What do the XYZZY's mean to you? (Future of the awards)

General Events
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It’s been a bit longer than years.

The awards have been ‘late’ since the 2015 awards: XYZZY Awards 2015 eligibility list.

In 2019, I emailed asking about the awards, and he said that he was transferring them to the IFTF the next year so it would run faster and more smoothly. I emailed a couple of other years to check whether the competition is running or not.

In 2022, Dan and I emailed with a plan on how to transfer XYZZY to the IFTF and offering to help run it. We were told it was already going to be handed off to some other people once they were found, in early 2023, specifically people who were not connected to IFTF, in order to expand the pool of leadership.

I think running competitions is a responsibility, not a privilege or prestige. I can think of about 7 different possible explanations for what’s going on that would make me very sympathetic to Maga, and only 1 or 2 that would be negative, and those would be very unlikely. In almost all the sympathetic scenarios, lifting the burden of the competitions would likely be a positive thing. I don’t see any ‘hostile’ in the take over. Maga is a very nice person in real life; and I doubt he has a personal vendetta against the 50 or so people who really care about the XYZZY awards.

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I thought it would be the IFTF board to intervene and support the IF comps and traditions when issues like this arise. It seems ridiculous that one non-responsive can hold 20-30 years of IF tradition hostage. If these are the pinnacle awards of all the IF competitions then it is a very bad look for everyone in these communities.

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I agree. I don’t think anyone thinks this. And I suspect you’re right about it being a potential lifted burden, but that should be voluntary on his end.

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Well, sure, but it’s always valuable to get some pushback on a crazy idea. Never hurts. But I think confirmation has been what Dan was seeking with all those emails, and it obviously hasn’t been forthcoming. Because your comments have made me think, I’ll acknowledge that all of this may seem a bit cold to a cool dude who has done a thankless job for many years. I really hope he’s OK and just really busy doing amazing things.

But this whole story twingles me, because I am a person who will pathologically avoid something that I haven’t done when I’m in over my head and feel like I’m letting people down. It’s a big problem. And I smell that here and sympathize with it.

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The XYZZYs have always been independent. IFTF can only manage what’s been entrusted with them thus far.

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Agreed wholeheartedly.

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Ignoring all of the above discussion on whether or not it actually happens I liked that it existed as a general guide to what people that was good. I wasn’t, like, engaged with any of it but having it around helped me find some fun stuff so I’d be sad if it ended up dying.

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Thank you.

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Let me elaborate. The last time the XYZZY awards were held was very late in 2022 for games published in 2021. Here’s some statistics, courtesy of IFDB:

Games published in 2021: 396
Games in IF Comp 2021: 71, i.e. 18% of total
Games in Spring Thing 2021: 38, i.e. 9.5% of total
Games in ParserComp 2021: 18, i.e. 4.5% of total
Games from other sources: 269, i.e. 68% of total

XYZZY awards 2021: 10 games received awards
Games from IFComp 2021: 5, i.e. 50% of total
Games from Spring Thing 2021: 4, i.e. 40% of total
Games from ParserComp 2021: 1, i.e. 10% of total
Games from other sources: 0, i.e. 0% of total

Do you see where I’m heading with this? The XYZZY awards are heavily biased towards games from IFComp and Spring Thing. I have never really got into all the IFComp/Spring Thing hype and am a great believer in supporting the smaller, friendlier comps as author, tester, player, judge and even organiser, i.e. the 68% of games from other sources. These take up all my time, together with doing maps and solutions for older games for CASA.

In 2021, I was too busy with all these other obligations and had not played any games from IFComp or Spring Thing. I think I had only played one game from all the nominations. I can’t very well vote for games that I haven’t played, hence the XYZZY awards mean nothing to me.

Despite my own feelings on the XYZZY awards, this is a long-held tradition that was started by Eillen Mullin way back in 1997 and it would be a shame to see it end. Sam Kabo Ashwell is currently the organiser, but he no longer contributes to the forum, so I can only guess that his interests have changed. You really need a new organiser and this would need to happen very quickly, as games from 2022 will soon be forgotten and we should be talking about the XYZZY awards for 2023.

I sort of feel that @mathbrush’s IFDB awards will become more relevant and we should now be talking about those to ensure that the IFDB is up to date for IFDB 2023 awards.

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But it could also be the fact that games in more well-known competitions are bound to be better because there’s more competition?

