Oh, yeah, I meant to say something about this too. It’s a selfish concern on my part, since I don’t use social media very much, but it does seem to seriously disadvantage anyone who doesn’t.
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This is more or less the same thought I had earlier when I objected to the label “People’s Choice”.
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Sounds like there’s lots of support for changing the name or the procedures.
If anyone has a concrete proposal for a new name or for an opt-in process, feel free to reply to the nomination thread with the name or process, and we can use the same 15-vote process.
My personal thoughts on opt-in is that it doesn’t make sense for a “my favorite game of the year” poll. It feels like needing an opt-in from the author for a child to do a book report on a book, or for a fan to tweet about a movie. Once media is released, I feel that author control over fan reaction is limited.
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To be clear, I wasn’t really supporting the opt-in proposition, I’m just leery about saying “feel free to stump for votes on social media”—rather than being more inclusive than the XYZZYs, which seems to be to some extent the goal here, it shuts out anyone who doesn’t already use social media to promote their IF. And I think some of what @pieartsy was getting at with the opt-in suggestion is that someone who does post about their IF works on social media might, if their game were nominated, be stressed out by the sudden expectation that they’ll do a whole self-promotion campaign that they didn’t really sign up for (although of course they could always choose not to and just accept that they won’t win).
But if having no restrictions on self-promotion is integral to your concept for the awards, then I understand and will bow out of this conversation.
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I’m just making this all up as I go and honestly expect at least a mild train-wreck the first time around. (the rest of this post is partially answering your question but also other stuff in the thread)
If I had to say ‘my vision’, I’ll say exactly what ‘my vision’ is. I’ve seen things on IFDB and in other comps in the past where someone asked a bunch of their friends to come and vote on something. In all but 1 case, only 5-6 people responded.
I expect all advertising to be very poorly effective; I expect it to have little to no effect. Especially since it requires signing up for an IFDB account. So then why ban it?
In my vision, I see stopping worrying about someone telling their friends to vote also letting authors be more relaxed and willing to say, ‘Hey, don’t forget my game! It was really good’. I also expect this type of post to have relatively little effect, from personal experience, but I think it could relieve some tension.
The name ‘People’s Choice’, in my vision (which hasn’t translated), is based on the real-life ‘People’s Choice’ awards, which were simple polls (like Gallup) without any kind of restrictions on campaigning, as opposed to academy-led voting. In my mind, ‘People’s Choice’ evokes campaigns like the Minecraft mob votes or the ‘will Dick Grayson be killed by the Joker or live’? campaigns.
To me, the worst case scenario is that a flood of really gross neo-Nazis come in promoting their own offensive games. In that scenario, almost certainly they would violate the IFDB terms of service and get banned.
In the second worst-case scenario, one large group comes in and floods every category with votes for one game or category of games. My plan in that scenario is to split out the votes by platform, if it’s a platform issue.
One thing that is absolutely unavoidable in any kind of competition is people being sad that they lost. You can’t have winning exist in any meaningful sense without not winning feeling bad. You can mitigate it a bit, like Spring Thing’s ribbons system, which helps the last place people feel better, but some kind of sadness still exists. Even for successful people, it will still exist; I feel pretty successful, but I had the goal for years of winning IFComp, and never did; then I switched it to the goal of making the top 3 three times, but never did; I had a goal of getting a ‘Best Game’ XYZZY nomination, and never had. But while I was stressing out about those goals, I won some other things I hadn’t even been thinking about, and that changed my perspective; I even started volunteering for IFComp knowing I couldn’t really enter any more, so I will likely never achieve my dream.
The same thing will happen here; if people start to care about this competition it will inevitably cause hurt feelings. But I think it can be useful; almost everything I did make that was good was a byproduct of trying for the larger goal. And some things are never meant to be popular; my Book of Mormon Adventures game has been universally panned by every IF person who played it but the kids and families I made it for thought it was a lot of fun.
My last thing I guess is that I still plan on the XYZZY awards existing for a very long time. Having a competition that recreates their voting system seems meaningless to me. For one, I’d still like to get the xyzzy nomination one day; for another, I think multiple separate awards are useful. So any changes that result in the same rule set as the XYZZY awards are not something I want to organize.
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Those in favor of forming a DIFAGAPE…?
Not sure how you select membership.
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I think we all understand that competitions necessarily have losers (or non-winners) and that winning isn’t everything. It’s more about feeling like you have a fair shot even if you don’t have a ton of Twitter followers and the self-promotional acumen to motivate them to vote for you. But maybe it’s true that the IFDB-focused community tends not to have that much pull on social media and that the more social-media-focused communities, like the Tumblr Twine community, are unlikely to create IFDB accounts en masse.
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If social media presence meant anything in the IF world, I would not have won an XYZZY. I have no social media presence. I didn’t even tell anybody but my husband about the nominations, because I was so sure that wouldn’t come to anything. So sure, people can try to whip up a lot of excitement about their IF game on Twitter, but frankly, my experience is that almost everybody outside this little bubble just doesn’t care about IF at all.
