The Future of the XYZZY Awards

Good point.

I think it is important to separate the malicious and the merely enthousiastic. The former are like spammers, and hard to deal with on a systematic basis. One could upload Pong to IFDB and organise a flash mob to vote for it.

Regarding the merely enthousiastic, I think the first option would be to limit the effect of votes to the games played to the end by the voter. I know I am opening a mathematical can of worms, but if I only played games 1 and 3 out of four, my voting for game 3 ought not to influence its standing regarding the two unplayed games - had I played them, I might have voted for one of them instead.

So voting for the only game played, while legal, will be a null action: it just says “Of the one game I played, I liked this one the best”.

So let’s try to go for differential votes: this game is the best out of this set - (so I DON’T propose people put all the games played in an order). If this leads to imcompatible partial orders (A>B, B>C, C>A), the votes cast by those who played the smallest number of games are decreased in weight until the incompatibility disappears - which gives another incentive for playing more of the games in the category.

And yes, the malicious voters will lie, but let’s hope they are a minority even within the flash voting mob.

  • This would give less accessible IF a fairer chance to win - votes by those who didn’t play that Polish IF written in PDP-11 assembly don’t count against it. (Of course, if the Poles DO play the English game and then vote for the one in their language because it is in their language it may bias in the opposite direction, but that problem is unavoidable, in my opinion.)
  • This would help people who currently don’t want/dare to vote because they haven’t played all the games: they know they won’t be hurting the unknown ones.

Raising awareness about the awards is, in itself, not of any particular value; the value comes only if and when the people reached become players, reviewers, developers or authors of IF. Awareness-raising that only results in drive-by votes is actively bad.

I’ve got no evidence to say whether any of the ChoiceScript folks, having voted, stuck around to try some of the other games. (The XYZZYs, at present, don’t make it particularly easy to do so.)

They sure know we exist!

C.

That bit doesn’t make sense to me. The way I see it, the opposite is better. If everyone who want to encourage people to vote in the XYZZYs did so while talking about “competing games” as well as their own work rather than just asking people “vote for me”, it should lead to more informed voters. If anything, authors should be forbidden to solicit votes unless they also talk about the other nominees.

I’m naive enough to think (or at least hope) that no big rule changes or complications are needed, if it’s just made clear that any judges are expected to have played a reasonable selection rather than just voting on the thing they know. As others have pointed out, the issue here was with people being enthusiastic rather than malicious.

Ooh, ooh, pick me! [emote]:P[/emote] Obviously I don’t mind the existence of longer games, but I’m honestly quite glad about the Comp’s shaping of Expected Game Length. I have a very short attention span, and I also tend to like the more experimental stuff, which often doesn’t hold up for a longer work. But I definitely agree with you about the desirability of de-emphasizing the Comp as the end-all-be-all of the IF universe.

Less tangentially:

Okay, this is actually still a bit of a tangent: I like the idea of nominations being open all year anyway (though not the idea that authors have to nominate them), since the stuff from further back in the year tends to get lost in the Comp shuffle. What if the games that get, uh, pre-nominated simply go to the top of the Big List, as a curated Little List for those whose eyes glaze over before they reach the bottom of the Big List?

I like this, as long as everybody knows well in advance about it and it’s true that any game can be on it. It seems like the suggestion that comes closest to making sure the game is trying to play along with this community, without trying to draw arbitrary genre distinctions.

The idea is presumably to avoid negative commentary about the other games, which could be anywhere from outright vitriol to damning with faint praise. I agree that this community is generally kind and polite, but I can understand the desire to codify the etiquette, especially since the whole kerfuffle was about just such a “common politeness” misunderstanding. I’d be in favor of something like “if you’re the author or have some other personal connection to a particular game (such as having written the development system, or supporting the author solely based on shared nationality), don’t make public announcements about the XYZZYs that mention specific games at all.” Of course, the definition of “public” is handwavey, but I think it’s still a step closer to something that is harder to overstep by accident.

I think that if people are to vote in a competition, they’d better experience the nominees rather than just favor the work that got them there.

Competitions for IF should log what games each user has played and how much of it. Wasn’t transcript from players a feature in one of these competitions? If there’s transcript from players available, sure there is chance to log progress.

Say, “You’re only available to vote if you have played at least 5 games and spend quite some time in each of them.”

BTW, I’m now ashamed: I’ve never voted in any IF competition.

I don’t think this is naive at all; prima facie, less intrusive changes are preferable to big sweeping ones, as well as being a lot easier to implement.

This would, at present, be totally unworkable, because

a) automatic transcripts are, at the moment, a feature of browser-based interpreters; many players use local interpreters instead, which don’t have automatic logging features. (I, personally, don’t use a web-runner unless that’s the game’s native environment.)
b) some games can’t be run in a browser (such as, e.g., Cryptozookeeper),
c) as previously mentioned, we don’t want to be too reliant on comps; the XYZZYs is not the Comp Digest.

