What do we talk about when we talk about IF?

This brings me back to something I thought of when the latest SPAG came out: What would people think of adding a XYZZY category for Best Critical Essay? I.e. a way to recognize an individual piece of excellent critical writing about IF, and thus to enourage more/better critical writing. There could also (or instead) be a Best Critical Writer award, to recognize someone’s steady high-quality output over the year, although it may be that there are too few (and too obvious) candidates for this at the moment.

+1

I would theoretically like this to be possible, but I think it would be a really tricky category to generate sufficient interest in, unless we found some feasible way to generate a suitable first-round nominee list.

My general policy thus far on new award categories has been that we don’t consider awards that are about people, rather than the work they do. (So no Best Newcomer or Lifetime Achievement awards.)

I assume that means Best Critical Essay would be under consideration whereas Best Critical Writer wouldn’t. What about Best Collected Essays or Best Collected Nonfiction, considering someone’s body of work during the yearly consideration period?

Makes sense. I only thought of it because there is a Hugo award for Best Fan Writer, separate from Best Related Work (which seems to include both critical writing and auxiliary stuff like encyclopedias/bestiaries).

I could swear I wrote a response to this topic and it seems not to have been saved properly (or I closed a browser window inadvertently).

For me, the “golden age” of IF discussion was indeed the rec.arts.int-fiction days in the mid to late 90’s. One thing that existed then that’s missing was Graham Nelson. Graham had a way of making lyrical, amusing, and interesting posts about various subjects. His public commentary on IF subjects is sorely missed from my perspective. Granted, Inform 7 is an extraordinary achievement and if that takes up all of his “IF time”, so be it. But I miss his commentary and thoughts.

Real life has intervened as well. There are many other very good “IF people” who have moved on from public discourse. Neil DeMaus, David Dyte, Adam Cadre, Mike Gentry, John Cater, and more. In many cases, people have kids, more intense careers, or just realized “something has to give” and are focused on other hobbies or passions.

In regards to the Theory Club, as much as I know about IF, I have not played as many games as Emily or a handful of other people…those discussions would ping back and forth between people with deep knowledge of many games. The problem with that is when you relate contextual knowledge to a group of people missing that context, the discussion becomes very intimidating. All it takes is the mention of one game that you haven’t played and poof, the conversation is lost.

So if we were to start something workable, it would have to have someone willing to invest time in selecting material, identifying a topic, and giving people a heads up on said material, prior to the discussion. I’m not sure a book club discussion is quite right, because it may be fruitful to discuss more than one game in relation to a given topic. The key is to keep the focus on the identified material and have a facilitator maintain the focus of the discussion.

Another element to public discussion is the venue. Clearly ifMUD is an antiquated method of group discussion these days. Although many of us old-timers prefer it, this is unlikely to be the case for people in the wider world. Given the abundance of group chat mechanisms on the Internets, we should be able to come up with a better solution.

I consider Slack to be an excellent tool, but the way in which people need to sign up is probably too cumbersome. I almost think we need an ad-hoc tool of some sort that we can “spin up” for a given chat at any time. One that does not require any sign-up, can offer minimal chatting capabilities, allow transcripts to be saved, and then be torn down when the chat is completed. We could announce a unique URL in various blogs and this forum. A little research reveals bloochat.com/ which seems to do exactly as I’ve described. You can even set a password.

My sense of this is that we need someone “newer” to host the discussion. Many of us “old-timers” have a strong sense of IF, have had many theory-based discussions, and are focused on bleeding edge concepts that may or may not fit into a public theory discussion. But we should still have discussions on “older” topics like conversations, puzzles, and other theory topics.

David C.
plover.net/~dave/blog

Going through some old blog posts today reminded me of this series of posts, from January 2011, which provide the stats that were available to me at the time about RAIF discussion levels and also trends in content and production of games. Some of the observations are relevant to what we’ve been discussing here:

Scraping IFDB
More IFDB data
Take That, Mazes

That is a fantastic idea. Finding people to nominate essays would be pretty easy, if only because essays take much less time to read than a game does to play. It’s also has a low barrier to entry for those of us who want to win a XYZZY, and the payoff for the attempt is to give game authors the feedback they need.

Maga, can we please please make this happen? Please?

Again, I have three concerns about this:

  • Populating the list. This is the single biggest problem; the others are more vague qualms than concrete obstacles. I can’t see how it could be anything other than a text-entry first round, but I also don’t think that many people would be likely to remember a critical essay, however brilliant, published over a year previously. Or, at least, not enough to bother remembering its title and looking it up before voting for it.
  • Conflict of interest. I’m more of an IF critic than I am an IF author. Thus far, I’ve been OK with administering a ballot on which I occasionally appear (still, I felt a small breath of relief this year when Hadean Lands moved into first place.) But this would involve creating a category crafted to reward the thing that I do most of, so I feel a little itchy about it.
  • Circularity. Awards ceremonies are always at risk of becoming an exercise in community self-congratulation. No, scratch that: they’re always exercises in community self-congratulation, and that’s a legitimate role and is OK. But this would be second-order back-slapping, if you get me. Congratulating ourselves for making stuff is one thing; congratulating ourselves for talking about stuff we’ve made is… another thing.

This might be better served by a small group of people putting together a year-end review of writing than by adding to the xyzzy slate.