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Well, given the multiple people against it, I’ll put my idea to the same test as everyone else’s.
I’ll make a post on the nominations thread suggesting that campaigning is allowed.
If it doesn’t get 15 votes, then campaigning will not be allowed for these awards.
I think banning campaigning is a bad idea, but if I can’t get 15 people to support me, I’m going to let it go.
This means that people won’t be able to post links to specific games in the competition on social media; so if someone goes to the Adventuron community and says, ‘Hey, there’s an adventuron game that’s doing well in the IF awards poll, if you guys are interested, come and vote’. Anyone posting that vote would have to be disqualified under the rules you guys are suggesting during this month-long public poll, as well as the votes that come from such posts. Unless I’m completely misunderstanding
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I like the IFComp rules regarding promotion - authors cannot directly canvas for votes but may promote the comp and mention their games, but judges who are not authors can promote games.
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If campaigning were allowed, would there be an expectation that the voters are actually going to play the game they are voting for, and vote for it because they actually like it better than other IF games they’ve played (and not just because someone told them to vote for it)?
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I would not have that expectation.
Here are the rules for the Hugo Awards voting:
And the Nebula Awards voting:
As far as I can see, neither of them require anything of their voters whatsoever, other than that they be ‘registered’.
The ‘author’s choice’ segment of these awards also requires that people be registered. In my mind, I think of the author’s choice as the more important competition; I included People’s Choice so that people who don’t write games wouldn’t feel excluded, and having them run alongside will help the author’s choice see the nominations coming from the people’s choice side.
But as I said above, I’ve removed campaigning from the core rules of the competition and will only bring it back if it gets at least 15 votes. In fact, what I’ve put on the nominations thread is only a partial part of what I want; the thing I said there just says it’s okay to encourage merit-based voting.
My personal preference would be for there to be no rules besides the IFDB terms of service (which prohibits harassment of other users and the creation of multiple accounts by one person). But I won’t even suggest that unless the other motion passes, which given current feedback seems highly unlikely.
I have really strong feelings about all of this, and I have felt ‘heated’ today, but I recognize that everyone is coming from a good place, and the people opposing me are the ones that usually I agree with with anyone disagrees with them (including you!). So I will listen.
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Like many folks posting here, I wouldn’t expect any of my games to benefit from an open-campaigning rule, since I also have a Lilliputian social media profile – it’s pretty much zero bar a Twitter account with zero posts and precisely one liked tweet, and a surprisingly strong run on Buzz, Google’s long-moribund Twitter also-ran (like, I had a post where I took the Sense and Sensibilities and Zombies thing of injecting SF/F tropes into 19th Century novel plots but inverted it, and came up with a bunch of potential pitches, the best of which was Elric of Marylebone. This content killed in 2010). But! I’m still in favor of Brian’s initial proposal, for two essentially selfish reasons.
First, it would create some space for unabashed cheerleading, which, putting my player’s hat on, I’d really enjoy. I play a good number of games and write a lot about them, but that usually comes in the context of reviews I’m writing for an ongoing competition or festival. As a result, 99% of what write about even games I adore is (hopefully constructive) criticism, where I try to think as much about places where something isn’t working as where it is. Plus, the generally-observed rules and norms against trying to influence judges – which are doubly strong in cases where I happen to have tested a game I wind up loving – means I’m especially reticent to compare games against each other.
That’s all well and good – I like this kind of writing, and I definitely agree with those norms. But it’d still be nice to have a space where I could just ignore all that and jump up and down with enthusiasm over the games I’ve loved best of all in a year and why people should give them a play if they haven’t yet, and give them a vote if they have. Sure, there’s nothing stopping me from just going ahead and writing up a post like that on my own, but the awards would I think provide an impetus for people to actually read such a thing, and follow through on the recommendations.
Second, we currently have a lot of venues for considered critical opinion, but not many that reward pure audience size and enthusiasm – and looking specifically at the size and reach of our corner of the IF scene, if you had to choose between engaging more folks or engaging fewer but potentially more broadly-IF-knowledgeable folks, it sure seems like we should opt for the former. Like, as an example about the ability of the XYZZYs to drive a mass audience, my latest game won two of them (yay!), but when I checked a couple days ago its number of ratings on IFDB had actually went down by one since the nominations were announced; when I just looked this up again, though, it had broken even again, since Dan Fabulich played it on New Years Eve. I don’t want to seem ungrateful – seriously, winning those XYZZYs is a dream come true, and Dan, I appreciate the rating! – but I think it’s clear that the awards status quo isn’t a recipe for dramatically increasing the profile of winning games.
