XYZZY Awards: Let's add a "Nomination Round"

Competitions
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The 2018 XYZZY Awards opened voting on July 5th, which is later than I think we’d all have liked.

I believe that this happened because the current process for XYZZY currently requires the organizer and some volunteers to wade through every single IFDB game released in the prior calendar year to first verify whether the game (still) exists, whether the game was released as complete, and whether the game is “not IF.”

This is a ton of work, and I’m grateful that Sam, Claire, and Juxi were willing to do so much work, but most of the games being evaluated had approximately 0% chance of earning an award. I think there’s a better way.

I propose to add an additional “nomination” round to the XYZZY Awards. In the nomination round, each voter could nominate games to be eligible for an XYZZY Award, out of all of the IFDB games with a “release date” in the prior calendar year, without any organizer filtering.

The XYZZY organizers could then go through all of the games that received even one nomination and just check those to ensure that the game exists, was released as “complete” in the calendar year, and was “actually IF.” I anticipate that this would be 10x or maybe even 100x easier than the job the volunteers currently do.

Any game that received even one nomination and passed organizers’ review would be eligible for the subsequent round, which would work the same way XYZZY Round 1 voting works now, but it would only include games that had at least one nomination.

I’d mentioned this idea last year on Twitter, (there I called it “Round 0” instead of a “nomination round”) and a nice little thread formed.

For the record, I do think under these circumstances it would be appropriate for authors to nominate their own games, because I think a really huge list of nominees is appropriate for the first round of voting.

It might be appropriate to limit the number of nominations per person to a reasonable number (20? 50?) just so nobody nominates the entirety of IFDB.

WDYT? Is this the right idea? Is there another related idea that would reduce the amount of work XYZZY organizers have to do before we can open the first round of voting?

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It’s already noted that the games found ineligible generally have zero chance of winning anything anyway, so could this just be part of the first round of voting? Throw the entire 20XX IFDB list onto the XYZZY site with a proviso about the eligibility criteria. The first time a game receives a vote in any category, have a human check its eligibility. In the unlikely event that it’s found to be ineligible, email all voters to let them know and offer them a chance to review their ballots if they wish.

I guess this only works if most games receive at least one vote reasonably early in the first round. If there are a lot of games getting their first (and perhaps only) vote near the end of the first round, then checking their eligibility in a timely fashion becomes much harder. I have no idea what the stats on this might be.

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I like this idea. For me, the question “What games this year are potentially worthy of an XYZZY?” (as in a dedicated “round 0” vote) might yield incomplete results, because there are some games I might not have thought of including, if I wasn’t thinking about “best setting” or another specific category. So including the categories as part of the first round could help prevent cases where you come to a specific category in round 1 and realize you should have nominated more games in round 0.

Maybe there could be a built-in review period between round 1 and round 2, to allow for checking eligibility and revising of ballots. Round 1.5.

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Re: tsawac’s tweet “I’d probably want Round 0 to be open year-round, honestly, to help with people’s flagging memories about games released earlier in the year.”

It’s a good point that something open year-round could help people remember games released earlier in the year, but (since I like Emerald’s idea of checking eligibility after people start voting in round 1) maybe it could be something unofficial so that people aren’t necessarily limited to those games in round 1. That’s basically what we do with the IFDB polls. Would the polls be a good enough reminder if they were opened early in the year, or is there a better way to do this?

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I find this search helpful to refresh the memory:

https://ifdb.tads.org/search?searchfor=%23ratings%3A3-+published%3A2018+rating%3A4-&sortby=ratu&pg=1

All games from 2018 that are rated 4* or above, that have at least 3 ratings, sorted by rating order (highest to lowest). Currently gives 27 games.

Anyway, I agree with the previous post. Make the “For your consideration” polls official, and start them at the start of the year, so they can grow organically as games are released and played. But really an awards contest for 2018 that takes place 8 or 9 months into 2019 is way, way, too late.

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so, without weighing in on whether the structure of XYZZY nomination should be changed, i wanted to provide some context on a small part of the original post. i’ve reproduced it below:

I believe that this happened because the current process for XYZZY currently requires the organizer and some volunteers to wade through every single IFDB game released in the prior calendar year to first verify whether the game (still) exists, whether the game was released as complete, and whether the game is “not IF.”
This is a ton of work, and I’m grateful that Sam, Claire, and Juxi were willing to do so much work, but most of the games being evaluated had approximately 0% chance of earning an award. I think there’s a better way.

this was a ton of work, and part of the reason for that is that i wanted it to take less time the next time. with that in mind, i made this ifdb web parser module, which automates the collection part of it, including most listed download links. the part where one has to go through all the games and play a bit of them and etc. is time-consuming, for sure, but it’s not a huge task most years.

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