I understand, Max. We all feel the mix of urgency and anxiousness. Call me a sentimental fool, but I feel it’s best to do a wellness check on your repairman before we start searching the classifieds for another repairman.
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If we wait for a call until the new year, then that seems like a good amount of time. And plus if we don’t get it until new year, then we start around new year. That will be the start of a new term and I will have loads of time, so I will definitely be able to help.
Plus, if new year not only will if be a sign @maga has sort of given up on the XYZZYs, but then we can combine this one and 2023 together and give it a new start at the beginning of the year. Seems tricky, but probably better.
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He will either answer or he won’t. Either way, we’ll have our answer.
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We absolutely don’t have to do this, but I can’t imagine seeing this as a hostile takeover. It’s not hostile. And given that this probably wouldn’t be official, it wouldn’t be a takeover. Surely you don’t really think that’s anyone’s intent here?
If @dfabulich has emailed multiple times over a year and not heard back, I’d say that’s a pretty good indication that it’s not going to happen. Will another month matter?
It feels very sad to just let the whole year go by without trying. Although if it doesn’t get community support, clearly it’s DOA.
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I’d like either an acknowledgement that they are or are not continuing, honestly. Running the XYZZYs without the latter feels hostile to me. Presumptuous at least. Your opinion is just as valid, of course.
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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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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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