if an earlier work turns up in discussion, someone is likely to create an IFDB entry for it.

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It also creates a (minor) perverse incentive not to create IFDB entries for works by otherwise-unknown authors, for fear of disqualifying them from receiving an award later on.

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One thought that crossed my mind (that I have spent 0 time considering the repercussions of) is changing it to mean ‘has not previously won an IFDB award in any category’. Considering that we hand out dozens of awards per year, it might help narrow things down. I guess that means Type Help would be the strongest contender this year.

But, again, I just thought of this as I sat down, so I have no idea if it would work in practice.

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Hey, so! Encorm and I are very flattered that people like Lady Thalia so much, but the more we think about it, the more we don’t really feel great about the possibility of winning the category of Most Sequel-Worthy for the third year in a row for the same series. We don’t want to suck up all the air in that category, and frankly other, newer series/authors could use the encouragement a lot more than we can; we’re going to keep making Lady Thalia games whether anyone wants us to or not, I’m afraid.

We’re not withdrawing from the IFDB awards entirely, and Lady Thalia and the Case of Clephan has also been nominated in a lot of other categories (which we are also immensely grateful for and flattered by!), so if you’re cheering for it to win something, there are other polls you can give it a boost in. But it just doesn’t feel right to me for one series to keep hogging the Most Sequel-Worthy award, and I hope this will allow some attention to go to games that haven’t already gotten as much sequel-related encouragement as we have.

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And just stepping in to say as organizer that this withdrawal from that one category was formally approved and that this has been allowed by the rules since the beginning.

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And to be clear, this IS a threat and you WILL get Thalia’d :smiling_face_with_sunglasses::flexed_biceps::gem_stone:

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At first I was thinking you meant the game has not previously won an IFDB award in any category, and I was confused. Then I realized you were talking about the author. :slight_smile:

I can’t think of any drawbacks, other than the possibility of the award unintentionally going to someone who’s already gotten an award under a different name (but that would be true regardless of how you defined debut, I guess). And I’m not sure how easy it would be for people to find out who had or had not gotten an award in the past. Maybe you’d need to keep a list for reference.

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