I was curious, so I calculated who the winner of this award would be, going back to 1999, the first year where ifcomp.org reports vote totals.
- 1999: Skyranch (1.10, 37th place out of 37)
- 2000: What-IF? (1.31, 52nd place out of 53)
- 2001: The Last Just Cause (1.11, 50th place out of 51)
- 2002: Blade Sentinel (1.33, 38th place out of 38)
- 2003: Curse of Manorland (1.17, 28th place out of 30)
- 2004: PTBAD 3 (1.14, 35th place out of 36)
- 2005: Ninja II (0.81, 36th place out of 36)
- 2006: PTGOOD 8*10^23 (0.86, 43rd place out of 43)
- 2007: Press [Escape] to Save (1.36, 24th place out of 27)
- 2008: The Lighthouse (0.87, 34th place out of 35)
- 2009: The Hangover (0.98, 24th place out of 24)
- 2010: Aotearoa (1.31, 1st place out of 26)
- 2011: Cold Iron (1.32, 15th place out of 38)
- 2012: Fish Bowl (1.48, 12nd place out of 28)
- 2013: Reels (0.97, 35th place out of 35)
- 2014: Tea Ceremony (1.29, 10th place out of 42)
- 2015: Recorded (1.27, 51st place out of 53)
- 2016: Theatre People (1.39, 46th place out of 58)
- 2017: Run of the place (0.85, 79th place out of 79)
- 2018: They Will Not Return (1.20, 22nd place out of 77)
- 2019: Island in the Storm (1.11, 39th place out of 82)
- 2020: Equal-librium (1.13, 101st place out of 103)
- 2021: Wabewalker (1.08, 47th place out of 71)
- 2022: Traveller’s Log (0.89, 70th place out of 70)
- 2023: Antony & Cleopatra: Case IV: The Murder of Marlon Brando (0.92, 24th place out of 74)
- 2024: Hildy (1.08, 7th place out of 67)
It’s very rare for the game with the lowest standard deviation to place highly. Aotearoa won 1st place in 2010, Hildy won 7th in 2024 and Tea Ceremony won 10th in 2014, but no other highest-consensus game has ever cracked the top ten.
Indeed, where the consensus is strong, it generally tends to indicate that the game is clearly bad, like Ninja II, which came in last place in 2005. (It’s the highest consensus game of all time.)
For this reason, I suspect that the games of lowest standard deviation will usually not be as long remembered, unlike the Golden Banana games, which are frequently “interesting” in how controversial they are, and thereby have more historical influence.
EDIT: BTW, generating results like this is easier than ever, now that IFComp has a JSON API.
EDIT 2: Added “out of #” to the placement, so you can see which games came in last place or close to it. There are eight years where the game with the lowest standard deviation came in dead last, plus eight more years where it was “nearly last.”