Nobody sponsors or compensates the organizer for XYZZYs. That’s why it’s difficult, the designated organizer is in charge.
Designated by whom? It’s not “the community”, there’s no such abstraction.
As we’ve seen Sam passed the torch to Pinkunz. There is no third party involved at all.
So how did Sam get it?
If it was entirely by self-nomination, then I see no reason why someone else couldn’t nominate themselves. As long as the award is actually awarded… which seems not to be the case currently… that, as they say, is that.
If it’s simply a matter of the current website being under the control of some particular person, give the award a new name and declare XYZZY dead. If the old award is never completed, there’s certainly no one contesting that declaration.
I was curious about this, too, so I added a “History” section to XYZZY Awards - IFWiki
History
- Originally organized by Eileen Mullin in 1997, on XYZZYnews. Over time, other volunteers assisted Eileen. In 2009, when announcing the awards, Eileen wrote, “Huge thanks to Lucian Smith, Dan Shiovitz, and David Welbourn for organizing and hosting absolutely everything.”
- In 2010, the 2009 XYZZY Awards were organized by Dan Shiovitz on xyzzyawards.org (archive). “David Welbourn tirelessly catalogues games of the previous year, Lucian Smith is master of ceremonies at the awards presentation, and Dan Shiovitz does the site maintenance and admin work.” The link to “email the competition organizers” went to Dan Shiovitz.
- In 2011, 2012, and 2013, the FAQ page remained the same, but Sam Kabo Ashwell posted all of the announcements to intfiction.org.
- In 2014, the 2013 XYZZY Awards were formally, officially organized by Sam Kabo Ashwell. Sam has organized every XYZZY Award since then.
- In 2024, Sam announced that he was handing over the XYZZY Awards to pinkunz.
At every handoff, from Eileen, to Dan Shiovitz, to Sam, to pinkunz, the previous organizer handed the competition off to the subsequent organizer.
We already did that; that’s what the IFDB Awards are, except for the part about declaring “XYZZY Awards” dead.
Nobody is in a position to officially declare XYZZY dead except for Sam, pinkunz, or maybe Dan Shiovitz, who still owns the xyzzyawards.org domain.
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Sam became steward of the XYZZY awards when the position was passed to him by the previous organizer, and so on, back to Eileen Mullin, who created the awards in the first place. There’s no law stating that someone else couldn’t make their own system and call it “the XYZZY awards”, but this isn’t really a matter of law. It really is a matter of community, and whether the community views it as legitimate.
It’s the same reason that I can’t invent a new award called “the Oscars” and give it to myself, then call myself an Oscar-winning filmmaker. The trademark and intellectual property issues aren’t the main problem; if that was the only issue, I could go to some jurisdiction that doesn’t recognize American trademarks and do it there. The main problem is that “the Oscars” is more than a name, it’s a tradition, and without that tradition the name is meaningless.
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That’s not a thing you can do/say. Pinkunz, the whole person, is the organizer of the XYZZY Awards. Anything you say about the XYZZY organizer you say about Dan.
You don’t become an incorporated non-human when you assume a volunteer role. A volunteer organizer is just a person, and you’re talking about that person, whether you want to or not.
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It’s the same reason that I can’t invent a new award called “the Oscars” and give it to myself, then call myself an Oscar-winning filmmaker … The main problem is that “the Oscars” is more than a name, it’s a tradition, and without that tradition the name is meaningless.
It happened with the Olympics, where people with no connection to the Ancient Olympics (AFAICT) kept claiming the name until it stuck to what they were organizing.
Though it happened after more than 1000 years and without the “giving oneself the award” part.
I haven’t followed all this, but how about just organising the 2023 People’s Republic of XYZZY now, and let the official organisers return for the 2024 Republic of XYZZY when ready? They could be peaceably merged later on.
P.S. Turns out I made the same suggestion in December 2023 (albeit using a different geographical analogy) so sorry about that!
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Please stop. Please, I beg of you, please stop. Regardless of whether all of your criticisms were valid or not, no one wants to hear them again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Harping on Dan’s actions or inactions is not helpful. It’s not tactful. It’s not kind. Please stop.
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I’m not trying to cause strife, and I’m fine with letting the matter sit for now to see what happens.
I spent some time crafting the flagged post above in an effort to be neutral. Per the automated message, the flagging means that it is considered “offensive, abusive, to be hateful conduct or a violation of our community guidelines.”
I’m honestly not sure what it is about that post that seems to have crossed a line; if any moderator or someone flagging it wants to send me a PM, I’m happy to listen to inform revisions.
