Asking for help is a skill unto itself, especially when there’s so much talent around here just waiting to be used. I think more people could take a page out of your book, Amanda. 
Congratulations on the very well-deserved win, and I can’t wait to see what you (and your army!) come up with next.
Congratulations everyone! Lots of strong entries this round!
Congratulations to all Winners! And to all Nominees! And a round of applause for yourselves, while we’re at it!
Amanda, you’re a rising star. I hope to read and play many more of your works in the years to come.
Chin Kee Yong, I’m very glad to see your piece was acknowledged. One of the most engrossing IFs I played in recent years.
Mathbrush, well deserved on the puzzle award. For me, your moving-stage-with-laser-fight was best individual, but great to have the entire puzzle collection prized.
E. Joyce and N. Cormier, you know I love Lady Thalia. And Melpomene. And both of them together…
Robin Johnson, thanks for helping close the gap between click and parser.
I haven’t played the other games yet, but congrats to you all!
You and @DeusIrae becoming our IF Dad Cheerleaders has honestly been the best part of the whole Lady Thalia experience. 
I am glad to serve! …though now I kinda want this on a t-shirt.
I’m a little late to the party here, but congratulations to all the winners! And I’m deeply flattered by the recognition for Lady Thalia. In a game that is largely about talking to people, it’s especially important for the.NPCs to be fun, I think, so I’m glad people thought they were!
I’d also like to be one more echo of congrats to @AmandaB and the individual winners. Good work! I wish I had more playing time to give things their due…
I played a lot of great games in 2021, but none of them were nominated. I haven’t played any of the XYZZY Award nominees, so I couldn’t vote. If the nominees (and winners) were better than all the games I played, then the IF scene is certainly in a very healthy position.
I’ve been thinking recently that it could be healthy for the IF community to have another yearlong game awards set, kind of how like all the compra are springing up to rival IFComp. If you set up a new award system with the community you interact the most with, I think it could be fun. I’ve thought about setting up “The IFDB awards” in a year or two. It’s a new and exciting time in the IF world!
What were the games you most enjoyed this last year?
Even for XYZZYs, it would be useful to start this conversation much earlier, since I had such a hard time remembering the specifics of names and individual puzzles over a year later. I suspect WHHoGG won because a murdered and murderous ghost is memorable, rather than because it was the best game.
A few of my favorite games from 2022 were: The Bones of Rosalinda, Computerfriend, The Impossible Stairs, Custard & Mustard’s Big Adventure, A Long Way To the Nearest Star, The Good Ghost, A Chinese Room, Lady Thalia and the Rose of Rocroi.
There were many others with highly nominatable elements.
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MEL !
This is a pretty good list! I’d also add Filthy Aunt Mildred, The Grown-up Detective Agency, Cannelé and Nomnom, and of course both Fairest and The Spectators to my personal favorites. There’s a bunch of IFComp games from this year that I haven’t played yet so I’m sure there’s more.
This is a pretty common experience. I’ve seen a lot of people take a few days to try out the games once the list comes out, and then vote after that. That’s one reason the voting period is so long.
Right, Filthy Aunt Mildred was faboo. I also forgot According to Cain, which I loved. ARGH, it’s not even 2023 yet and I already can’t keep up.
I’m late to this, but whoa what humbling news! I am now a XYZZY Award winning co-author. Nnneat! (Bernard Bernoulli smile)
Was the Excalibur wiki really released in 2021? It feels like so long ago I fear I’ve forgotten most of it.
Uh, is this the place for acceptance speeches? Ahem. Here I go anyway…
Obviously first and foremost I must thank my co-authors. Dare I even say the real authors? The Excalibur wiki wouldn’t exist without J.J. Guest and wouldn’t’ve been finished without G.C. Baccaris. Between the two of them I feel like I’m just the bread crust on this sandwich. All other wiki contributors, too, thank you, yes even and especially Ian and the rest. Also to my fellow XYZZY tie-winners and everyone else nominated. It’s a thrill to be in such esteemed company!
Secondly, maybe less obviously but as emphatically, I wish to build on my reticence to say “real authors” and reaffirm my position that the conspiracy theory stating Excalibur is just an “interactive fiction” written by three of us is still just as wrong. This erroneous idea has been around for some time, so long I’m not even sure of its genesis. The show came out before I at least was even born, I dunno how I’d fabricate all that. To clarify: the wiki itself was a recent invention, yes, and J.J. Guest’s brainchild, but pieced together lovingly from of course real sources as anyone can see. Has everybody really forgotten the show? C’mon, I hardly think that’s likely. Not everybody. Lethe is a myth, right? Unless…
I also noted some reviews (I forget which by now, maybe it was just one) referred to J.M. Vaillant as an existentialist, but I’d like to point out that he’s generally considered a nihilist more in line with like Zapffe or Ligotti. His “Hantises” (quotes or italics? I’ve seen them used so interchangeably on the Web that I can hardly remember anymore) takes the stance that Sartre’s “bad faith” is itself a sort of “bad faith,” considering that the freedom it assumes is wholly illusory. Ineluctable, atavistic haunting and all that. If I still had the book I would quote it with a page number or something, but I lost my copy when I moved across country almost a whole decade ago now. Yeesh how time flies! I was pretty sure I’d returned it to the library (pretty sure… that and HPL’s Collected Letters Volume V, which later turned up in another box though Hantises did not), but UC Santa Cruz still charged me for it.
