I think with all the scattered discussion and nuances, it needs its own discussion. I’m going to make a new poll as a separate post.
Edit:Okay, I got it running! I’m removing my suggestion above.
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Don’t distort what I said.
I certainly don’t refuse to play any games, but time is limited and I choose what I want to play when time permits. I certainly don’t like your attitude that I should be forced to play a select group of games, just so that I can vote in a contest that doesn’t include all the great games that I have played.
That’s a stupid analogy and bears no resemblance to the situation I described. It would be more accurate to say that I couldn’t vote because the bakers I like weren’t invited to contribute their cupcakes and I wasn’t able to taste the other cupcakes. This all wreaks of elitism.
I do, but that might be years after the comp and the awards.
Do you know what “I’m simply too busy” means? Maybe you don’t care for an elderly parent or have medical issues or have a stressful full-time job or contribute elsewhere to the IF community, but I do.
Bullshit. You’re misquoting me, distorting what I said and taking it out of context. What I said was " I had not played one single game in the XYZZY awards, so I couldn’t vote for anything". Whereas I played dozens of excellent games throughout 2021 and couldn’t vote for them because they weren’t nominated.
I hope others on here are more open-minded and understand the points I’m trying to make.
Just to reiterate, the main points are that:
- Every game released during the year should be eligible for votes.
- The voting system should be as simple as possible.
- The method of tallying votes should be as fair and equitable as possible so as not to favour the best-known games, as these are not necessarily the ‘best’ games.
I may be misunderstanding, but if your issue is that the games you played aren’t nominated, couldn’t you simply nominate them yourself?
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I knew someone would ask that. You’re right, but it comes down to time. Firstly you have to try and work out what games were released during the year. IFDB is far from complete, so you have to rely on many, many other resources such as competitions, game jams, itch.io, various Facebook groups, Discords, forums and so on. Can you imagine everybody doing that independently? It won’t happen. It needs to be a community effort.
If it was just a case of best game, that would be pretty easy to do, but the XYZZY awards has lots of categories and you really need to replay all the games to remind yourself of things like best puzzle and best NPC and best <insert category here>. It’s very time consuming if you want to take it seriously.
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That’s a real sticky point, unfortunately. IFComp is a decent chunk of all the games that come out in any given year, and if your schedule is such that you can’t get to them in time for the XYZZYs (which in this case opened a year after IFComp 2021 closed), then I’m not sure what changes can be made to accommodate?
Does such a method exist? The only way I can think of to address this is change to a judging panel instead of an audience vote, which has its own problems.
There’s some tradeoffs that come with an audience vote and those mostly seem to line up with the issues you have with both the XYZZYs and @mathbrush’s proposed new awards. I’m curious to see what your ideal awards setup would be like.
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I described a method earlier in this thread that I think would work really well, but no one has really commented on it yet. Maybe it’s too fair. Yes, a judging panel does have its own issues, one that I’ve experienced first hand. It is quite hard on the judges, as they have to play all the games. I believe they should play them to completion, otherwise a game may start out well, then fall to pieces and the judges won’t see that if they only play it for 5 or 10 minutes.
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Just went back through your posts to find it, and you’re talking about your ranked choice idea, right?
The XYZZYs kind of function similarly in the nomination round, in that you pick your nomination choices from a drop-down list of every single game released in the target year (as scraped from IFDB). I personally found this overwhelming due to the sheer number of games released every year, which is literal hundreds! I ended up frantically skimming the list for titles I recognized and editing and re-editing my choices as I remembered about other games I had played that I thought were deserving. If I had to rank them relative to one another I think I would have dropped the whole thing entirely, since it then turns voting into a significant time commitment.
I also don’t see how it really addresses your concerns since niche games are still unlikely to win without a publicity campaign, since there’s so many eligible games they’re going to get lost in the noise during voting. What you’re proposing would be more akin to running the XYZZYs but using what’s currently the nomination round as the actual competition.
(Also, I’m not sure IFDB can support ranked choice voting right now so this would be a big ask on the part of the organizers).
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Yeah, after thinking a bit more about this idea I’m increasingly convinced the above is 100% right - like, look what happens when people get Spotify, their music listening becomes more homogenous rather than less.
