What seems logical, since categorizing all these games seems like a ton of work, and because genres are not evenly represented, is to do the first year with some lumped-together genres. Like niche genres all together: historical/western/noir/gothic. Fantasy/sci-fi (although there may be enough of each to justify their own categories). Horror/thriller/espionage/mystery. Romance/drama/slice of life/autobiographical. Comedy/satire/farce.
Get authors to self-identify, ideally on IFDB when they list so you don’t have to do it. If I tried to game the system by listing “The Spectators” as a comedy because there’s one joke in it, I’d get disqualified.
See how the numbers pan out in the first year and then start extending the categories as the data justifies it.
I think we can handle the multiple genres by having one big poll for “outstanding game in a specific genre” and people can vote for games with the genre in the vote. Then any genre with at least 5 games receiving votes and a top game with at least 5 votes can get an award.
Edit: cross-posted, but I could see either idea working or a combination of both.
This system could also work for games in individual programming languages.
Right, you end up with combinatorial explosion with genres if you go far outside “drama/comedy/SFF”. There isn’t going to be a Western every year.
What about:
Outstanding Comedy
Outstanding Drama
Outstanding Genre Representation
Cuz then those genre games could fall into any one. It’s more the game that makes you laugh, the game that gave you pathos, and the game that had the coolest lasers/unicorns/masked killer and you don’t end up with like one in each micro-genre category.
EDIT: Mathbrush basically said that - have a singular “Coolest Use of Genre” type category that you could have a bigger pool for and award that person who does a game where they heavily did the research.
Because I think we may have done each other a disservice crossposting.
The first has 12 likes, the second has 7.
Only two of those are duplicated and only one is from the author of the other post.
Taking those out, that’s still 16 unique likes.
If I’m correct, is there any way I can good-naturedly encorage some of the folks that liked the second post to also like the first? We only need 3 more-only 1 more!- to tip it over.
It also occurs to me that @adventuron might have an opinion here as well.
If I’m off the mark, just disregard.
(Or if 8 folks from the first post are interested in liking the second, I suppose that would technically work as well, but that seemed like more of a stretch.)
I think there should be a clear distinction between Inform 6 and Inform 7, as they are completely different languages. The former is a conventional object-oriented programming language that tends to be used for puzzley games. The latter is a verbose English-like language that tends to be used for narrative games.
Should we make a distinction between the Inform 6 standard library and the PunyInform library? What about Dialog and ZIL? That got me thinking. Rather than most outstanding Inform game, maybe we should have…
Outstanding Z-code game
Outstanding Glulx game
So, it depends on the interpreter, not the programming language or library. That fits in well with the other platforms:
@Warrigal - That seems sane in terms of distinction.
As for how many of these get categories and which of them don’t, @dee_cooke 's suggestion seems the the easiest in practice. Either >= X number of a particular type is made and uploaded to IFDB in a year, or it doesn’t make the cut that year. Creates some additional incentive for proponents of any specific authoring engine/interpreter(/genre?) to keep busy throughout the year.
As an aside, XYZZY is specifically NOT an IFTF venture (I checked on the IFTF slack to verify. Maybe because it predates the IFTF?). As the IFDB has been adopted by the IFTF, would these new IFDB awards be at least tangentially under their umbrella, or is it expressly independent?
My gut feeling is 5 or more during the year. If there are less than 5, they would still be eligible under something like ‘Outstanding game for other platforms’.
I think my plan for both platforms and genres is to have one big poll and allow people to state in the polls which platform or genre they are nominating the game for, and only handing out awards for platforms or genres with enough games and enough votes.
I just made up these awards on my own; I have plans for determining future governorship (allowing anyone to take over if the awards don’t start by February if each year, for instance). I haven’t discussed this with anyone else. I put out a message to other ifdb admins today asking for feedback on something with the comp, but that’s the first message I’ve made. I’d be happy to have IFTF involvement, but I think it’s be worth seeing if we can get a successful years competition done first before we can decide if this is something we want to keep having in the future
Fair enough. Your shindig, lol. Have you put any thought into the what sort of thresholds you’d like to see? Like, if 12 Adventuron games get nominated with over 200 votes in total, that obviously passes muster. But if 2 ‘Western’ games get nominated with 11 votes in total, that’s likely not good enough. How many games need to be nominated with how many total votes for a platform/genre to be a thing?
My threshold would be five games total, with the top game getting at least five votes.
We could do separate votes for each category, but with platforms and genre combined it would be 20-30 polls, which I could see being exhausting. I might be wrong about that, though. And it won’t be my shindig for long; if it works well this year, I’d like to form a committee so that multiple people are in charge.
If you do this, maybe in the poll description you could give some guidance to help keep people from voting at cross purposes–some people voting for best Inform 7 game and other people voting for best Glulx game, for instance. Or people voting for overlapping genres.
Maybe you could set up a test poll on IFDB–sort of an open beta test to see if it works out the way you want.
I wonder if there could be a catchier name for this award. I thought of “hidden gem,” but if the award ends up going to a commercial game that wasn’t entered in a comp because it wasn’t part of the hobbyist scene in the first place, it might not actually be very hidden.
Out of curiosity, how would this work with Spring Thing games? Mostly because authors have the power to turn down ribbons, which could create a weird incentive loophole regarding eligibility.
I doubt anyone present would actually do that, but it’s possible.
Here is a practice poll people can use to see if my idea would even work well. This poll is for your favorite games of all time in different languages (so favorite twine, favorite inform, etc.)
I might be in a minority here, but the only languages I can recognize are Inform and Adventuron. I don’t check to see what program a game uses, and even if I did, I wouldn’t remember that a month or a year later. So I would never vote in such a poll.
