If it puts any single person off voting - and here we have just that example, thanks! - it definitely needs changing. I personally wasn’t bothered by my votes being public, but I could imagine others might be. I didn’t understand honestly why any votes were public, and didn’t understand why author votes were treated differently from the public polls. I do like seeing the total votes per game, but if that’s not possible to keep the votes totally private I think privacy is most important. Really mustn’t have anything that deters voters!
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I agree. Still it would be nice if it was possible to leave a comment anyway.
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Anonymous comments could get problematic. Perhaps anonymous voting, but any comments are public?
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To be honest, one reason I wanted votes to be public for at least one of the polls is that I’ve been involved in several competitions and IFDB recently, behind the scenes, and there’s been a lot of cheating recently. People keep creating sockpuppet accounts and voting themselves up, or having their friends all sign up and vote and leave the same day, and it’s annoying to deal with. By keeping votes public, it opens that up to public scrutiny.
But next year there will be way less categories, so it will be easier to do the policing myself or with assistance.
Another reason was because when the awards were devised, IFDB didn’t even allow for anonymous voting. I was going to use a system of private messages that would have been awful without Dan stepping in to help. I only got the idea to try for anonymous votes in author’s choice because people voted for it in a poll.
I do hope there is even higher participation in these awards between now and the end of the voting period, but I do also hope there is clear differentiation between what should be chopped off and removed from the competition and what should remain.
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That amazes me. Cheating in IF competitions? Why? I really can’t get my head around that.
It’s not like it’s the World Championship Soccer, or a final exam before the end of high school…
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I don’t think people see it as cheating. I’ll give an example: my son wrote a game when he was 5. It’s actually good, I think. I showed its ifdb page to students at my school. A bunch of them went on and wrote 5 star reviews for it as a joke.
It made it a very high rated game on IFdB, showing up on top charts and stuff. The admins and I first ended up making all the reviews not count, but in the end those accounts were all (reversibly) hidden, as they had all hopped on IFdB for a single day only to make bad-faith reviews and never came back.
Now this was a complex decision made after a lot of discussion and in parallel with other decisions. But in the end, I felt like I was cheating, for my son’s game.
So when I say people have been cheating, that’s the kind of thing I mean: clusters of votes coming from people who only sign up for a single day on IFdB and only vote for one game or one persons game, all in a group. Like me, it could just be enthusiastic friends or acquaintances. It could be good faith or bad faith. But either way, it’s disruptive. Public voting was one way to keep everything out in the open so people can see for themselves. Whether it’s been effective or not is up in the air.
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I am voting little by little. As you can understand only player polls.
Additionally I want to say that people from spanish Caad club has listed some games in ifdb to allow voting them.
I wish the problem will be an enormeous number of votes, fake or real ones. I hope people continue voting and the amount of votes will be collosal.
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Ironically, the PunyInform community is super busy with PunyJam #3, which has attracted 20 participants, a higher number than any of the previous jams. The participants write their games between 3-26 February.
Of course, any and all IF players could be playing and judging the PunyInform games, but that doesn’t seem to be happening much.
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Looking through the list of “eligible” games I was struck by how relatively quiet it was in the retro text adventure community last year, and other adjacent neighbourhoods such as PunyInform and Adventuron… I think a lot of people were just coming off big projects in 2021.
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Also, i’m rather disappointed, there’s no category for use of media - illustrations, graphics, sound etc.
We have “slice of life” and “surreal” categories that, to me, seem much more obscure.
We have an adventuron category, a system that promotes per-location graphics, but no acknowledgement of those graphics.
Yes the categories were voted on, but so was Author vs player. Additionally, these awards ought to be as different as possible from all the others.
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Agreed. I guess we’ll have to vote for a “best graphics” category next year.
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That might be part of the trouble actually! As I’m going through I’m also wishing I could vote for games that have great writing or characters, for example - but just like Best Use of Multimedia, those are already XYZZY categories which may be why folks (myself included) didn’t nominate them.
Things might feel different after the XYZZYs run and we see the slates from both sets of awards - or, frankly, if the XYZZYs continue to run very late in the year, it might make sense to not worry so much about overlap and make the IFDB Awards more comprehensive.
EDIT: though I would be sad to see slice of life and surreal go away as categories! Those are big, often underappreciated IF subgenres so I hope they get enough engagement to demonstrate their relevance.
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I suspect that might put a stake through the XYZZY’s heart. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not be responsible, even indirectly, for contributing to the downfall of an IF institution that has run continuously for 26 years. The only other ongoing IF affair that is older is IFComp itself, starting in 1995 (btw, here’s a nearly 3 decades late congrats to @zarf for clinching that one with “A Change in the Weather” 
).
The XYZZY’S are actually pretty impressive in general, like outside of the IF niche. It’s almost the longest continuously running video game award show in the world, period.
The Japan Game Awards (formerly CESA Awards) started in 1996, so they barely edged them out. Every other video game award that started earlier either isn’t running anymore, or had a significant multi-year hiatus before being rebooted.