I very much get the goal here - I would love to figure out a way for weird niche stuff like Queenlash or Accelerate to get more recognition, for example! - but I think that in the context of these awards, curated categories tailored to highlighting those under-appreciated games, or, if we’re talking blue-sky ideas, judging panels with reps deeply familiar with stuff outside of what this community sees as the mainstream, could be pretty cool. And it’s maybe worth acknowledging that the whole concept @mathbrush started with is a populist “People’s Choice” awards, which would serve a specific purpose and fill a particular niche in the scene - I don’t think it’s intended to, or can, be all things to all people.
EDIT: just rereading the back and forth here, and seeing that it’s gotten a bit heated, I dunno whether it’s helpful to say I see where both Garry and Brian are coming from and the frustration is understandable but maybe not super productive to express? Like, I know the IntFic boards - and by extension the XYZZY’s for 2021, which I think were dominated by us - have some significant blind spots when it comes to stuff outside our main events which can undervalue hard work folks are doing elsewhere. But on the flip side, if over all of 2021 and the first 11 months of 2022, a player hasn’t gotten to either of the Spring Thing best in show winners, either of the top two finishers in ParserComp (or the top-placing Adventuron entry), the EctoComp winner, or any of the top eight finishers in IFComp, that seems like it reflects a lack of interest in these venues rather than a lack of time and I agree with Brian that it seems unproductive to make procedural changes in response.
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Yeah, just trying to think of a rational way to get a fairer and more balanced voting mechanism in place. To be quite honest, I don’t expect the mathbrush awards to be any different to XYZZY, except in name, but I don’t appreciate being abused for making a suggestion.
That might explain the absence of some games. IFDB is far from complete, as it relies on voluntary contributions. My voluntary contributions are already targeted at CASA.
Yes, there is a whole world of interesting things being done elsewhere, particularly in the retro and indie scenes, but also in the narrative/choice-based community.
That sounds like it’s aimed at me. In my case, I was a tester for quite a few games in Spring Thing, ECTOCOMP, ParserComp, IFComp and a couple of other jams/comps in 2021 and 2022, and a participant in ParserComp, Puny Jam and Text Adventure Literacy Jam in those years, so it’s certainly not a lack of interest. The only XYZZY nominee that I had played was the excellent ‘The Faeries of Haelstowne’ by @ChristopherMerriner, but I hadn’t finished it and the puzzle that it was nominated for must have been later in the game.
Thank you both for the thoughtful feedback.
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Yes, IFComp is a big contributor to all the IF games released in a year but is actually much less than 50%… especially if you start to look beyond the borders of specific communities and discover games that aren’t normally covered by the existing competitions and awards like the XYZZYs. There seems little point just making another set of XYZZY awards, so any comments about widening the scope and appreciating the larger IF landscape beyond IFComp, which I think Garry is trying to make here, seems to me to be valid.
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My humble point of view:
- Don’t segregate by tool
- Don’t wait for other comps results, use previous years one
DON’T SEGREGATE BY TOOL
Judge the final game, not how it was done. If someone choose to use “A” because it is more powerful, nice for him. If someone choose “B” because is easier and faster for developing, nice for him. Each one has chosen his own route for the game, but what it counts is the final result.
This staff of “Better XXX tool game” seems more for a specific comp of that tool.
Segregate that way will also go against tool innovation, as all new tools would probably be competing ones against the others and are not allowed to go to play with the “big boys”.
By the way, I HATE the name “Homebrew parser” as it seems to state that it is something not professionally developed, and that can be true or not. I like to use “Custom tools” or “not mainstream parsers” and things like that.
As a developer of a Hom… Custom Parser I don’t like that.
DON’T WAIT FOR OTHER COMPS TO FINISH
Set these awards in the best date, no matter when other comps are finished or not that year. Take the results of previous one when you need information for them, as “No previously awarded” or “Not previously nominated” categories.
After all, it is possible that other comps appear in the future, for example biannual ones, or someone being awarded in no specific IF comps not known by this community.
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Yeah, this is the main reason I haven’t taken part in the test poll: Brian chose the one upvoted topic that I have absolutely NO interest in whatsoever. I think Amanda said it better in one of the other threads. I differ from her in that I often do have some idea which system a game was written in, but it’s definitely not something that I compare games based on. I’m not going to look back later and go, hmm, what was my favorite game in Texture the way I would think, “what were my favorite protagonists, or favorite short games?”
Honestly I’m starting to re-think whether I’d be willing to vote in these anyway, as dividing games by “were they written this year?” is another thing that I don’t ever really think about…
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My apologies, I was wrong to make assumptions about your motives and life, and I won’t do so in the future.
