XYZZY Awards 2015: finalist round

Announcingthe finalists of the 2015 XYZZY Awards. Congratulations, all!

Voting in the second round is open now, and will remain so through May 14. Go, vote!

Best Game
Birdland (Brendan Patrick Hennessy)
Brain Guzzlers from Beyond! (Steph Cherrywell)
Hollywood Visionary (Aaron A. Reed)
Midnight. Swordfight. (Chandler Groover)
SPY INTRIGUE (furkle)

Best Writing
Birdland (Brendan Patrick Hennessy)
Laid Off from the Synesthesia Factory (Katherine Morayati)
Midnight. Swordfight. (Chandler Groover)
SPY INTRIGUE (furkle)

Best Story
Arcane Intern (Unpaid) (Astrid Dalmady)
Birdland (Brendan Patrick Hennessy)
Cape (Bruno Dias)
Map (Ade McT)

Best Setting
Beautiful Dreamer (S. Woodson)
Chlorophyll (Steph Cherrywell)
Neon Haze (Porpentine, Brenda Neotenomie)
Sub Rosa (Joey Jones, Melvin Rangasamy)
Summit (Phantom Williams)
Sunless Sea (Failbetter Games)

Best Puzzles
Brain Guzzlers from Beyond! (Steph Cherrywell)
Chlorophyll (Steph Cherrywell)
Oppositely Opal (Buster Hudson)
Scroll Thief (Daniel M. Stelzer)
Sub Rosa (Joey Jones, Melvin Rangasamy)
Toby’s Nose (Chandler Groover)

Best NPCs
Birdland (Brendan Patrick Hennessy)
Brain Guzzlers from Beyond! (Steph Cherrywell)
Hollywood Visionary (Aaron A. Reed)
Midnight. Swordfight. (Chandler Groover)
Nowhere Near Single (kaleidofish)

Best Individual Puzzle
Catching the fairy in Oppositely Opal (Buster Hudson)
The Hard Puzzle in Hard Puzzle (Ade McT)
Identifying the murderer in Toby’s Nose (Chandler Groover)
The skull in Sub Rosa (Joey Jones, Melvin Rangasamy)
Understanding how the RPS cannon works in Brain Guzzlers from Beyond! (Steph Cherrywell)

Best Individual NPC
Bell Park in Birdland (Brendan Patrick Hennessy)
Dmitri in Midnight. Swordfight. (Chandler Groover)
Hana in Hana Feels (Gavin Inglis)
Winter Storm Draco in Winter Storm Draco (Ryan Veeder)

Best Individual PC
Bridget in Birdland (Brendan Patrick Hennessy)
Martin Voigt in Darkiss! Wrath of the Vampire - Chapter 1: the Awakening (Marco Vallarino)
Opal in Oppositely Opal (Buster Hudson)
Toby in Toby’s Nose (Chandler Groover)

Best Implementation
Laid Off from the Synesthesia Factory (Katherine Morayati)
Midnight. Swordfight. (Chandler Groover)

Best Use of Innovation
Aspel (Emily Short)
Laid Off from the Synesthesia Factory (Katherine Morayati)
Midnight. Swordfight. (Chandler Groover)
SPY INTRIGUE (furkle)
Sunless Sea (Failbetter Games)

Best Technological Development
Raconteur

Best Use of Multimedia
Secret Agent Cinder (Emily Ryan)
Sorcery! 3 (Steve Jackson, inkle)
Summit (Phantom Williams)
Sunless Sea (Failbetter Games)
We Know the Devil (Aevee Bee)

Thanks, maga, for running the XYZZY Awards again! And congrats to all the finalists! That’s a great crop of games.

Part (all?) of the reason for the change this year to allowing two votes for each category per voter was to reduce the chances of ties leading to categories with fewer than 4 finalists (because the next number of votes has too many entries tied). As we can see, this change still didn’t solve the problem, with two categories still getting short shrift. (Although Best Technological Development may just not have enough pre-qualification for people to know what’s eligible-- that’s a different issue.)

I understand maga’s argument that allowing more votes per voter would lead to more broad-consensus finalists rather than leaning towards finalists that have a passionate minority of fans the way having only one or two votes per voter does, and I think I have been convinced that the latter is more desirable for the XYZZY Awards. But, I just thought of a compromise that might work: allow each voter to provide a ranked list of up to (say) 5 entries in each category, but, only use the 1st place votes, and go to the runner-up votes only if needed to break a tie that results in fewer than 4 nominees in the category. This way, you wouldn’t include games that everybody liked but nobody loved; games would still require a top-4 number of first-place nominations to even qualify. But the runner-up data would help make sure that the categories are well-stocked.

What do you think? Any major flaws in this idea?

Yes, Tech Dev is its own special problem; most voters didn’t vote on it at all, and those who did mostly didn’t take advantage of their extra votes, and sometimes voted on things which weren’t remotely eligible (like, say, Lectrote, which was released in January 2016). I think we either need to compose some kind of eligibility list, or

The major concern I have with your proposal is that it it’s fiddly - it would take a bit of work to implement, but more importantly than that, it’d make extra work for voters. A lot of voters didn’t take advantage of both of their nomination slots; a lot of voters ignore the text-entry categories because they have trouble remembering NPC names or specific puzzles. First-round XYZZY voting is already laborious, particularly if you’re doing a conscientious job of it, and I’m reluctant to make it any more so.

A simpler approach would be to just change the policy on what the acceptable number of finalists is. People (at least, some subset of people) seem specifically pissed off at categories with only two nominees; on the other hand, I’ve never heard anybody complain that six nominees is watering things down. So maybe we recalibrate a little bit and say that the acceptable range is 3-10, rather than 2-7?

(The main trick is Xyzzymposium; I’m not asking some poor writer to take on responsibility for producing in-depth articles on ten games. Six is already pushing it. But that can always get split up.)

Hm, I don’t think it would need to be more fiddly. Voting for more than one would still be optional; the form would look the same, just with more select-boxes per category, and the note that your top vote is the important one, the others are only used for tiebreaking. Even just making the existing two votes ranked might be enough, although I suppose if those two Best Implementation finalists were literally the only ones to appear on more than one ballot, then this would not have helped. (And if that’s the case then maybe the category could stand to be better-defined or something?)

Really I’m looking at this from the perspective of someone who is browsing through the finalists lists 10 years from now and wants to know what the notable games were for a given year. If there’s only two games in a category (e.g. Best Writing last year), that gives the mistaken impression that it just wasn’t a very good year for that category, for whatever reason. But in practice it’s the opposite, with an embarrassment of riches that divides the field.

Personally I feel like 5 is the sweet spot, and 4-6 seems like a good range. Three would seem pretty thin, and seven would seem crowded (and 10 seems kind of crazy). On the other hand, expanding the Best Game category to 10, a la the Oscars, might be a good idea.

The things which people find laborious in the voting process, from what I’ve heard, are 1) remembering stuff about games they’ve played, 2) choosing between games that they think are worthy.

Having extra nomination votes makes 2) easier. Making players rank them makes it harder.

That was very much not the problem; it was a very well-populated category. Third place just happened to be a five-way tie.

I’ve extended voting; it’ll remain open through the 20th. News about the ceremony to come.

In case people haven’t been looking at the web site: it appears the award ceremony will be this Saturday (the 28th), at 8am Hawai’i, 11am Pacific, noon Mountain, 1pm Central, 2pm Eastern, 7pm UK, on the MUD.