Wait up, folks. The premise that the term “point and click” is obsolete in reference to graphic adventures is just way off base. It’s the primary term used for these games by site such as Jay Is Games, Touch Arcade, and many others. In fact, at JIG, pointandclick is the only tag you can use to find them! In the larger cultural context, there is far less confusion about what “point and click” refers to than there is about “interactive fiction”.
Thanks for that, I wasn’t sure how the term was viewed outside of the adventure-game communities I usually frequent.
Which underscores my point, I guess - the term isn’t obsolete and is still used and recognised, though in another decade or so it might not be and might need to be revamped.
So it’s good for idle discussion, intellectual stimulation, and thought-provoking-ness, but P&C adventures will still be P&C adventures.
Though I have to say it irks me that I have to identify adventure games as “point and click”, instead of calling them “adventures”. Nowadays I feel “adventure” has become more synonimous with “action-adventure”. I certainly had my share of conversation that went:
“Hey, do you know about adventure games?”
“Oh, sure. Like Tomb Raider? Loved that game.”
“…no, more like Monkey Island.”
“What-sey Island?”
“Nevermind”.
“Hey, do you know about adventure games?”
“Oh, sure. Like Tomb Raider? Loved that game.”
“…no, more like Gruds in Space.”
“Whatsinspace?”
“Nevermind”.
I just tried browsing the “Adventure” category at Touch Arcade. It includes a wide variety of games, including action-adventures but also a bunch of other stuff; the way to identify the graphic adventures in that list is to skim (or search, I presume) for the term “point and click”!
Even if there’s no confusion with anything else, “point-and-click” doesn’t even cover all CYOA; there are plenty of CYOA games controlled by typing in numbers from a multiple-choice list.
Plus, turning pages and stuff?
An alternative round-0 approach, suggested by Jacqueline Lott as an alternative to the IFDB method; I’m not sure whether I like it more than nomination-through-IFDB, but I think it’s the best version of direct open-nomination I’ve heard thus far.
To establish the list of eligible games (from which Round 1 votes are drawn), allow year-long open nomination. 1 vote is the requirement for eligibility. People can nominate as many things as they want, and authors can nominate their own games. For the purposes of this round, games would be nominated not because voters necessarily thought they deserved an award, or even to be a finalist; it would be more a matter of ‘this is at least worth taking a look at.’
Thus far, this is basically 7a; the refinement she suggested was to maintain a public list of pre-nominated games, and a mailing list/RSS feed of games newly added to the list. This would help people be a bit more aware of the field of plausible XYZZY contenders, and hopefully mean that people would have time to play more games ahead of Awards season.
Having the list public might go some way to avoiding some of the authorial-modesty problem, but I don’t know that it would do enough; it might exacerbate it as well (“if nobody else wants to nominate my game, what’s the point?”) It would potentially reward crappy-but-egotistical authors for nominating their own games for everything (they might not earn any nominations, but at least they’d get on a reading list.) Changing it to disallow or limit self-nomination might still be okay, though.
An advantage over the IFDB-only approach is that it could also be used to better determine the field of (what are now) the text-entry categories. It’d also give us more opportunity to vet the list (for things released in the wrong year, or explicitly incomplete, or that are actually match-three Flash games). A disadvantage is that we’d have to do more work to publicize the change in order for it to work as planned.
I agree that this could be a problem if games had to be nominated for every category. Maybe a single nomination could make the game eligible in all categories.
If you have to nominate your own game for specific categories, than your explicitly claiming that your game is at least interesting for those specific qualities, and that’s probably something that players should judge. But if you’re only adding your game to this list of eligible games, I think you’re only claiming that your game is indeed an IF that you wrote in the past year and released to the community.
Yeah, I’d prefer that, if not for those troublesome text-entry categories. But having a list split out by award would be super-annoying to read.
Yeah, even if duplicate entries were removed across multiple categories.