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There are always some really rough games in IFComp. But it’s clear that a lot of people really push themselves to do their best in the big comps. So the answer is both yes and no, I think.

It’s just the nature of all entertainment that people like to have festivals, and then awards ceremonies, and often rely on those to guide their attention. It’s true of every form of entertainment. Really amazing indie gems get overlooked and left out because they don’t benefit from the buzz. Which is why if we find those gems, we need to create the buzz ourselves. Awards are never fair, and they are never the truth about what’s “best.” They’re just fun, and long as we all keep in mind that it’s an artificial and arbitrary system, then we won’t end up buying that Top Gun 2 is the best movie of the year, or that any one game is the objective “best.”

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Thank you. Just chewing on what you had to say.

So the XYZZYs:

1.) Set up the vote for nominations.
2.) Tabulate the results of the nominations.
3.) Provide those results to allow the actual vote.
4.) Tabulate the results of the vote.
5.) Provide the final results to the community.

Looking at all of those, they are all passive. The XYZZYs give us back what we all collectively put in.

I guess I mean, if there’s bias, surely it’s all of our collective faults and not the fault of the guy counting the votes. Maybe we need to do better highlighting and discussing noncomp and smallcomp games throughout the year.

Agreed.

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73

I might also suggest, though I don’t know if it’s true: Since the awards happened nearly a full year later, people nominating and voting might have had to refresh their memory of what games came out a year prior and reviewed the Comp lists, naturally causing bias toward those games.

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I would imagine this might intensify a tendency toward not paying as much attention to noncomp and smallcomp games. In other words, agreed. Although I believe our biases, all of them, would still be apparent even if the proceedings started January 1st. It’s the sort of thing you can improve, but not really eliminate.

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The XYZZY awards are not an indicator of what’s “best”. It’s a popularity poll. If 100 people have played a good game in IFComp, but only 5 have played an equally good game in (say) SeedComp, then the game in IFComp is statistically more likely to get nominations and the equally good game in SeedComp will be culled.

When you vote, you can only vote for one game in each category. Again, the more popular games are more likely to get votes, simply because more people have played these games. You do not rate games by giving them a score. It’s all or nothing.

In the interests of fairness, I would suggest that the top (say) three games in all comps are automatically nominated for best game in the XYZZY awards. This at least brings them to people’s attention.

I’d also like to point out that many of the smaller comps allow you to vote on games by category such as plot, writing, puzzles and so on. Again the top (say) three games in each of these categories should automatically be nominated for the equivalent categories in the XYZZY awards. Again, this at least brings them to people’s attention.

Contrary to popular opinion, the IF world does not revolve around IFComp.

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I agree there’s room for improvement. I also agree that IFComp, while important to the community is not all there is and personally put much of my energy in helping smaller comps grow and flourish, as do you.

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Just looking ahead to the XYZZY awards for 2022, according to IFDB, there were 535 games published in 2022. Of these, 13% were in IFComp 2022 and 9% were in Spring Thing 2022. If there are no changes in the nomination/voting popularity poll, I’ll bet they get close to 100% of the XYZZY awards.

Prove me wrong.

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For this bullet point, I nominate @radiosity.

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I wasn’t aware I was trying to, Garry. Sincerely.

XYZZY was designed for a different time and a smaller community, yes?

When I check IFDB for games published in 1996, the first year evaluated by the XYZZYs, I get 43 games.

That’s the environment this model was designed to handle. And, for 43 games, I imagine it worked admirably. But now we have an excess of 1200% more games each year. (Could I point out that this, as an aside, is really fucking cool?)

I agree some steps can be taken to adjust for the massive growth of annual IF output. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect it to work equitably with that sort of change.

I’d rather improve it than axe it, though.

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That’s got nothing to do with you. It’s just my prediction for 2022.

I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that it was probably a larger community, as the community at that time were subscribers to XYZZY News. It was certainly a different community, The internet was fairly new, the modern authoring tools were still in their infancy and choice-based IF wasn’t a thing.

IFDB is pretty hopeless for games earlier than 1997. For 1996, IFDB gave me 109 games and CASA gave me 130 games. This was around the time of the boom in the underground movement.

535 games in 2022 is still a lot of games. Who said interactive fiction was dead? Even so, it’s still a long way from the CASA peak of 805 games in 1984. (IFDB lists only 382 games for that year.)

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