The first round of voting is over: we have the finalists (congratulations, all!), and a slightly weird announcement.
You can see the results here and vote in the finalist round here.
In one category, we found ourselves in a slightly odd situation. There were a great big pile of nominees with one vote apiece, and one nominee with more votes than all of them put together. So we had a choice - either we could nominate every game that got a single vote, or we could declare an outright winner. (Or I suppose we could have sifted the nominees by some undeclared method, but god damn that would be some dishonest shit.) We elected to declare victory by first-round knockout.
That category was Best Individual PC, and the winner is The Aqueosity from Coloratura. Congratulations to Lynnea Glasser!
We feel that a nomination should represent something significant - something for an author to be proud of, something that represents the state of affairs of current IF. That would not have been served by having a giant pile of second-round nominees.
It seems very clear to us that a second round of voting would not have changed the ultimate outcome.
It kind of messes with the ceremony and the review panel - but those are just extras, really.
(Edit: finalist voting will close on April 4th - that is, the 3rd will be the last day of voting.)
There are unusually few parser-based games up for awards this year. In Best Game, Best Writing, Best Story, Best Setting, Best NPCs, and Best Individual NPC, the majority of nominees are choice-based games; mostly Twine.
Seems like a lot more Twine games were made in 2013? A scientific analysis of IFDB search results shows more Twine games in 2013 than Inform and Tads put together.
You could make the case for quality over quantity, but if you have a core group of good makers (like you have with Twine) then I think quantity starts to trump all.
A small correction: another game is now nominated for Best Individual Puzzle (maximising your score in Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder.) This had to do with how the particulars in text-entry categories get combined.
Oooooh, silly me, I know where I went wrong. [emote]:)[/emote] I was confusing XYZZY with the IFComp. Having Coloratura here as well increased the confusion in my addled brain. Nevermind!
[spoiler]You shrug, exit the ancient ruin, and try to push the encounter out of your mind. It probably wasn’t that important anyway.
VICTORY END[/spoiler]
amazing
This was satisfying neither as game nor as literature. In fact, I felt like Arthur Dent in Mostly Harmless, when reading a novel in a certain planet is an exercise in futility as the novels there usually finish without any climax or logical conclusion… this guy did better in KING BEE, where the retro-look and gameplay was a good way to deliver a message.
then again, the single parser-based game up to votes is about an experience, delivered in short outbursts of text. where is the literary aspect of IF these days?..