If, at some point, every IF game everywhere was played on an interpreter that automatically logged usage stats, and we had access to those stats, and we were able to tie individual players to accounts on the XYZZY site… then we could do this. But that would be pretty creepy. I really don’t want to know which of y’all has played Deadly Climax. Over a thousand times. Always stopping play at the same point.

Another idea might be to make the categories less generic, and more tuned to IF. The precise categories would need some thinking out, but would capture IF-specific qualities. And the scores in individual categories would count towards the overall “Best IF” score.
Some first - not well factored out - ideas:

  • “Depth of interaction” - not just Rematch-style (though that would count), but also how successive interactions build complex state. We all know the “hit NPC then greet NPC”-effect…
  • “Mimesis” - the extent to which the implemented world behaves like the evoked world ought to.
  • “Use of the interface” - part of the previous, but worth its own category. Do reasonable commands give reasonable responses? Points off for guess-the-verb, needing “search the bed” to see the suitcase on top of it, points for interesting responses to commands that lie outside the thrust of the work, or for using the open-endedness of the parser (as with the central puzzle in “Spider and web”).
  • “Sense of freedom” - the extent to which the IF gives one the impression of agency. Not applicable for some games, but for many it is. This may be about the richness of the implemented world, or the smooth way in which the player is steered away from what the author doesn’t want him/her to do.
  • “Mechanics” - basically the complexity of the program, as opposed to the amount of it. An excellent new conversation mechanism, mood tracking system, learning NPC’s, et cetera.

Such categories would reward good IF for being good IF rather than “just” being good art.

What you’re advocating here is a much more technical XYZZYs: moving the competition more towards people who not only enjoy IF, but a) have a solid grasp of theory and b) strongly favour judging a work on its formal, technical qualities. The XYZZYs tend to be rather more theory-dominated than the Comp, which is part of their value, so I can see where you’re going with this.

Here’s the problem with a formal aesthetics, though: nobody’s going to agree on it, and opinion on what the relevant formal qualities are is going to change significantly over time. Mimesis, as you define it, doesn’t enjoy the same status now that it did in the late 90s. Whether super-complex mechanics are a good thing in their own right is a debatable point (sure, the world model of Dwarf Fortress is impressive, but how much of it is actually important to gameplay?)

Having fairly vague categories is, I think, a strength: we can all agree that setting is a fine thing, but whether that primarily consists of detailed scenery objects or implied worldbuilding or having a 10,000-room map is something that should be determined by the community, not the rules of the event. If it turns out that people think that kick-ass character writing is more important for Best NPCs than an intricately detailed relationship-modelling system, or vice versa, the XYZZYs shouldn’t try to tell them they’re wrong.

(Also, I don’t think this would do anything whatsoever to fend off Clueless Enthusiasts. If you’re willing to vote for ZE for Puzzles and Innovation, you’re probably not going to be fazed by Mimesis and Mechanical Complexity.)

Well, the criteria are probably not well-chosen (consider my posts brainstorming), but the idea is still to appraise aesthetics, but aesthetics typical to iF. A prize for good painting might have “Use of colours”, on which a piece of music will never score high. Dance might, being closer to painting, but it would have to be very good dancing win, having to counter the necessarily low score on the use of strokes.
In other words, the idea is to reward IFness by judging aesthetic qualities that are typical for IF, rather than either aesthetic qualities per se or being typical IF per se. My examples were just primitive attempts at enumerating such qualities.

Probably not, but immersion is, I presume, generally regarded as a good thing, and good mimesis helps, whereas breaks of mimesis tend to lead to breaks of immersion.

I meant this one as a more technical category, to reward development of the medium. Complexity wouldn’t be rewarded for its own sake, but, say, useful extensions (for which the game under consideration might merely be a showcase) could find recognition here.

I fully agree here. But a rubied ring winning this category would not generally be appreciated, would it? So my proposal would be to try and find a category definition that ensured “setting” was interpreted in the IF sense of the word, without reducing it to an enumeration of techniques that are currently known to be useful in creating IF setting.

Exactly.

True, but this proposal was not meant to deal with that side of the issue. My other proposal (votes only counting towards the games actually evaluated) was. And that one was brainstormish too, by the way.

Hm. Okay, that’s an interesting general principle. The trick is that IF is a pretty crossover-ish form: it draws heavily on a lot of related media. “Use of colours” won’t work for music, true, but it would be totally appropriate for Concept Cars or Male Lingerie Design or TV Commercial Set Decoration, none of which would sit very well with the people who really just want to talk about paint-covered canvas rectangles. (And if they change it to Best Use of Colour on a Canvas Rectangle, they will a) look silly and b) encourage the design of man-knickers composed of rectangular canvas.)

