Upcoming 2024 IFDB Awards (held in 2025) (IFDB poll in response #24)

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The IFDB Awards will be coming back for their 3rd year in February of 2025! IFDB users will be voting on games published in 2024.

I feel like last year’s awards went smoothly and nicely, and I’d like to conduct it this year in mostly the same way.

The criteria for language and genre categories is 5 games released in a year. This year (so far), that would make the following categories:

Language:

French
German
Spanish

System:

Inform 7
Inform 6
Punyinform (last year this and Inform 6 were two categories. There are 9 punyinform games and 6 non-punyinform Inform 6 games this year).
Twine
TADS (just barely, through a multinational effort including games by Spanish-speaking, Italian-speaking and German-speaking authors)
Ink
Dialog (an impressive 8 games!)
Adventuron
Dendry (5 games)
Bitsy (5 games)
Choicescript
Moiki (11 games)
Custom (22 games)
Decker
Ren’py
Not commonly used systems (everything else)

I can’t find any other systems than those listed above. Here’s the search I was using for games not in the above systems and which have at least 1 rating (it’s okay for a system to have a game or two without ratings, but if all 5 don’t have ratings there’s no point):
search

Genres:

Fantasy
Historical
Horror
Humor
Mystery
Romance
Science Fiction
Slice of Life
Travel

Western almost made it, with 5 games (but 2 are the same game in different languages). So if someone wants to make a mini western in the next 6 days…

The remaining awards are:
Outstanding Game of the Year 2024
Author’s Choice for Best Game of 2024
Outstanding Debut 2024
Outstanding Game over 2 hours in 2024
Outstanding Short Game of 2024
Outstanding Underappreciated Game of 2024
Most Sequel-worthy Game of 2024
Trailblazer Award of 2024
Outstanding Worldbuilding of 2024
Outstanding Use of Interactivity in 2024
Outstanding Retro Game of 2024

Remember, there is no obligation to vote in a category that doesn’t interest you. Categories with low votes just don’t get an award.

Moving forward, I want to know if anyone has any changes they want in the awards categories. The ‘5 games’ system has worked pretty well so far and has been voted on numerous times.

I originally intentionally tried avoiding similarities to the XYZZY awards to avoid diminishing them. However, I no longer believe that to be a major issue, as the IFDB awards seem to have had no negative effect whatsoever on the XYZZY’s. Our main unique quality is the open-sourceness of the IFDB awards and transparency in timing, organization, and voting, and that will be enough to distinguish us in the future.

With that said, I’d be happy to incorporate a couple of new awards that overlap with XYZZY categories if people are interested. I’d rather not do any categories that involve individual nominations within a game (like best individual NPC) due to the way our awards are nominated. If adding new awards creates too many categories, we could remove some. Right now, though, I’m not advocating for any specific new category, just throwing it out there that I’m no longer opposed to it, if anyone wants to discuss ideas.

In any case, I look forward to when the voting opens next year! Remember to update your games with the right publication date/system/genre to show up on the searches, and also remember that a game doesn’t have to be tagged right on genre if the voter thinks the game fits that genre well!

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I don’t really have any feedback except to say—yay Dialog!

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Earlier this year, I mused about beefing up the “New to IF?” section on the IFDB home page by running a poll for the best games for beginners.

We could have an official annual IFDB poll for best games for beginners. (Maybe we’d do this as part of the IFDB Awards? But I think that could be weird, because, unlike other IFDB Award categories, all games ever written would be eligible.)

WDYT?

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I remember you bringing this up. It seems like a good idea to me; wasn’t the idea to do a poll that wasn’t restricted to a specific year? And to “refresh” it each year?

If that’s the gist of it I can put the suggestion to a poll here (I assume it would pass easily). If I misremembered it I can go back and read the thread in more depth.

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If you do a best game for beginners in the IFDB awards, I think it should be for games released in 2024 (assuming there’s enough candidates), whereas @dfabulich’s poll would be for best beginners’ games ever released up to that point in time. This could be updated annually to account for new games.

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Yes, that’s right.

I do acknowledge that it might be strange to have an IFDB Award for “best game for beginners (all time)” category that we’d “refresh” annually, since all of the other IFDB Award categories are just for the winning game of 2024.

But it would also be strange for IFDB to run a separate official annual game poll that isn’t part of the IFDB Awards. So, as strange as it is, I think rolling this into IFDB Awards as a weird exception is probably our best option.

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I think the potential for voters to be confused by having one category where every game ever is eligible and every other category restricted to games of 2024 is pretty high. The IFDB awards are early in the year while the games of the previous year are fresh in everyone’s memory, but there’s no reason why the “best beginner’s game” poll needs to be at the same time, so you could hold it at a different point during the year to minimise the weirdness of having an IFDB poll that’s not part of the annual awards.