I didn’t flag you, but I’ve PM’d you again. Not sure if you got my earlier PM, but maybe you’ll get this one.
You know, I’m actually really happy that otistdog never seems to have been through a big enough personal disaster to understand what this might feel like from Pinkunz’s side, or why others find this tactless and upsetting, like visiting someone convalescing in a hospital and getting into a fight about their estate. Saying “look, I’m just talking about the facts of their inheritance, not about them,” is still going to get you awkwardly shooed out of the room. Better to let this one go.
Thanks for all your community-building with PCT, the Bubbling Beaker Awards, etc. - you’ve brought a lot of life to this board, and I really do appreciate it.
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How about we stop worrying about what Pinkunz feels and start thinking about the XYZZY Awards?
We’ve been talking about the awards the whole time. The options, as I see them, are:
- Wait for Pinkunz to get back online and check in with him then, possibly changing things going forward so that there’s no single point of failure.
- Reach out to one of the other people who can still access the website and talk them into appointing someone else.
- Hold a wildcat XYZZYs.
- Move on with other awards and community activities.
It’s no secret that I’m in favor of a combination of 1 and 4. I don’t think option 2 has a high chance of success and even if someone could get access they’d have to redo all of the existing work for '23 and '24. Option 3 has a similar problem as well asrequiring someone to make a new website and voting platform. 2 and 3 are also asshole moves and that matters in a community as small as this.
Being callous here gets us nothing. I’m deeply concerned about my friend, but there’s also no secret easy option that we’re ignoring here by being nice. Unless something has gone extremely, catastrophically wrong on Pinkunz’s end in a way none of us are aware of then waiting for him is in fact the easiest and likely fastest solution.
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I think option 2 has a decent chance of success if Pinkunz resigns, because there’s very little actual work for '23 or '24 that needs/needed doing.
One of the big mistakes Sam made and that Dan doubled down on was to say that in order for XYZZY to run, the organizer (and/or the organizers’ delegated assistants) must first evaluate every game for eligibility (released as complete in the year under consideration, playable today, and actually interactive fiction).
They were literally clicking on every game in IFDB for the given award year, launching each game, and playing it for a bit, just to make sure it was playable IF.
I tried to tell Sam, year after year, that this eligibility analysis was completely pointless. In the first round of voting, just let people vote for any game in IFDB. (This is how the IFDB Awards work.)
Once nominees are selected, they would almost certainly all be eligible, and, in any case, you’d have at most a few dozen games to check; it would be trivial to verify the eligibility all of the nominees in an afternoon.
Year after year, Sam kinda agreed, but said that he couldn’t/wouldn’t change it this year, but perhaps/definitely next year. He finally agreed to change it for 2023, but he never ran the 2023 Awards, and instead eventually appointed Pinkunz.
Pinkunz, for reasons I’ll never understand, decided to run the XYZZYs the old way again, manually evaluating all of the games for 2023 himself personally, no matter how long it took, no matter what tragedies befell him. (I even volunteered to help multiple times, and he turned me down.)
I certainly don’t want to criticize a dying barista for not serving me coffee, but it is heartbreaking that the XYZZY organizers decided to fly to Brazil to harvest coffee beans themselves, and continued trying to do so even when I begged them not to, even when it was obvious that they couldn’t make the round trip in a reasonable timeframe, if at all.
I wish, for their own sakes, that they’d just done it the easy way, or, barring that, I wish that they’d resigned instead of trying to do all of this unnecessary work.
But this is the main point.
And so, we’ll just have to wait.
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Please discuss the XYZZY situation courteously. That’s fine.
What we do not tolerate is personally attacking a member or complaining about their personal issues.
Virtual awards are not a life or death matter and nobody deserves to be called out and raked over the coals about it.
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Humble Proposal: Should we discuss whether this forum and community might want to adopt the XYZZYs and give them a space?
what is Hanon thinking?
We could create an XYZZY Organization group. It wouldn’t always have to be managed by just one person or the same person all the time, although that is how Spring Thing and IFComp work here. Ideally, there would be a team: someone does math, there’s an artist, a promotion/public relations/social media network person, etc.
This forum allows polling that would likely facilitate the nomination and vote processes. The XYZZY processes could also be documented so if anything went wrong, Forum Staff could support as backup.
Initially there needs to be discussion of what xyzzys have been, how exactly they work, and what we would like them to be going forward.
If Pinkunz ever rejoins, he’s of course welcome to participate; and I bet he’d be glad the project got picked up again in his absence.
Perhaps the missing years could be run as tests without a schedule, and then once things are working the committee could decide when “xyzzy season” is annually.
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