Funny story, one of the things I had almost added to the wiki that got caught and (rightfully!) edited out was something I recalled watching on CBC the night of a comet or meteor shower or some such astronomical event I forget exactly, but it turned out to be the opening from another show, “Die Madchen Aus Dem Weltraum,” (starring Blake’s Seven’s Gareth Thomas) with music by Berry Lipman. Not that it was played clearly in the astronomical event or even clearly remembered by me, being something I saw when I was like maybe eight. We had a laugh over that… what with the pandemic interlude and all that laugh seems about as long ago as the show. Coincidentally, I love Berry Lipman and just rediscovered his happy sounds a couple years ago, about the same time I picked up Disco Elysium and (not necessarily related to that game plot-wise) rediscovered how disco really did connect the entire world for a decade or two. Ah the things we forget, eh?
What was I on about? Oh, right. Excalibur! What a show. Magnificently, daringly weird, even bleak, scary, wonderful. I loved every bit I could catch, even if it was fuzzy or even sometimes too staticky to really interpret with 100% accuracy ever. Such are memories, c’est la vie.
Thanks again to everyone who helped catalog it, to all its fans, to all of the wiki readers who either revisited it with us or discovered it newly, and to anyone or anything else I might be forgetting. Mayhap one day there’ll be a Lodestar One Two? But if there is please… please don’t come wearing a chef’s hat. Surely we will check all lightsabers at the door. Unless we forget (and we’ll probably forget).
Uh oh, that sounds like it might be me…
(Checks my IFDB review)
Yup, that was me! In my defense, I kinda think everyone’s an Existentialist until proven otherwise, and even if Vaillant isn’t an orthodox Sartrean or anything, his writings sure make it seem like he thinks that there’s a kind of freedom at the far end of the radical forgetting that he espouses - sure, from one angle, that’s nihilistic self-erasure but maybe on another view that points towards something like existence preceding essence?
EDIT: forgot the most important part, congrats on the win!
Speaking of Ian Newell, I ran into him recently in the Big Finish section of London’s Forbidden Planet and he completely blanked me. I resisted the urge to ask if he still had his Return of the Jedi duvet set, though the temptation was strong with this one. Anna Sprague on the other hand sent me a lovely text message to congratulate us on the award. Last time I spoke to her she was writing her own Twine game; essentially an interactive “fix-up” of some of her Excalibur cast-and-crew slash-fic, but with the names altered to avoid further lawsuits. I texted back to ask her how that was going and she replied “don’t ask”.
Yes, it really has been nearly two years since we released Excalibur. It still feels like a miracle that we finished it at all. It’s one of those projects which you look back on and think, if I’d known how much work that was going to be at the outset I’d never have taken it on. I’d never have started it without Duncan and I’d never have finished it without Grim, and together we’ve created something none of us could have come up with on our own. Congratulations to both of you on the award, you deserve it and I love you both.
@StringWizard You are definitely a real author. We came up with the premise for the Excalibur TV show, the main cast and the core concepts together. Your most important contribution in my eyes was Jean Michel Vaillant, whose philosophy set the tone for whole piece. It would have been a completely different animal without that chain-smoking Gallic curmudgeon and his nihilistic worldview.
@DeusIrae I suppose there’s plenty of category overlap between nihilists and existentialists anyway, since neither is really mutually exclusive. Camus rejected the existentialist label, but it stuck with him anyway. Not that he was a nihilist, just sayin’ it’s a shoe that probably ultimately fits on many feet.
@J_J_Guest Me? A real author? Nay, I am at least three last I checked. Ha ha… OK, OK… stopping before I derail the thread over what reality means pertaining to authorship.
That duvet still cracks me up. I mean, it’s both awesome and somehow… just… it’s all Ian. Don’t tell him I said that. Do let me know if you hear when Anna’s Twine slash fic gets finished, that sounds juicy. I’d beta-test that. Hope you get a chance to say hi to all the other wiki contributors for me. It’s been too long.
Congrats and love again to everyone. The IF hits just keep coming. Who knows what we’ll come up with next year, hm? So much looks so promising already!
Congratulations everyone! I missed the results since they were close to Christmas.
Thanks for nominating Cygnet Committee in the media category
Congrats also to @gravesnailgames’s Fish and Dagger for winning in that category. I know it got a lot of positive reception and I enjoyed playing it — in addition to being well-made overall it also played to my tastes. I wrote my own review of it a while ago for those who are curious.