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Exactly. I don’t think having a “of all time” make any sense for the IFDB awards, honestly.

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Since you’ve said we’re not worried about intersecting with the XYZZY awards, how about an Outstanding Puzzle Design category?

I agree with everyone saying that all these awards should be for 2024 only. For all-time lists, we already have stuff like Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2023 edition) - Details conducted periodically, and I think something like every five years is a more sensible cadence for running those.

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Well, it sounds like the Best Game for Beginners poll is contentious.

Here’s the for and against as I see it:
For:
-It’s hard to know what games to suggest on IFDB’s front page. A poll can be helpful for that, specifically for beginners.
-That kind of poll has to be held some time, so it makes sense to do it the same time as IFDB Awards.

Against:
-It doesn’t follow the same format as the other awards, as it’s ‘over all time’.

Here’s a poll for it. Note that only the Awards themselves are guided by the polls; Dan can run a poll for Best Beginner games whenever he wants. This poll is only for specifically joining the two (although there are still options to express your opinion of the event overall).

You can vote in multiple categories below. The first 4 are for doing a poll for best game for beginners of all time (which I support), the bottom 4 are for doing a poll for best beginner game of just 2024 (which I am lukewarm on).

  • A poll for Outstanding Game for Beginners of All Time (2024 edition) should be a category of the awards this year.
  • A poll for Outstanding Game for Beginners of All Time (2024 edition) should run this year and be linked in the ‘ifdb news’ along with the awards, but as its own event
  • A poll for Outstanding Game for Beginners of All Time (2024 edition) should be run, but not in tandem with the IFDB Awards.
  • A poll for Outstanding Game for Beginners of All Time (2024 edition) should not be run
  • A poll for Outstanding Beginner Game Published in 2024 should be a category of the awards this year.
  • A poll for Outstanding Beginner Game Published in 2024 should run this year and be linked in the ‘ifdb news’ along with the awards, but as its own event
  • A poll for Outstanding Beginner Game Published in 2024 edition should be run, but not in tandem with the IFDB Awards.
  • A poll for Outstanding Beginner Game Published in 2024 edition should not be run
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I’ll do a poll for outstanding puzzle design later, just waiting to see if anyone else has ideas.

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Doesn’t this poll already suit the purpose? It has been accumulating votes since November 2008.

Maybe all that’s needed is an annual drive to get people to add new votes?

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One issue with that poll is inertia; it has 30+ votes for the top games, many of which were popular years ago. It would take a lot of effort to knock those off of the top spots. And I’ve heard several people say Lost Pig isn’t a great intro to IF anymore. So a newer poll would give people a chance to say ‘what’s a good game for beginners according to current views’.

There also isn’t a single choice-based game on the list.

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Isn’t inertia a good thing in an “of all time” list? I mean, Counterfeit Monkey has plenty of inertia at the top of the Top 100 list by virtue of popularity and a high number of ratings. That’s the proof it deserves to be there.

Anyone can add a choice game to that list (or upvote one already on it) at any time. It would only take 8 votes to make it to the #10 spot on that list.

If the concern is that recent beginner-friendly games aren’t getting enough attention, then doesn’t a year-specific award make more sense?

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Older games will have some advantage simply in having been around long enough for more people to have come across them and rated them, including people who aren’t on the scene any more and therefore aren’t voting for any newer games. So perhaps a compromise could be to implement an exponential decay factor so that older votes gradually get less weight, and anybody still paying attention can come back and refresh their vote at any time. But I think that’s overcomplicated and I stand by my advocacy for an annual poll for best-of-the-year and a less frequent (quinqueannual or so) survey for best-of-all-time.

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I was going to reply in favour of a “Best Beginner Game of 2024” category, and this pretty much covers all the reasons why I think that would be a good idea.

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I think that would be OK if the “Games for Beginners” poll used score voting, like we do for star ratings. Then, we could compute an average or use Evan Miller’s algorithm (which IFDB calls “starsort”).

Without score voting, if we simply count votes, the problem is that voters in 2008 couldn’t have considered games published in 2009 or later.

For example, Counterfeit Monkey is pretty good for beginners, but it only has 7 votes in that poll, compared to 39 votes for Lost Pig.

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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Counterfeit Monkey for Beginners

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It’s also a lot easier to add a vote for a game that’s already listed in a poll than it is to add the first vote for a new game, which means that I suspect long-running polls are unlikely to see big changes in their front-runners as time goes on.

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Honestly I can’t win most games without hints (those two included, even on replays).

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Sorry, ya’ll in too deep. Counterfeit Monkey is not a beginner-friendly game.

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