It might be interesting to support the per-category listing as one display option, with the full, undivided list as a default – if it were procedurally generated based on votes, and listed each nominee only in the category for which it was nominated for the most awards, that might provide some gentle suggestion for voting.
There is value in that - but I’ld also like to see an IF-specific critical vocabulary develop, which is better done (partly) on this forum than during a vote. Taking examples from other art forms, voters could decide to make “bouquet” an election category for wine (probably a good idea), or “charoscuro” for painting (probably a bad idea), but establishing those notions would be hard to do within that context.
My Internet connection willing I’ll start a new thread for that discussion. [EDIT: It willed. It is here.]
Yeah. Hm. I’m not sure what ‘the category for which it was nominated for the most awards’ means, but I think the way to present this would be to have the RSS/mailing list mention each game only once, when it’s first listed for anything (so that you don’t get extra attention by listing yourself in one category per month), then have the site list all games in a table with category columns marked off, so that you can easily check whether Stiffy in Love has been put up for Best Supplemental Materials yet. And, uh, maybe the text-entry categories in a separate list. Presenting mixed data sets is a pain.
Another thing that’s occurred to me about a year-long list-compiling round: it could be conducted on a wholly experimental basis. If mid-January rolled around and the list looked totally unrepresentative, it could be replaced with the old list, no harm done.
For the text-entry categories, I think this makes sense. For the game categories, IMO, IFDB is better. Submitting yourself to IFDB doesn’t mean that you think you’re awesome; you’re merely declaring that your game exists. It requires less of a mental hurdle of self-promotion.
I don’t see how the open list would provide more vetting opportunity than IFDB. IFDB already has an RSS feed, whose results are highlighted on the IFDB home page.
Well, it serves somewhat different goals, yes.
There are a number of problems with the list, as it stands:
- it’s time-consuming to compile, since it involves dredging up IF from a wide variety of places, which change every year,
- it’s not readily visible to players until the first round is announced,
- it’s enormous, intimidating and unhelpful as a reading-guide, in large part because
- it’s bloated with trivial works that stand no chance of a nomination,
- it’s difficult to fact-check because it’s compiled so close to the first round opening,
- it doesn’t pick out Tech Dev entries, or provide any guidance on the other text-entry categories.
IFDB is awesome for 1), okay for 2). It does a little for 3) and 4) – or, at least, it would if more people paid attention to the IFDB new content feed, which we might or might not be able to promote – but not really all that much. (I watch the IFDB front page pretty closely, but I don’t play most of the new games listed on it, because a pretty high proportion of them suck.) It helps 5) a little, because it’s compiled slowly over the year and (in theory) links to all the games, but XYZZY organisers can’t really remove anything from the list if it turns out to need vetting. And, as you say, it does nothing for 6).
The 0th-round pre-nomination system fixes 1), 2) and 6), is probably a little easier for 5), and is intended to deal with 3) and 4) (but in practice might or might not actually do so.) In the process, it might create another problem (authorial modesty vs. self-nomination if we allow self-nomination, significant games getting overlooked if we don’t.)
I suppose the intended meaning is ‘the category for which is was most often nominated’. So if A people nominated W for category X, and B people for Y, then if A < B W will not appear in the list for X.
That’s right, I meant “the category for which it has received the most nominations.” Sorry for not being clear.
Suggestion:
We could mail post-cards to register for voting, to prove we’re real people who aren’t voting twice?
This is a cool idea I got from “real life”.
Logic:
Anyone who has enough time to sit in front of a computer honestly giving the games a good shot has enough time to put a stamp on a postcard and stick it in a mailbox.
This isn’t logic; it’s an attempt at moral persuasion, i.e. ‘if you do this pleasurable thing then surely you have enough time to also do that administrative thing’. Except, basing plans on what you think people should do instead of on what they actually do, is not particularly wise. And what people actually do is that they do play games, but they do not mail cards.