Thread for nominations: Nomination thread for IF People's Choice and IF Authors' Choice awards
Polls about timing: Poll about timing and privacy of IF People's Choice and IF Author's choice - #2 by mathbrush
Poll about rules about promotion: Poll for new IF awards public discussion/sharing/promotion rules
Poll about names, and list of rules: Proposed ruleset for IF awards comp and name poll
Background
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. In the last few years, the IF community that interacts with this website, IFDB, and IFComp has shifted and diversified, and one of the best trends has been having multiple competitions that are strong, healthy, and complement each other, like IFComp, Ectocomp, Parsercomp, and Spring Thing, among others.
I’d like to do the same thing for yearly awards, which currently has the XYZZY awards. I’d like to make a new set of awards, not to replace the XYZZYs, but to fill in some of the gaps that they leave.
I haven’t discussed this with anyone yet at all outside of a message posted on a subforum last night.
What are the awards?
I’m currently proposing two new sets of awards, both involving IFDB:
-The Interactive Fiction Author’s Choice Awards:
These are awards voted on entirely by IFDB members who have written games, as shown by having a game connected to their user profiles. A game with multiple authors would only qualify one of its participants.
This competition would parallel the Miss Congeniality contest in IFComp, where authors vote for their favorite games.
-The Interactive Fiction People’s Choice Awards
One big problem people have encountered as they move into this IF community from other communities is about self-promotion. How many times have we had to warn people about ‘ballot stuffing’, or about flooding the community with votes from outside the community? I remember it happening with Choice of Games, have seen it happen with people from tumblr getting a lot of friends to vote on IFDB, etc.
But what if that was allowed? This competition would literally be a popularity contest. As much promotion and campaigning as desired. Only literal sockpuppeting or botting would be banned, but otherwise, this would be an awards ceremony that encourages advertising. I think this could help draw more people into the community and would especially help games that touch on the popular market more than most IF.
What are the goals of these awards?
The goals of these awards are to fill in the gaps left by XYZZYs.
Currently, the XYZZY awards have moved around a lot in date and have ended up close to the end of the year. I’ve offered with some others to help with XYZZYs, but I learned that there is already a search in progress for new leadership. I plan on these new awards having a regular schedule, and also having an automatic article in place that allows anyone to get them started if I or the current maintainer doesn’t start them in time.
One of the biggest recent roles for awards is as resume-boosters. I have helped write recommendation letters for academics citing awards, and Choice of Games has put XYZZY awards on their game covers when selling. Authors have gotten jobs from awards. These two new awards should help with that.
Finally, like I said before, I think having an advertising-and-campaigning allowed awards system will fill a nice gap we’ve had.
How will it actually work?
I have a basic framework, but will need some feedback from the community, as I’ll add later in the post.
The basic framework is I’d prefer everything to be done by the end of February.
The IF People’s Choice Awards will be a monthlong set of IFDB polls. The highest number of votes wins. This will essentially replace the ‘for your consideration’ polls that I (and others) have run the last several years.
The IF Author’s Choice Awards will either take the form of an IFDB poll or private comments. If people are okay with public votes, than this could be the same poll as the People’s Choice Awards, just counting only author votes. However, this is where I need feedback.
If enough people get on board, and if it is desired, we may be able to figure out a way to run anonymised IFDB polls as an alternative.
What still needs to be determined?
Several things!
First: What categories will there be?
I absolutely want to include Best Game or Game of the Year, as it fulfills the resume-boosting mentioned earlier.
Outside of that, I don’t want to reproduce the XYZZY awards list of awards, as I anticipate the XYZZYs functioning healthily for decades to come. I want this to complement that.
One idea is to have an award for a specific authoring system of cluster of authoring systems. This is mainly to help smaller communities or large communities detached from the main one. So if the itch/tumblr group of Twine authors wanted to have ‘best Twine’ or if Adventuron and Punyinform wanted to include 'best C64 parser game), we could do that.
For this first year, my plan is this: I will open a separate thread from this. People can respond to that thread with a category idea. People can ‘like’ categories they plan on voting in. If at least 15 people ‘like’ a category idea, it will be included in the main competition.
Second: when will this run?
If people are okay with public votes, we can just run this as a single set of polls in the month of February. That gives people the month of January to let the games of the last year process, and then in February, people can see games that are ‘in the running’ and start trying them out.
Otherwise, they can be run sequentially. If people want the Author’s Choice to be private voting, untainted by the public polls, we can have a ‘nomination phase’ for it in the first fifteen days of January, followed the rest of January for voting. Then the People’s Choice awards can run publicly in February.
Alternatively, the order could be switched, so the public polls run in January, serving as a kind of first-round nomination, with the Author’s Choice running privately after that.
I’ll put up these options in a separate poll.
What if I think this is dumb and don’t want it to happen?
Well, all of this is just made up. We’re just a bunch of grown-up kids having fun and putting stickers on each other. All of these competitions and awards only have power because we give it to them in our minds.
Nothing will kill this idea faster than lack of participation, so if it doesn’t interest you, I just wouldn’t participate, and it will slowly founder and die.
I’m interested to see your thoughts, and will soon create the additional posts. Good luck!
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