Feedback thread for the 2022 IFDB Awards

Could a part of this issue be resolved by having multiple genres on the listing? For example, a game might be both Horror and Sci-Fi, but the IFDB doesn’t allow more than one genre for a game (pls correct me if I’m wrong).

4 Likes

I’m fairly certain you can list multiple genres. [Goes to double check.]

(I’ll change it back.)

It appears you can list as many as you’d like, or even invent new ones. It’s a simple text field.

2 Likes

image
It’s a drop down list/text box with me. I’ve tried with and, a comma, space or semi-colon, but it doesn’t really separate the genre. Like you can’t click on just horror or romance. It’s all genres or nothing.
Could there be something like with the author text box, where if you add and you can click on either author?

4 Likes

Unless I’m very mistaken genre is different from the tags. There can only be one genre filled in, though the keyword searches used in the IFDB Awards allows multiple words to be picked up on. The tags are not searched by the genre search used in the polls. And I found editing genre really unintuitive. Only once I’d managed it did the award winning games show up in the built in poll searches …

4 Likes

Something about the messiness of entries might also have to do with the job usually falling on the shoulders of the organizer of the competition (or, at least I think that was the case for last year’s SpringThing and for the Goncharov gamejam that Autumn ran).

It’s already really nice for them to take on that role with the chaos of running the actual competitions, so maybe it’d be something to consider for encouraging participants to make their own listings / repopulate them with more information, or perhaps having a designated helper rather than heaping it onto the runner’s shoulders on top of other comp tasks?

6 Likes

I’d like to second this. I felt like Brian was fielding a lot of requests while trying to determine his process AND think about Spring Thing. I think it was a lot, anyway.


This may be controversial, but I don’t think authors have a lot of say in genre classification of their work. I agree that they should specify a genre when submitting, but for me that’s where it ends. Genre is a tool for players, award committees, and customers (where applicable) to find what they’re looking for. Or to discuss what they’d like to discuss.

Just my take

8 Likes

I’ll take the chance to add that Brian has mentioned he was looking for help with SpringThing on the technological side of things:

in case any meowmeows here feel like they might be able to help out on that end!

6 Likes

I don’t know why you’re getting different results, as I was able to list 4 genres just fine. It seems like this would be better solved with a dev request than a rule change.

Even if you decide to allow voters to determine the categories, the process of adding more than one or changing genres should still be accessible and easy.

1 Like

I don’t think you actually listed four separate genres. You created a new genre label called “Horror, Romance, Humor, Western” (with just the one game in it).

7 Likes

Yeah, HItchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the sole game in the " Science Fiction/Humor/Literary" genre.

2 Likes

If that’s the case, then multiple genres should be supported (and I need to comb through my edit history on IFDB).

3 Likes

The genre keyword search used in the award polls is quite loose so “Science Fiction” can match anything like “Science Fiction, Mystery” and “Comedy/Science Fiction/Horror”. So there is flexibility for multiple genres being represented in this single genre field. But I still think requiring it to be set for voting is more problematic than not.

7 Likes

It is true that when you click on genre, you will only get the games with the exact same genre field. However, if you in the search field type: genre:mystery

Then you will also catch the games with multiple genres. However, to me there is a “bug” on IFDB, so if you type “Genre” (with capital G) then it does not work as intended. This is a problem on e.g. phones where the first letter is by default capitalized. So people will be thinking that IFDB isn’t working as expected because they don’t know the search will fail unless they use a minuscule g.

9 Likes

Just and idea: I know that this might put even more work onto organizers in the future, but you can always consider asking the community for help.

It would be great with a logo and/or a certificate the author could e.g. put on their itch.io page etc.

Planeta Sinclar did something like this as you can see an example of here:

15 Likes

OMG this such a cool idea!

6 Likes

The IFDB Awards competition page is finally completed :white_check_mark:

A question about eligibility: for games with rolling releases or long-running WIPs, what would be the year for which the games are eligible? Would it be the year of first public release or the final “complete” release? What if the game is a serial which has a large amount of content released, but won’t see a final release anytime soon? I was thinking maybe the first release date and the final/complete release date could both count as eligibility years.

10 Likes

I think in the future maybe you should consider doing the system categories, or, if you keep them, aggressively marketing them. I say this because I appear to have tied for best ChoiceScript game and, uh, I believe that is an incorrect judgement of my 4-hour Petit Mort game’s quality in relation to the set of all eligible ChoiceScript games.

I think it’s selection bias in the audience of judges, which is, like, fine, nobody’s to blame or anything, but if you’re gonna have a ChoiceScript category getting a slate of judges who play a lot of that kind of game would be good.

Thanks for running this, though! It’s fun.

9 Likes

Objectivity is an illusion, and the commercial games are already ranked by sales. From the beginning, it seemed likely that the results would be skewed to those games most familiar to the intfiction and ifdb communities.

I did advertise a couple of times on the Choice of Games forum, but there is still a fear over there of overwhelming competitions, coupled with a lack of interest. If they had come en masse and voted in every competition, it’s possible every poll that wasn’t for systems would have had a choicescript game as a winner. Would that make the results more accurate? According to Cain, while a great game to us, has been played likely 100x less than most commercial Choicescript games and much less than a lot of the itch Twine community. Giving out awards at all for ‘best interactive’ fiction is just a polite lie, but it’s fun.

That’s a really good question, and I’m not sure about it. One on hand, you could vote on each ‘chunk’ as it appears, just like it was several separate games. On the other hand, a really good WIP could end up dominating for a while. Yours seems like a nice medium, but it’s different than what’s been done in other competitions, so I’ll have to think about it and encourage the thoughts of others between now and next year!

8 Likes

I guess it should be similar to the Xyzzy awards though we can perhaps be more flexible. If I wrote a game for intro-comp I don’t think it should be eligible but if voters vote for it anyway, it might be okay as long as the release of the final game gets a new “chance” in IFDB Awards.

To some, price is a negative factor so it might not be that “inaccurate”. There is no fixed definition of “outstanding”. I remember some of the old computer magazines where the final score was called “Quality/price” which would give your game an infinite score :wink:

1 Like

I can’t speak for others, but the very fact that it was written in 4 hours factored into it being outstanding.

1 Like