I would be delighted to rename the IFDB Awards, but I don’t think we should do it without permission from the current XYZZY Awards organizer.
Unfortunately, Dan can’t communicate, so he can’t give permission, and Sam won’t give that permission (I’ve asked), so we probably never will.
Which is a good argument for distributing responsibility via committee. Circumstances are currently holding the XYZZYs hostage because of Dan’s situation. What happens if Dan is permanently indisposed to restarting the awards yet unable to communicate his desire to pass them off?
Then we let the name “XYZZY Awards” go. That’s all we can do.
@inventor200, to clarify: I would have been doing that as of January 1 this year, after it was clear that I had not lived up to my very public commitment to get the awards for 2023 games out by year’s end of 2024, nor had I lived up to my even earlier public commitment to keep everyone well-informed about the situation. Based on his appearance at the Feb 5 PRIF meeting and his communication with jwalrus sometime in March, it seems that Pinkunz has been able to be online and/or in contact with community members enough to resolve any access issues here, or at very least to have word passed along. Whatever might be happening today is really just part of the picture.
I understand that you consider Pinkunz to be a personal friend. I don’t know him well enough to have a personal opinion, and – to repeat – my pointing out his failure to live up to his commitment is not a personal attack, despite your insistence on conflating the two. Phrasing like “punching bag” and “opportunistic pot-shots” ascribes motives that just aren’t true.
@AmandaB, I don’t consider this matter to be about feelings; it’s about a sorely neglected community touchstone and restoration of a common good. I’m not criticizing Pinkunz for having had bigger concerns over the last nine months, though I do think that his continued inability to meet the expectations that he himself set indicates that he’s not in a position to fulfill the role. The last time that a wildcat XYZZYs was proposed, community sentiment was against it, and the eventual result was a formal handoff to a new organizer. If it’s necessary, an open and public process to select a new organizer would probably be best.
@SomeOne2, OK – the XYZZYs are the second-longest-running videogame award. Thank you for the correction. Please note that I am not telling Pinkunz what he should do; the statement that you’re referencing was what I said I would do (really already have done) in his place. I understand that you, too, view Pinkunz as a personal friend, and repeat that this is not about attacking him.
@jwalrus, I’m trying to get the public here to acknowledge that there is a problem with the status quo, that there has been a problem for some time, and that the problem isn’t that I’m pointing out the problem.
@pieartsy, I appreciate that you elected to reply on a dispassionate basis, though I continue to push back on making the focus about me. I should have been clearer that I took your subjective labels of “abrasive” and “yelling” (terms which I think apply much more to some of the responses above) as an implication that I am attacking Pinkunz personally. I would not be trying to create this discussion if Pinkunz had been living up to his voluntary and self-declared commitment to public communication; had he been doing that then there would be no need.
@HanonO, I appreciate the positive characterization of the People’s Champion Tournament, but I would not in the remotest way consider it to be on the same plane as the XYZZYs! The PCT (and FIFP) are fun forum games that have really not been very successful in promoting their intended goals. The XYZZYs are a genuine cultural phenomenon of note to historians and the wider public, and I’ve seen several anecdotes by authors that stating that trying to win one was a personal motivation. The XYZZYs matter.
On the question of how to help restore the XYZZYs, if people really are interested in seeing the torch passed, I would consider accepting it with Pinkunz’s public consent, though frankly I think it’s a better idea to select a new long-term organizer in an open and public process. The plan suggested by @rileypb seems like a good intermediate measure, and should at least result in regular public communication.
I don’t really know the specifics of what’s involved in the awards production process, but here is some comparison data based on posts to the official XYZZYs site and IFDB records (all dates in MM/DD/YY format):
Game Year # Games Published List compiled 1st round open Finalists declared Results announced
--------- ----------------- ------------- -------------- ------------------ -----------------
2013 619 02/07/14 02/17/14 03/10/14 04/06/14
2014 502 03/11/15 03/15/15 04/05/15 04/27/15
2015 570 04/04/16 04/11/16 05/01/16 05/31/16
2016 557 06/12/17 06/19/17 07/05/17 07/23/17
2017 507 04/23/18 04/30/18 05/14/18 06/04/18
2018 463 -no data- 07/05/19 07/23/19 08/16/19
2019 494 -no data- 09/02/20 09/14/20 10/01/20
2020 566 -no data- 09/10/21 09/24/21 10/08/21
2021 417 -no data- 11/21/22 12/07/22 12/22/22
2022 572 -no data- 12/09/23 12/18/23 01/08/24
2023 790 TBD TBD TBD TBD
2024 812 TBD TBD TBD TBD
If we use 2013 as a comparison year that went well, 619 games were vetted in about five weeks and made available for voting in another week and a half. Add 30% for the higher number of games in 2023 and double for unfamiliarity, and the expected timeline would be around 13 weeks to vet the list at a rate of about 60 games per week (9 per day). Typical completion from that point seems to take about 6 to 8 weeks.
