XYZZY Awards 2020, and a zeroth round for 2021

It’s a new year, and the XYZZYs approach. (At a reasonable time this year, I hope.) If there’s something you think deserves consideration, please make sure it’s got an IFDB entry.

For 2021, I’m strongly considering instituting a ‘zeroth round’ - open nominations, no limits (beyond common-sense ones about not automating nominations), to populate the first-round voting list, instead of pulling from every game in IFDB. (You can nominate your own works in the zeroth round, or someone else’s; the idea is to limit the list to At Least One Person Thinks This Is Relevant.)

The idea here would be to produce a less sprawling first-round nominees list, distribute the work of checking eligibility throughout the year (rather than in one big block that holds the Awards up until it’s done), hopefully help populate the much-neglected Tech Dev category, and possibly even make more visibility for games released earlier in the year. I don’t have the details fully nailed down yet; and I welcome feedback on it, but unless there’s a pretty unambiguous ‘hell no’ from the community then I’m pretty committed to the change.

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If you do this, I suggest mentioning what the award categories are on the nomination form. It might help jog people’s memories about IF they wouldn’t otherwise have thought of.

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I’m super excited about this! (And thanks for enduring me bugging you about it.)

Are there particular details you’d like feedback on? There was some discussion about this in 2018.

In my mind, the zeroth round could be as simple as a voting form with “everything in IFDB that was marked with a release date in 2020.”

(In the hopefully near future when we can make it open year-round, and/or have a “nominate” button in IFDB.)

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To clarify: I am not implementing the change for the 2020 award year; I am proposing it for the 2021 award year, which is why I opened the post by asking that people add IFDB entries as usual.

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