I can help with the first two bullet points, but I’m not sure I can help with the third, since any competition involving voting would need people to have played the games, so less popular games will always have a disadvantage, and as you just proved people don’t have time to play everything.
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The “by platform” polls were added because people voted for them. If no one actually voted on them this year, they will be taken out next year.
I envision these awards as being a-la-carte voting. Instead of voting in 25 different polls, you only vote in the ones you care about. There won’t be any mechanism to check if someone managed to vote in all polls, and it would be hard to make one anyway.
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This forum poll system needs urgently a thumb down votation for this comp post 
Is not the same 15 votes in favour of something without opposition, than 20 votes in favour with 40 against them.
This democracy system has forgot the “opposition” side ^,^
By the way, none of the other categories are segregated by tool. So “best short game” or whatever it is is for all systems, not individual ones.
Even best game is for all systems. There’s just one extra award, and it’s for “best game in such and such system”. So there’s only one wears out of about 20 that is for a specific system.
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I agree that this is a problem. It’s been a well-known problem for years, honestly – specifically that any game released outside of a comp is dead in the water on release, and if that comp isn’t IFComp then it’s still pretty dicey. I just don’t know how to address it.
In the context of a yearly award, the only thing that occurs to me is that this is really a voting audience problem, not strictly an award design issue. As you mention, IFComp games are just a small fraction of what’s released each year, but that puts playing the full body of yearly IF beyond any one person (even superhumans like @mathbrush ). The solution is instead to reach out to the communities making and playing these games to make sure they’re represented and casting their votes… which, to be fair, I think Brian has at least started to attempt so far. That plus a forum for fans (not authors) to robustly advocate for their favorites is the only way I can see to address this in an awards context, which I’m sure comes with its own downsides?
It’s definitely a problem worth chewing on, but it’s a very difficult problem.
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Alright, here’s a crazy thought. What if we put the onus on the author. It is the IFDB awards, no?
You don’t make sure your game is loaded onto IFDB, it isn’t considered.
Make the “outstanding xxxx game” a disambiguation of the “outstanding game” vote.
If an Adventuron author wants to be considered not only for “outstanding game,” but “outstanding Adventuron game” the onus is on them to correctly tag their IFDB listing.
On the management side, you check all of the votes for “outstanding game,” see if at least 5 games clearly labeled on IFDB as Adventuron received any votes, and then acknowledge the top vote recipient as long as they cleared that arbitrary 5-vote threshold.
If any particular community wants to be sure engine-specific acknowledgement is awarded that year, the onus is on them to:
- Write at least 5 solid games that year
- Make sure they’re all on IFDB and correctly labeled
- Encourage their community to turn out and vote
This solves the multiple polls issue and an individual voter feeling like they don’t know which game to vote for, because what if they don’t even know what Adventuron even is? But they do know what their favorite IF game from last year was.
This also prevents folks from needing to tag their vote with a specific engine, which is a nightmare waiting to happen.
@ChristopherMerriner writes the world’s best Adventuron game and wins the overall “outstanding game” award, but doesn’t clearly tag his game as an “Adventuron” game on IFDB? Tough cookies, I guess someone else will win the “outstanding Adventuron game” honor. Pretty striking lesson to label your game.
The PunyInform community writes 30 games that year, but only 3 make it onto IFDB and only 2 are tagged as “PunyInform”? Well, it’s the IFDB Awards, and you’re not on IFDB. Y’all censored yourselves.
Put the onus on the authors and communities.
Streamline it into one “outstanding game” poll.
This is a reasonable compromise.
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One potential problem I see here is if there is some system such as Inform 6 or Adrift where there are games people like but maybe that year it wasn’t their favorite overall. So no one votes for games from that category for best game of the year. But if you ask everyone “oh what was the best adrift game of 2022” they can all agree and say “yeah, out of these 5 this one really stood out to me”.
Whereas the next year some other system might miss out.
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Yeah- as I understand it, the goal of the system specific categories is to create space for those that might not have as much broad appeal, and engaging people beyond their core communities; thinking about 2022, I know I wouldn’t vote for an ADRIFT game for any of the “best X” awards but there were some fun ones it’d be nice to be able to recognize. And as you say, if there’s no self-conscious community that’s showing up a particular system/platform it’ll just get dropped.
Plus it’s nice insurance to make sure other games can at least get a little action if CoG stuff sweeps the other categories (which, to be clear, I think is a fine outcome if it happens).
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