Maybe not to you, but clearly to a lot of people here. Perhaps if you stopped talking about Dan, people would stop being upset with you.
I don’t know if it’s necessary, but you are clearly really invested in it, so here we are having a public and open discussion about it. I think if it is going to get done right now, you really are the best candidate to do it. I stand by the nomination, not to pressure you to do it, but because you want it to get done and you are a good candidate. Or we could just take a deep breath and move the conversation toward the future once Dan is able to participate.
Otis, to make it clear - what @inventor200 has disclosed so far is not the sum total of what Dan has been dealing with over the last few months. I’m not going to give specific details without his permission (which I can’t get right now) but I know he was dealing with an unexpected and serious medical situation during the turn of the year. I certainly wouldn’t have considered communicating about the XYZZYs a priority at the time were I in his shoes.
We’re cutting Dan slack because we know more about his situation than you do. Please try to understand that. If you had prefaced any of your concerns with “I know he’s having a hard time and I really feel for him, BUT…” then I think we could have a productive discussion here? But you’re not acknowledging any of that, only the deadlines missed. That’s only half the story and people are trying to give you the other half.
With all due respect to Sam, he’s ghosted out of the community and if he wants to keep control of the award name and trappings (which implies he created them?) we should definitely move on to something newer and better.
A cool name for the award and imaginary trophy would help.
Golden Zorkmid
IFDB ‘Required Inventory’ Award
The FooBar
Grue’s Choice
I’m pretty sure the XYZZYs started as a “fun forum” thing and only gained any sense of credibility for consistently running for so long. I get it, “tradition” but there’s no reason we can’t evolve and move forward from the way things have always been done.
The point is engagement, and the goal is getting people’s eyes on IF and inspire discussion and visibility. PCT does that in its own way. We know Competitions are the main vector for title visibility, so the more awards and game reviews that can be produced, the better.
Ryan Veeder created his own competition and awards and runs it whenever he feels like doing it.
I guess people could volunteer to be part of a committee. I’m not sure what action can be taken beyond that unless Pinkunz is on board. Or, if Pinkunz can’t be reached, then Sam would have to be on board.
Just to check, what exactly did you ask Sam about doing? Taking the current format of the IFDB awards and renaming them to the XYZZYs?
I ask because if there’s a desire to do something about the XYZZYs while Dan is unavailable, getting Sam’s sign-off on it would probably be the best way to forestall any questions about legitimacy. I suspect that would be most likely to happen if the intention were to run the XYZZYs in as close to their existing format as possible, and also if it’s clear that it’s intended as a stopgap measure rather than a permanent move to a different stewardship structure.
And personally as a side note, I think we should have an “Oscars for IF” which XYZZY kind of was in the past. I think the most difficult and labor-intensive part is the voting which usually is clunky because of the situation (this happened one year) where “Best Writing” solicits nominations and 20 worthy games each get one nomination, then two games get more than one and due to “statistical tie” there are only two nominations for best writing. We have a limited voting pool.
I’d humbly submit that there should be an award decided by a rotating “expert” committee - the community nominates games and then a rotating panel of experienced author/players review submissions, play and discuss privately, perhaps review, then decide which games get the award so it’s expert review instead of the whims of voting statistics.
That’s probably a way we might solicit people like Aaron Reed and Emily Short - who are tremendously busy IF “superstars” - to participate. They can’t look at 8000 nominees, but might be able to carve out time to check out five “finalists” and provide commentary since it’s much more of a short-term commitment.
(That was actually originally the de-facto “prize” concept for XYZZYs - the finalists and winner got “expert review” from IF veterans)
I think I would agree with this, if we can’t restart them with Sam or pinkunz. As Hanon said, it’s just a tradition. I think a lot of this fuss is fixation on the past and “how it’s always been”, tbh (not from any single person). We can make new traditions, and we’ve already started to. It’s not the end of the world. I still hold hope that pinkunz can finish things, but if he can’t, I won’t be that sad about the loss of the XYZZYs.