Pretty much everything we value in IF exists in various other forms – so if we defined a category to edge out CYOA a bit more, we’d probably open the door to some other related form. (This isn’t to say that IF doesn’t have typical qualities: but most of them are non-aesthetic, invisible and neutral, unless they’re tampered with.) And I think that if you make a category too specific or put in fine print about what it really means, people will ignore your definition (see: Best Use of Medium).

So I think your general principle’s valid, but I’m not sure how it could be used to change the existing categories very much. And… I don’t know. I have the general feeling that the point of the XYZZYs should be a positive one: “here is what we value” rather than a negative “here is how we’re distinct from other media.”

Well, cover them in oil paint, and probably some people in the oil painting crowd would start to argue that they have a rightful place in their gallery - just as is happening with CYOA here. Art kind borders are fluid, so my idea was to try to find a way to accept that fluidity without accepting just anything. The further from the core (or the Wittgensteinian main usages), the harder to get points. But I am sure if I dipped a dead rat in oil paint and threw it at a genuine painter’s canvas, whereas Rembrandt decorated a men’s slip, he would stand a better chance of winning an oil painting award than I would. And rightly so. Probably if I decorated a canvas and he threw a rat at a slip he would still win…

Of course the idea of what is the core may and will change over time, and so will the categories. Maybe at some point someone will get a Ph.D. by analysing their development through time as an indication of changes in the meaning of IF. Devising and discussing the categories may teach us something about IF. Most art forms have developed an associated vocabulary - the bouquet of wine, the flashback in narrative arts… IF could, I think, profit from some development in this repect.

That is true - I think it is the combination that might make this work. Having and colour usage and 2D-spatial composition and brush technique and representation and … - would build a fuzzy boundary around painting. Abstract painting may get few or no points for representation but otherwise be “in”; atonal music would be virtually “out”. And at all times it would stimulate discussion of what it means to be an oil painting.

I think it would be positive. When a wine critic discusses bouquet, it that negative? So no “avoidance of pictures”, but “Text quality (consistency, naturalness, evocativeness, …)” - DOOM with a high-quality literary running commentary might get points, and why not? It is a case of trying to designate (is that the word?) what it is we love about good IF as opposed to good art in general. And a boundary work, say CYOA, could still win awards if it compensated its lacks in some areas with virtues in others - and to me that would be fine.

I agree with this concept in principal, though I disagree vehemently with the earlier, brainstormed concepts for the categories. But I think that’s the point of the point … were my own idea of the “core values” listed, CYOA would be nowhere near the boundary, but very near the center, of what I consider the ideal in IF.

And I think it would probably graph differently for everyone, which means any set of categories chosen (arbitrarily, or by committee, or by general vote or whatever) would ultimately fail to represent the community consensus on what “we” value in IF, because there is no such consensus (and in a real sense, no such “we”), and there cannot be, and never will be. Not only will the core constantly move, it will never exist in a single place to begin with.

That said, I still agree with this concept in principal, since I think of all the inevitably-failing things proposed so far, it’s the least faily [emote]:)[/emote] And I think that’s as good as it gets: least faily.

I don’t think this is quite true; if we didn’t have a relatively coherent, largely overlapping set of ideas about What Good IF Is, we wouldn’t have even the weird, many-headed community we have now; it’d be impossible to have Awards because nobody would see a point in voting for them. (The unadorned list of XYZZY Awards as it stands makes a pretty good manifesto for Stuff the Community Values, even if there are people who hate puzzles or don’t really care about prose.) But I think that trying to nail down what that is in a brief, clear and more-specific manner is unlikely to be possible. And if we managed it and changed the categories to reflect that, people would ignore it anyway (in the same way that half the voters routinely ignored the fine print about what Best Use of Medium was intended to mean.) And it would probably look very silly five or ten years down the line.

At the moment, this makes you outer-quartile. Also outer-quartile: the people who really don’t like CYOA even a little bit and think it should never be eligible for any IF contest. Obviously I don’t think that the XYZZYs should make a structural commitment to either position. But we’ve drifted back to the ‘what do we do about CYOA’ conversation again, which I think is mostly a distraction.

The first time through I thought the verb was “Stuff” and the noun was “Values.”

I’d like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

I just was testing something where I wanted something proper-named on a supporter so I wrote “On the table are a glass, some utensils, and War and Peace.” Then I was banging my head against the wall as to why the output kept saying “a table (on which are a glass, some utensils, War and Peace).”

The first line of my source is now “Use American dialect and the [motherfucking] serial comma.”.

I think belief serves just as well as fact, in such cases.

There’s one, now [emote]:)[/emote]