XYZZY Awards, round 1

The first round of the XYZZY Awards is live. You can login (with your IF Comp account) here, and vote here. The first round will close in the first minute of May 1.

(In fact, voting has been live for a little while, because I was testing some things, and some of you eager monkeys snuck in and voted already. While I appreciate your enthusiasm, your ballots are probably screwed up now, so you should go and change them.)

As promised, first-round voting now allows you to make two nominations in each category (which must be for different games). This is an experiment - if it goes well we may broaden it next year.

Also, Sunless Sea is in. Thank you all for your thoughts on the subject.

I am getting an error message that I can only vote once per game per category, even though I have not in fact double-voted any of the games – anyone else running into this?

A couple games - Steph Cherrywell’s for example - seem to be double-listed.

I haven’t seen this from anyone else - if it persists, could you email me and Dan Shiovitz your ballot so we can better diagnose what’s going on?

That should have been fixed; it was an entirely aesthetic issue (that is, the votes were still going to the right database entry). Let me know if it persists.

We’re also rolling out the Xyzzymposium articles from last year: here’s Gabriel Murray on Best Story.

(We’re still doing the peer-review process on some of them; if anybody would be willing to volunteer to glance over an article or two for quality-control purposes, that’d be super helpful.)

Yay Xyzzymposium!

I’ve started putting up discussion posts at my blog for anyone who cares to use them to discuss… I have to start doing morning things now so I’ll get to the text-entry fields later today. These are supposed to provide more flexible venues for discussion than the For Your Consideration IFDb polls at a forum-neutral venue–so if anyone wants to promote them at other community sites (Twine forums, ChoiceScript forums, etc.) that’d be great!

I’ll bump this when I’ve got all the posts up.

Also, not to be too demandy, but I had a lot of trouble finding the nominee/category lists from the front page of the XYZZY site–I had to come back here and follow the link to the voting page. Maybe it’d be a good idea to link that more prominently?

@matt w I think you have Best Writing twice, and no Best Story. Nice idea, by the way!

Thanks, and fixed! I hope to get the rest of the posts up this afternoon.

Thank you! I was hoping this would eventually happen.

Your username has paid off.

It’s, well, after noon and I’ve posted the rest of my discussion posts.

These are meant to be able to provide a venue for anyone to be able to discuss the nominees without needing a special login (that’s why I’m not doing them on this forum) and with the ability to go back and forth and clarify what you mean (as opposed to the IFDb For Your Consideration polls, which you also might want to look at). It’s my hope that people will be able to use these to focus their attention on the free-text entry fields in particular (like Individual Puzzle and Individual NPC). Please stop by!

Xyzzymposium continues with Joey Jones on Best Implementation.

A reminder: this Saturday will be the last day of voting. If you were planning to play a few extra games before casting your votes, you had better get to it!

My coffee almost came out my nose reading this note. Luckily I’m drinking iced coffee.

More Xyzzymposium: Yoon Ha Lee on Best Writing.

A little under two days remaining to vote. As usual, there are a bunch of tight categories: your vote absolutely counts.

A LITTLE OVER NINE HOURS. I am biting my nails.

Eeeeeee…