Speaking as a user rather than a mod, my two cents is that Pinkunz should be part of this conversation if possible, and I’m happy to wait until his current emergencies are dealt with before we talk about next steps. It sounds like he was already delegating and coordinating the work before another disaster derailed everything, which is the same thing anyone else would be doing.
I don’t know him, but I hope everything works out ok for him.
Awards, shmawards…
True, regarding XYZZY, but as said that shouldn’t mean we don’t create new traditions that don’t involve previous IP and people who are sidelined by Real Life, and doesn’t mean we have to discard the XYZZY format completely in the future as a separate thing.
Very true, but we already have the IFDB awards, right? We’ve been making new traditions already.
I like Sam and I like Dan, they’re both really nice people.
The two sides in this argument remind me of that chart of conservative vs liberal, where liberals are concerned about the good of the world and society as a whole while conservatives are concerned about individual liberty. So people supporting Pinkunz’s sense of dignity are like the conservatives and people wanting the other hundreds of community members to have the awards are like the liberals.
But I think the deadly flaw in the XYZZY Awards is that this tension can exist at at all. Why are they set up in a way that one person has control of a community event? Why are they set up in a way so that if that one person has literally any major life event it becomes an embarrassing public ordeal?
I did set up the IFDB rewards to replace the XYZZY Awards. I only called them IFDB awards and picked different categories out of respect for Sam and Pinkunz. But I also set them up to be ‘open source’ so that they can transfer seamlessly to a new group through public voting. If I don’t show up one year, anyone can take over (with a public vote) and it’s okay.
That’s also the reason I’m going to open source Spring Thing’s code this year. With the IFArchive backups and the open source website code, anyone should be able to reconstruct the whole Spring Thing website.
I do think this situation is unfortunate for everyone involved, but even if Pinkunz’s health and situation is restored (for which I fervently hope and pray), the system still has a vulnerability that puts pressure on its ‘runner’.
Edit: Found the image of the conservative/liberal thing:
For Spring Thing, it might be good to also write down somewhere under what circumstances someone else can take it over, and how, similar to what you did for the IFDB Awards.
5 posts were split to a new topic: Pulled from What do XYZZY’s mean
@AmandaB, I hope it’s clear that I’ve been talking about Pinkunz-as-organizer-of-the-XYZZY-Awards and not Pinkunz-as-a-whole-person. Any conversation about the status of the XYZZYs naturally flows toward the person with the responsibility for them, so it’s inevitable that he come up, but as I’ve said so many times it’s not personal to me. I would consider accepting the role of temporary caretaker to get the XYZZYs on firmer ground and set up new long-term arrangements, if that’s necessary, and I appreciate your vote of confidence. However, I agree with jwalrus that a formal public handover would be needed to preserve the legitimacy of the awards, so it’s really a decision for the current organizer.
@Encorm, I understand that some people are being motivated by the desire to stick up for a personal friend, but since I don’t know Pinkunz I’m coming at this with a “needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” perspective. I’m not interested in personal details because I’m not interested in making this a personal matter; it’s Pinkunz’s right to keep such matters private, in any case. To be honest, I don’t really want to know those details in the first place, since I’m not looking to personally excuse him any more than I am to personally attack him. What matters to me is that the duties of the role aren’t being fulfilled in a publicly-visible way; given the history leading to the previous handoff, this doesn’t seem like it should be a controversial stance.
I’m not sure that I’m correctly understanding the details of the posts from jwalrus and SomeOne2 above, but it sounds like they have personally already worked to complete the vetting for at least a large part of the games for 2024. (Thanks to both of you, by the way – the news is welcome and the effort is appreciated.) Perhaps there will be more official communication soon.
I do hope that rileypb’s proposal gets some traction, since I don’t think the current de facto policy of non-communication is serving the community very well, and a formal committee structure would add some much-needed resilience.
Who sponsors the XYZZY awards? That is, who assigns responsibility for managing them? Who has the authority to make decisions about it?
(edited) And perhaps most importantly, who has the right to complain about someone holding their own award and using the ‘XYZZY’ name to describe it? Is it copyrighted? Is the name owned by anyone?
