I did miss that! That has an effect on my opinion and I will reconsider my position.
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Thatās not strictly right for Hugo. I vote in the Hugo awards most years. I can only do so by buying a membership of the relevant Worldcon. Either a supporting long distance membership or attending. There is a cost.
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Someone with at least mild artistic skills (which may be me after this next year!) designs the stickers referencing the winners of last yearās awards.
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I think I agree with Dee, my preference would be no rules that mentions campaigning along with a tacit understanding that too much banging your own drum is frowned upon.
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It seems like there is some tentative interest in forming a DIFAGAPE, āDistinguished Interactive Fiction Authorās Guild for the Acknowledgement and Promotion of Excellence.ā
As I understand the premise, it sounds like itās not just āIF Authorsā who would be eligible, but a selected panel of judges, raising questions about how exactly judges would be selected.
I can imagine a few approaches to this.
- The competition organizer could privately select people. (This puts a lot of burden on the organizer. Recall that at one time, Sam was in the habit of selecting people to blog about XYZZY nominees, and even that was a challenge.)
- The judges could be the Top N reviewers on IFDB for that calendar year.
- The judges might be elected. They would presumably present themselves for election, run a campaign, and top vote getters would be judges. (Butā¦ who would be allowed to vote for judges?)
- The judges could be authors who have received an honor for their IF. (Top N% IFComp, XYZZY Nominee, Spring Thing Best In Show)
I find the idea of running a competition where the judges are the Top N IFDB reviewers in a given year particularly compelling!
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That actually could be a kinda neat way of incentivizing people to write reviews (though might need to be top reviewers of games published in the year, vs reviews written in the year? There are a bunch of folks who write reviews of older titles, which is awesome but may or may not be a good fit for this purpose). You could do a traditional compile-the-votes-and-announce-a-winner thing, or with a manageable number of judges you could actually structure it as a roundtable conversation which I think would be pretty fun.
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Is there? I thought that everyone was kidding about that.
The IFDB reviewers idea does sound interesting, though.
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Agreed. Of course, āplease only vote for games you have playedā is always a community norm that operates on the honor system rather than an enforceable ruleāif I wanted to vote in the XYZZYs by picking game titles out of a hat or rate IFComp entries based on how aesthetically pleasing the authorsā names are, nobody would ever know. But I think itās worth encouraging nonetheless.
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It seems to me that thereās a lot more agreement on āVoting should be in good faith and should represent personal experience with the game involvedā and āPromoting good faith voting is allowed and encouraged, while soliciting bad-faith votes or votes for a game from those who havenāt tried it is prohibitedā. Maybe Iāll withdraw my current suggestion and add those instead.
A lot of time, the people who really ought to speak out (for instance, about a small non-comp game released early in the year) are often scared of breaking rules by doing so, while the people who want to bend the rules will often bend them regardless. Another problem that comes up is people who say āI want to vote but I only played one gameā; I think that should be okay!
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One of the initial goals @mathbrush identified for the Peopleās Choice awards was to allow campaigning, because advertising ācould help draw more people into the community, and would especially help games that touch on the popular market more than most IF.ā
It seems like folks are not too enthusiastic about open campaigning, but I wonder if thereās a way to recapture the original goal of expanding the community.
I think it should be possible to have a Peopleās Choice award that permits advertising, but not campaigning, by requiring voters to (claim to) have played multiple games in each category. If Iām right, this would help to expand the community without undermining the competition.
CoG doesnāt advertise XYZZY voting today
Ever since 2012 when CoG voters flooded the XYZZY ballot box, we have avoided blogging about or discussing the XYZZY awards while voting is still underway. We now only blog about XYZZYs after voting is over, to congratulate winners.
If we were to blog, āhey, XYZZY first round is open for nominations,ā I anticipate the nominations would be full of nothing but CoG games. (Weāre so much bigger now than we were in 2012!)
But Iād love to at least be able to say in the second round, āhey, please play all of the XYZZY finalists and vote for your favorite!ā That would allow me to direct our players to the wider world of IF, and get them playing games that they might not have otherwise played.
How it might work
For example, suppose the Peopleās Choice competition had a ranked-choice voting system (or score voting, like IFComp), but voters are only allowed to vote for games that they claim to have played. If a player shows up having only played one game in the category, they wouldnāt be able to vote for it; they couldnāt honestly claim that the game was better than any of the other games in the category.
And if, out of fandom for one particular game, potential voters forced themselves to play other works of IF, just to familiarize themselves with the competition, and then turned out to enjoy them, well, thatās exactly what weād want, isnāt it?
