Agreed, the Author’s / Player’s choice split only confused an already long ballot.
I could give a laundry list of problems I have with the old genre requirements. Rather than go down them, I’d be happy if any game could poll in any genre, even if it’s not listed as such on IFDB. In other words, let the voters decide if a Mystery title is also a Fantasy title.
I was going to make this suggestion too!
I’d also like leeway for judges to decide re genres. Because it was a real menace last year, having to manually edit IFDB to add genres for voting. Assuming you could remember the games for them. And even then you’d only get to some. For me it’s like if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck I’ll assume for the duck genre it’s a duck. But with the proviso that said duck might also fit into other categories too 
I’d like to chime in re:genre.
I’m in favor of allowing any game to receive a vote for any genre.
Yes, you’ll get some bizarre votes, like a serious drama garnering a comedy vote, but these would be outliers and would be drowned out by good-faith genre votes.
This makes management waaaayyy easier. Both on the organizers and the participants. Laissez-faire.
It also allows unexpected organic results, or perhaps appreciating a game that is primarily in one genre for the aspects it occupies in a different genre.
I think there’s a danger of vote-splitting for games that do not have an obvious genre, but I don’t know that this is more of a problem than any alternative would pose. I’m not arguing against CYOG, just making an observation.
I do think it’s a shame that we can’t get a feelies award going, since they’re cool and there’s a long tradition in IF, but if people aren’t voting for them, then they aren’t.
Agreed. I think Mathbrush hit the nail on the head though. IFDB, for various reasons, often includes feelies as an afterthought. Some of this is cultural, as physical feelies have become more and more untenable as time goes on, most restricted to limited-runs for backers of kickstarter projects. Also, various digital stand-ins for feelies haven’t quite taken off yet. This may change with time. Perhaps maintaining an award focused on best digital feelie may help foster creativity on this front.
Digital feelie… deelie?
Yeah, at this late date, I would think digital feelies would be eligible. Or should be. I don’t think there’s a tag for it at IFDB? Or I haven’t encountered it, anyway.
(there is a “feelies better than game” tag, used only once)
I really liked the map/hints that came with LAKE Adventure for instance.
Ha! Wow… that’s harsh.
For Reliques of Tolti-Alph, of all things - and it’s also tagged with “source better than game.” I mean it’s not my favorite, but still, it’s got some interesting ideas and it surely isn’t as bad as all that.
I confess I just assumed “feelies” meant digital ones at this late date.
Yeah, I think in practice it was games with digital feelies that were being nominated! The issue was more that there wasn’t an easy way to find games that have them and the feelies aren’t always linked from the IFDB page in an obvious way, either.
It looks like the tag never really took off, for whatever reason. I have to confess that I didn’t tag my own game with it.
Maybe we can do a tagging drive this month in anticipation of the IFDB awards? Not sure how best to approach that.
There’s a not-uncommon complaint with tabletop games, that some supplements are designed to be read rather than to be played. (Certain writers at White Wolf used to be infamous for this, with some entire gamelines never even being playtested before release, since playability wouldn’t matter to the intended audience.)
And I’d say if any IF falls into that category, it’s Tolti-Aph, which is by design a pretty thorough demonstration of a lot of I7’s features. Balances is similarly a demo of how to do things in I6 (like the featureless white cubes you can label, which make for an obnoxious puzzle but a cool tech demo).
The XYZZY Awards used to have a category for “Best Supplemental Materials,” which was later renamed “Best Use of Multimedia,” so this might be covered already by the XYZZYs.
“Feelies” isn’t quite right nowadays since most IF is released digitally. What about “Outstanding Multimedia and Supplemental Materials” as a catch-all for games that include extras such as images, music and sound (video?), PDF maps or external lore like a book, ARG elements such as external websites, and any other potential fiddly-bits that might be included?
I was actually just chewing on a topographical relief map of the game world printed from a 3D printer as Jigsaw pieces that fit together to match up the continual topographical surface. (You don’t need images on the jigsaw pieces to fit it together then). As a side benefit, you wouldn’t need to see to be able to solve the puzzle and put it together. You could do it entirely by feel.
They could be designed to snap together, allowing you to then flip the completed map over and make sense of the mad symbols and scribblings etched across the bottom.
It’d be neat to do a braille version of the same scribblings and allow peeps to choose which version to print on the 3D printer.
First of all, I have played all the 2023’s games in spanish languaje reviewed in my blog or itchio and rated (almost 50 games). There were 3 comps and a dozen of other games.
Second, I think that all the categories are cute, but this would be of a big work, It’s number could be reduced and mixed. For example there are too much categories for the “only” 50 spanish games.
Right now I don’t plan on doing every category in Spanish, just one “outstanding Spanish game of 2023”.
I like keeping the author category for votes. I feel like that category is more likely to give lesser known games/authors a shot if they have an equally good game in the running by it being less affected by who has the largest following to come across to IFDB to vote as authors are the only ones casting them. Just nice to have two separate categories IMO even if a bit more confusing.
Although I spoke out against the Author / Player split, @Jacic’s comment got me to wondering if there might be room for a single “Authors’ Choice” poll. It would be akin to IFComp’s Miss Congeniality prize.
I still think splitting all (or most) of the categories author/player causes too much confusion. I’m suggesting adding a single new category, where the votes are limited to authors who released a game the prior year.
I hesitate to suggest this, though, because there’s already plenty of categories.