The only other continously running video game award shows to get close are the British Academy Games Awards (BAFTA Games Awards) which held their first award season in 1998, and the D.I.C.E. Awards, previously known as the Interactive Achievement Awards, which also began in 1998.
Every other video game award organization is either a comparative newcomer or a reboot of an older defunct organization.
The Japan Game Awards, BAFTA, and the D.I.C.E. Awards all deal with primarily graphics-based video games, so the XYZZY Awards stand apart, quite unique.
(IF you want to go down the rabbit hole of Video Game Award Organizations: List of Game of the Year awards - Wikipedia and XYZZY Awards - Wikipedia )
Anyway, I really think we should be careful not to make the XYZZY’s redundant. The genre and system awards make the IFDB awards distinct along with a handful of awards I haven’t seen anywhere else. It would probably be best to avoid even creating the impression that the two are redundant.
So much so, I think we should consciously mark some historically XYZZY award categories as out-of-bounds out of a respect to the institution. It’s not like we don’t have enough to vote on anyway, and that leaves a reason for folks to circle back for the XYZZY’s.
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I mean, that’d be a heck of a notch on one’s belt!
…no, I 100% agree, reticence to stomp on the XYZZYs is a good impulse and their history and legacy are important. I know a lot of ink has been spilled on revitalizing them so hopefully that will pan out this year, since the alternative of de facto marginalizing them would be a sad one.
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I concur. It’s hard to overstate the exposure a non-English game gets by being linked on this forum. Even if a small fraction of intfiction readers ever bothers with a Spanish game, that’s potentially a larger audience than it might have inside its natural community.
So, kudos to @mathbrush and others who post reviews and bring our work to the attention of international players who might not hang around in non-English forums. It would be a bit sad not to have at least a non-English catch-all category in future editions.
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You mentioned a ‘non-English’ category and a few others mentioned that as well. Do you think having a single non-English category would be better than 3 smaller ones? I could see it either increasing participation and helping people feel comfortable voting for their own language or become a ‘which language is best’ contest which would be bad. What do you think?
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It seems like a collective action problem from game theory, some coordination dilemma, bystander effect or similar.
I’m really not sure about this, but maybe it would be good to allow authors to vote for their own games? There’s something distasteful about that, but it might turn out beneficial.
The advantage would be that the stalemate at the beginning could be broken more easily. I mean the sort of deadlock which @Natrium729 described above, where nobody wants to start voting, for fear of destroying the chances of their own games.
The drawback would be that some modest/humble/unsure people, who would like to see their own game win, but would not usually vote for it, might then feel compelled to vote for it, to even out the advantage that the, let’s say, more confident authors gained by voting for their own games, respectively.
But maybe that would not be a big problem, because people can vote for multiple games, so nothing would keep the authors from voting for their own game plus several others which they deem worthy.
If several authors do that, the poll pages will liven up, there’ll be activity, and people will be reminded of the games (which happens more easily when they are already on the page instead of just among the search results).
On the negative side, it might cause every author to scramble to the IFDB on the first day of voting, to vote on their game to make sure it is represented; in which case the poll pages might end up quite big, because they’d nearly replicate the search results, with dozens of games with one vote each. (Although, would that actually be a big problem?)
Obviously, there would be an incentive for authors to just vote for their own game and none of the others, so as not to boost those (if we regard authors as purely self-interested for a moment, for the sake of the argument). However, that seems nearly unavoidable in a community where the overlap between authors and voters is so large.
At least it would be easier to get everything started, and maybe a critical mass would be reached, and “neutral” third-party voters would be the tie-breakers anyway.
This is just a totally tentative idea, I might be misjudging what would happen.
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In theory I overall agree with you, but in practice I’m not sure it’s possible to reach a “critical mass”, when the French community is so small…
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A category like that would be a bit special. The order might not be very representative if votes come from very distinct subsets of people. I would be happy with it being some kind of “out of contest” section, the buzz are the hits on the itch play counter.
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I prefer the separated language categories.
Part of the appeal of the Awards is to give smaller communities recognition, and also to pit like against like, and not comparing apples to oranges, or setting disparate communities against each other, who tend to have different interests, and who haven’t played the other communities’ games.
I think many of the multi-lingual people are comfortable in their own language and English (as indicated by their presence here and on IFDB), but we don’t know how many understand a third language, to the degree of playing an IF game in it. The number of those people will probably be quite small. So it’s rather unlikely that many people will even be able to play the other games in a hypothetical general non-English category.
So it would just come down to which language community happens to be larger, even without any ill intent, any nationalism or such.
From a future player’s perspective, putting all languages into one award would also not be very useful.
I’d say that most people, if they want to play a non-English game, have a particular language in mind. So they’d specifically seek out the past winners and runners-up of “Outstanding French Game”, for example. The past winners of “Outstanding Non-English game” would be less useful, as they could contain anything.
So, in my opinion, a general non-English game award would only be worth considering if the specific language awards don’t gain any traction at all, so that the only choice would be between the general one or nothing at all.
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