The rules would still say that campaigning was forbidden, but encouraging players to try the alternatives and vote for their favorite would be encouraged.
Some people would cheat (but not that many, and theyād be caught)
Now, certainly, some people would cheat, and claim that theyād played all of the nominees and hated everything except their favorite game.
But with clear messaging on the vote submission form, that would be clearly voting in bad faith.
The problem in 2012 is that CoGās voters didnāt think, āhaha, Iām helping Zombie Exodus cheat to win this competition,ā they were thinking, āoh, Iām supporting Zombie Exodus in an open competition; Iām sure everyone else is behaving the same way I am.ā
With clear rules about how to advertise the competition (āDonāt say āvote for meā, but DO say, 'try all the nominees and vote for your favoriteā) I think most voters would do the right thing.
And cheat detection will be required in any case, and with score voting in particular, I think it can be really obvious if someone rates one game a 10 and gives all of the other nominees a 1, especially in multiple categories.
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Sorry to cause a bit of a stir. To clarify, I donāt think the concept of promoting or being excited about peopleās games, even if - or purposely to - sway the opinion of others is inherently bad. I just think the ācampaigningā thing turned me off, especially in terms of the author campaigning for an award just because they submitted to a separate competition.
It felt like, what if I was volun-told to start a political campaign to elect myself to city council because I published a well-written news article? I could just ignore the campaign and lose the election but Iād still feel crummy - not because of losing, but because I didnāt really want to run in the first place but had no choice in being considered (and not popular enough).
I think that just, not making campaigning a core part or framing of the awards, but not banning it (or at least promo/enthusiasm) entirely, is fine for me.
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I was only half-kidding, tbh. Yāall must suffer from severe imposter syndrome or hardcore incurable humility.
There already is a DIFAGAPE in everything but name.
I hadnāt yet broached the topic, but whatās missing more than āsomething like the HUGOāsā is āsomething like the Rock & Roll Hall of Fameā instead.
We need some lifetime achievement awards around here, preferably before some of those lives naturally end.
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Um. As opposed toā¦?
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Before they press the blue button instead of the red button and make the game unwinnable, obviously.
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Damned if I do, damned if I donāt.
If I omitted ānaturallyā someone would have suggested I might be getting all serial killer-y with IF luminaries. (Which I am not, for the record.)
Iām just pointing out itās nice to give significant lifelong recognition when the recipient is still alive to receive it.
As far as Iām aware, none of you are roommates with the Grail Knight from the Temple of the Sun.
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Is it me, or is this getting way too complicated?
Now, before you begin voting, will those of you who are playing in the match this afternoon move your reviews down onto the lower peg immediately after lunch, before you write your letter home, if youāre not getting your hair cut, unless youāve got a younger brother who is going out this weekend as the guest of another boy, in which case, collect his note before lunch, put it in your letter after youāve had your hair cut, and make sure he moves your review down onto the lower peg for you.
Can you elaborate? I wouldnāt have said that āplease play all the finalists in a category before voting on that categoryā was particularly complicatedā¦ and the rest of that message is just backstory/rationale.
Sure. Suddenly there are āfinalistsā, which means there are voting rounds. āplease play all the finalists in a categoryā is just the rule for the final round. There are other different rules for the other rounds, or are these ānominationsā?
Also,
I think it should be possible to have a Peopleās Choice award that permits advertising, but not campaigning, by requiring voters to (claim to) have played multiple games in each category
If this is simple, can you explain how claiming to have played multiple games in each category permits advertising but not campaigning?
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Ah, sorry, I shouldnāt have put āfinalistsā in there; that part of Danās message was clearly about the second round of the XYZZYs, not the potential new awards.
The issue in 2012 was that the much much larger Choice of Games community voted in XYZZY for the game they knew and loved without having any idea that there was any reason to have played any of the others. Which turned it into a straight popularity contest with a foregone conclusion that the much bigger community would āwinā.
Putting the āplease play several games in a category and choose your favoriteā in the award itself tries to mitigate that, and take (some of) the responsibility off authors to make sure that their fans know to try other games.
Iām not sure how well it would work. But Iām also skeptical whether anything would allow mixing communities of such different sizes with legitimately different tastes, without one overwhelming the other.
But if the awards are as much about drawing people into the community as about choosing which games this tiny community thinks are the most interestingā¦ then itād be an interesting experiment. And Iām pretty much an āall awards are made up and donāt mean anythingā kind of person, so Iām all for doing weird experiments with them, but thatās probably an outlier opinion.
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I agree. Iām not trying to argue whether itās really too complicated or not, but my feeling is that the rules should be simple.
Perhaps itās a bit like game design. Try to keep things simple and still work. 
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