So for me, even if say the giant Choice of Games audience sweeps in and anoints CoG games to win basically everything, a) I wouldn’t think that’s too big a loss, since there are so many other awards, including the Author’s Choice ones here, that aren’t as “biased” by popularity, b) probably those CoG games are going to be pretty good on their own right, there’s a reason they’re so popular, but most importantly c), even if only 1% of that influx of voters decides “huh, looks like there’s some other cool stuff on this IFDB thing, maybe I’ll stick around and check out some of the other non-CoG games”, that feels like a potentially significant upside.
Anyway, that’s why I liked Brian’s post in the other thread, but as per usual figured I’d write a novel about it!
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You may have missed the bit on the Nebula site that says:
Any deliberate strategic coordination of nominations by sub-groups of voters for the purpose of placing one or more specific works on the final ballot (also known as slating) is prohibited. Reciprocal voting or vote-trading among individual voters (also known as logrolling) is also prohibited. Ballot manipulation of this nature goes against the spirit of the awards and diminishes the perceived honor bestowed to recipients of the awards.
More broadly, both those awards do expect that people will have read the entries and vote for the ones they think are the best of the year. There is also a strong tradition of not canvassing for particular works. Authors are encouraged to announce if they have eligible books out, but you finish that announcement by saying “please vote”, not “please vote for me.”
The voting rules may not say this, but it’s still part of how things are done. Seventy years of history provides a very strong basis for tradition. And the last time someone tried to slide around the unwritten (Hugo) rules, it provoked an absolute shitstorm.
I’ve no doubt that’s true but, forgive me, this isn’t the Hugo awards that Brian is trying to set up here and if we end up too scared and too cautious because of such intimations of disaster then this thing might never get off the ground. I’d just let it run and see what occurs. The worst that happens is that all of those dark-web neo-nazis vote massively for their evil game and it wins, the second worst that some other social media promotion skews results towards the (non neo-nazi) authors with a presence there. Quite possibly neither of those outcomes. But if we don’t try the experiment, we’ll never know, and if it is hugely problematic then it could be changed for the next time.
Anyway, just my tuppence worth. I’ll keep quiet now.
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I can’t decide how I feel about the campaigning thing.
On the one hand, I always feel it’s in bad taste when somebody hops on social media during a comp/jam to post ‘hey everybody vote for me me me!’ - I prefer the polite Hugo-style campaigning that Zarf describes above.
On the other hand, banning campaigning could lead to confusion about what, if anything, people are allowed to mention outside of the ‘main hub’ (for lack of a better term) - Brian described an example situation where you’d have to disqualify someone trying to drum up support for an Adventuron game by persuading the Adventuron community to come and vote - but does that mean, in that situation, that you couldn’t remind people of the awards in general by posting about it in that community? Would saying ‘hey, Adventuron community, remember that these awards are on!’ be construed as an underhanded way of bending the rules in that situation? And if so, wouldn’t it defeat the purpose of trying to bring more disparate parts of the scene together for these awards?
I am torn, but I lean towards the feeling that fewer rules are probably better.
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I think it would be nice if people were encouraged to go to IFDB, register, and play some games.
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I propose we solve this by constructing a Sanctum of the Eternal Song in pentelic marble, roughly 60x70x40 cubits in dimension, with lavish ionic colonnades on which are basreliefs of the Hundred Treasured Artisans of Interactive Fiction Excellence, and an entrance inscribed with the motto “Enter Without Light Within, Be Grueified of Sin”, into which all candidates will ceremonially process, dressed in the fineries of their respective online communities. Once they are inside, we shall seal them in the chamber along with Twelve Trusted Witnesses from IFTF. The candidates will then enter fervently into prayer until one of them sublimates into Pure Art and ascends beyond this plane, after which they will be declared the winner, receiving a sticker and a note on their IFDB page. Only this method will ensure the selection is an untainted apotheosis of critical discernment.
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For what it’s worth, the suggestions I’ve made weren’t really meant to be oppositional. I don’t actually know what will work the best.
I think various people have made good points, so I’ll just mention something that I haven’t seen mentioned yet:
From a player’s perspective, if someone is looking for a game to play, it would be nice know that the award-winning games are games worth playing. If an award means people who may or may not have played the game wanted to support an author, or authoring system, I don’t know why you’d want voters to be voting on games, as opposed to, say, an award for “author/authoring system with the most enthusiastic fans.” If that’s what people want, we could just call it that.
(Edit: A popularity contest for authors–especially if it involved public voting–seems like it would lead to, uh, unnecessary hard feelings for those who didn’t do well. So, I don’t actually endorse that. I’m not sure if the same thing would apply to authoring systems, or not. I guess I mostly want to point out a disconnect I see if people are voting on games when it’s not actually about the games.)
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As we know, North Americans will even go vote for a sticker, so this is a powerful motivator. Now we have to argue about what will be on the sticker. I INSIST that it be an abstract portrait of Michael Gentry, and I will brook no opposition.
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