Glad to see a full range of opinions on display. 
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I don’t have much personal experience with them- but I did notice that people often listed if they had won one in their personal bios on social media sites, and usually the award would correlate with having a really good game, or body of games, even if it wasn’t to my personal taste. Sort of like a cool little nod of acknowledgement from people in the same club- even if you ran across them in wildly disparate situations, the fact that they knew of or had one themselves meant they were probably entrenched in the tight knit community here, and had put out great work- and I always thought that was sort of lovely. A bit like the little red accessories in The Night Circus to mark out devotees- a scarlet knit scarf means nothing to most crowds, but those who know, know- and there’s a camaraderie around it.
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The XYZZY Awards are the one place where individual aspects of a work can be recognised. Most competitions or other awards effectively go to the best all-rounder, but the XYZZY Awards can go to the best puzzle/NPC/setting in an otherwise very flawed work. (In theory; in practice more people enjoy a good all-rounder and are less likely to play the very flawed one just to see the one diamond it might contain.)
They’re also the only place for technical achievements to be awarded in their own right.
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There’s only one thing that can work otherwise: the IFDB Awards work as pretty much the child of the XYZZY Awards by taking on some of the roles (the best puzzle, etc.)
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I suspect peeps are likely to give the XYZZYs some leeway if folks knew thar be rumbling under yonder surface even if not much can be seen atm.
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I feel like you’re being modest; you’ve actually come up with some well thought out plans to improve the XYZZY’s, and got quite a few ‘likes’ on it, too:
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Do you know something we don’t? 
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Such a great book. Carry on with XYZZY talk, but also go read this book.
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I actually ran into the game they had commissioned from the same people who wrote Fallen London, before grabbing the novel. It was a really cool introduction to their in house style, and really beautifully suited the dream like quality to the novel. I’m not sure if it would still work, as StoryNexus has been dead for quite some time… But a great little game.
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Mmmaybe we shouldn’t be so noisy about them not being awarded last year, then? I mean… we could just agree to back each other up if we all put “Won XYZZY for Best Game of 2022, (game you made in 2022)” on our resumes, right? Share the opportunity?
Just, uh, let’s not all apply for the same job.
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In another post I mentioned that I see the IFComp as the equivalent to interactive fiction’s E3. The XYZZY awards are IF’s answer to the annual Game Awards. I was surprised that the 2022 iteration was not there, it probably should have been held earlier in the year.
Since I reviewed every game in IFComp 2023, I’m hoping to see a revival of XYZZY.
By the way, Xyzzy is a special weapon in my project, but I’m not allowed to divulge what exactly it does and how it functions.
However, the XYZZYs are not a good indicator for people new to IF to check out which games they should play. The IFComp winning entries, slightly better, but not much. Something beginner-friendly is more appropriate.
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To be clear, the 2021 XYZZY’s, reviewing games that happened in 2021, did occur in 2022, just late 2022. Nov 21st - Dec 22nd, iirc. And the 2022 XYZZYs would typically occur in 2023. Technically, there’s enough room left to run the 2022 awards before New Years Eve. Although, they’d have to announce in the next few days.
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The XYZZY rewards do matter to me! They help me find what was “best” for particular categories (e.g. setting, puzzles, NPCs) and learn from the masters of the art. It also helps in that it not only considers a particular comp (like IFComp), but all games overall. Not all games are released through one of the major comps, and it would be bad if we would miss out on what is out there, just because the author(s) decided not to enter any.
By the way, I joined the lasting “tradition” of adding the special magic word to my IFComp game as well (not in the big archived version, but in the during the comp updated version which hopefully will be available in IFArchive soon.)
Small note: the historical link appears to be broken?
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After playing a game from last year’s IFComp, I was thinking about adding an XYZZY puzzle to my game that has been in the works for several years. It my be an XYZZY epic game. 
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Looks like the wayback machine snagged an image: https://web.archive.org/web/20210813051650/http://xyzzyawards.org/awards/historical.php
Edit: Oh, bummer. None of the list of links have been captured. I guess we have to settle for Wikipedia:
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I always thought of the XYZZYs as the main award of the year - like an Oscar. It was not connected to a competition, but any game from the year could be nominated for something. Like those big awards, “the nomination is the thing” even if a game didn’t win, an XYZZY nomination was still a big deal and great recognition and could be listed in a blurb to make it stand out.
I suppose it’s more like a people’s choice type award since anyone can vote. At one point it was also very valuable because IF veterans were asked to write an essay about a category they had specific attachment to and how each nomination and the winner related to it. Even though these happened after, this was almost like the “award package” they usually show before they give an award.
I started giving some side-eye in 2013 when there were only 3 nominees for Writing out of a normal five. I was like “that can’t possibly be true…” in a year where I could name at least ten games that at minimum had nomination-worthy writing. The report back was essentially one game got several nominations; the other two got two apiece and then there were maybe fifteen other games that got one nomination apiece and cancelled each other out.
This was when people could only nominate one game in each category and the rules were re-thought so people could list a second choice as a backup to fill the category.
I still think they are important, and I know they require a lot of effort (every game published in a year must be vetted for eligibility to avoid mistakes, re-releases, ineligible games, etc) but the timeframe for when they happened started slipping later and later, and interest in the nominated games had been replaced by the following year’s games so they weren’t as fresh in people’s minds.
The other thing is since this is basically a community choice award with a limited number of voters, it’s very possible for one very popular game to get vote-flooded for every category. This happened inadvertently one year (either for XYZZY or IFComp) that had a Choice of Games entry and that entire huge community wanted to show support and overwhelmed the number of votes for everything else. This will happen in a niche interest group where there are a normal limited number of participants but the voting is open to anyone and another community can inadvertently stuff the ballot box for their game.
Birdland swept in its year, and while it was a great game that deserved accolades in all the categories it won for, it had a fanbase outside of the normal community that pushed it to the top of every category. While not undeserving, it was already a popular game that pushed out other works that might have been deserving to be recognized also.
My only suggestion would be to re-organize it so nominations are by the community, and the winners are selected from those nominees by a rotating slate of “experts” who only need to play all the nominations in their category and decide on winners with commentary. Don’t worry about vetting every game in the year and only vet them for eligibility when nominated to reduce that task.
And…hopefully start the nomination process in January, hand the nominees to the experts in February so they have a couple months to play them with a goal of announcing the nominees in the beginning of April and then winners by the end of April. First quarter of the year!
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I believe I read that Dan and others from COG have learned from that and are now more circumspect about the XYZZYs each year. I don’t know if I could find where I read that, but I don’t think I imagined it. Also, while I do believe your suggestions have some merit, I’d be happy if they continued to happen at all, improved or not.
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Why? Why not simply vet only the games that have been nominated? Much less work. Easy to throw out any nomination for the wrong year or such. Easier, anyway, than vetting every single game released in a year.
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I don’t know for sure, but usually the XYZZY nomination form is an enormous drop down list of games, so they likely were pre-compiling a database of valid nominees. Maybe this made sense in the past since people only could nominate one game in each category so people’s nominations wouldn’t be nullified if the game wasn’t valid. It’s less of an issue since people can choose a nominee and a backup-nominee.
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