I proposed “Best Scene” as a better name for “Best Moment,” not because it’s a better idea altogether.
They can still be nominated for Best Puzzles. But if nobody’s nominating or voting for BIP, then I think it makes sense to drop the category. Adding a new category (not as a replacement, just as a new category) might be prudent anyway.
So what’s less general than “scenes” but still logically related to “puzzles”?
It almost sounds like what you’re wanting will make an apple-and-oranges category no matter what.
To clarify: people vote for it once there’s a shortlist. In general there isn’t so much of a problem when the question is ‘here are the things: choose between them.’ The issue is much more about the nomination round.
I’ve said this before and I still think it: nominations should come with a one sentence justification.
I like “Best Scene” actually. Solving a puzzle corresponds nicely to what I think of as a scene – or several scenes, in which case it’s probably more like a set of puzzles rather than a single puzzle.
Trying to step into the shoes of an outsider or semi-outsider’s perspective…I think the alternate names would be even more confusing. They might be more precise but to the layperson it might be not readily apparent that this is a puzzle based category. Even with a descriptor it’s not the first impression. My recommendation would be to drop it and consolidate the voting into one more robust category.
“Best Scene” suggests to me something that probably isn’t a puzzle. Like if I were asked to name the best individual puzzle in Ultra Business Tycoon III I’d probably say
shifting the difficult to get past the bees
but if asked the best individual scene I’d say
the sister saying “you’re going to wish you’d spent more time with me”
and that’s not because the latter is a better scene than the former, or a better example of something that both of them are. It’s because the puzzle doesn’t have a unity of time and space. There are some that do – I was going to contrast puzzles and scenes in Gun Mute, but the puzzles there are very much set-piece scenes – but there’s only one finalist from this year that I think matches that (the meat monster), and maybe not even then
I had to go back to another room to solve the puzzle, and I’d think of the scene as more the aftermath of solving the puzzle. And this might be even less scene-like the more a player had to stumble around to reach the solution.
I do feel that something would be lost if we ditched Best Individual Puzzle; there’s something nice about recognizing one elegant puzzle as opposed to a lot of puzzles that work in a system, which seems to be what Best Puzzles nominees are usually like (with good reason). Are the vote totals so low that it’s basically just noise?
Perhaps “Best Interactive Sequence”?
“Best Interaction” could be a scene or puzzle solution.
I still like “Best Moment”. Many games have a best moment - that flashing “ah-hah!” that stands out above the others. I think this will be reasonably easy to explain to an outside audience. “Best Scene” seems like a more formal way to say the same thing, and I’m okay with that too.
Some of those best moments are puzzles and others aren’t, but (focusing briefly on parsers for a moment) most really well-done puzzles have the single moment when you figure it out, enter the correct command, and feel awesome.
I am less fond of this suggestion because I think it’s too broad and will cause confusion. The old IF Art Show showcased non-puzzle interaction beautifully, and I think it would be easy for things like “conversation with NPC X” or “the implementation of area Y” to qualify here under that name.
I also support one-sentence justification (regardless of what we call it). I would suggest supplying those justifications to the official XYZZY bloggers afterward, as that would help those reviewers gain insight into why a game received the nominations it did.
This is a really tough one, for individual puzzle. I’ve been thinking about it since Sam posted. Not really sure what the best option is.
I’d like to be able to read justifications for best puzzle at the nominating stage. I think there’s been a few puzzles nominated over the years that had no business being nominated, and a few games nominated for Best Puzzles overall that shouldn’t have been. It would be nice to read what everyone is thinking when they nominate a game for it, but I don’t know how realistic that is. On the other hand, there is a long tradition of the individual puzzle category. The XYZZYs have been going for a longer time than commercial IF did (or at least it’s pretty close).
Is there actually a satisfactory way to re-design the category so that it: a) covers everything Best Individual Puzzle would have covered, b) covers things that ended up being covered under BIP but never seemed to fit comfortably there, c) covers things that weren’t covered under BIP but which currently don’t have their own category (the “awesome moments”, or whatever you want to call them, that aren’t puzzles), and d) will be transparent to those outside, or not fully inside, the IF community, as to what the category encompasses? As I think matt w’s already pointed out, words like “moment” and “scene” don’t suggest in themselves that they actually cover puzzles, so when someone from outside considers the XYZZY awards, sees “Best Moment” or “Best Scene,” they’re not going to think this is a puzzle category, and will probably be confused when it turns out a bunch of puzzles are nominated for it.
And even dropping transparency to outside as a priority, it seems from the discussion here that whatever it is we’re trying to encompass with terms like “Scene” and “Moment of Interactivity” is nebulous and open to interpretation enough that it doesn’t seem like we’d up getting a set of nominees that make any kind of consistent sense together anyway, which seems to kind of defeat the purpose.
Or maybe I’m just being obtuse, I dunno.
Also, and this is something that just occurred to me: wouldn’t a category that encompasses specific scenes or moments be inherently spoilery? With puzzles, it’s possible to refer to a puzzle as, say, “getting out of the chair” without communicating anything to those who haven’t played it except that the game involves getting out of a chair at some point, but you can’t really refer to, say, the ending of the Sixth Sense in terms of being a great moment except through some variant of “the moment you realize Bruce Willis was a ghost the whole time.” Many nominees probably wouldn’t be that extreme, as they’d have to be games whose impact was largely in some big twist or revelation, but I can think of lots of great moments from IF that would be exactly that, and even in the case of something like the moment from Counterfeit Monkey that maga was talking about, which he couldn’t refer to except vaguely and with spoiler tags, I don’t see any way to nominate or vote for that in a way that’s specific enough to clearly indicate what’s being nominated but vague enough that it doesn’t give too much away. If a lot of the impact of these great moments comes from their being unexpected, then an entire XYZZY category which completely undercuts that seems a bit problematic.
This is already kind of a problem with Individual Puzzles, to tell the truth. I don’t think that scenes would be inherently more spoilery - in both cases it’s a matter of phrasing.
Also, nobody has weighed in on Supplemental Materials yet. Should I take the silence as indifference or agreement?
But aren’t most puzzles such that it’s usually easy enough to make it clear what the puzzle is without simultaneously revealing much about what the puzzle actually entails, let alone the solution? I’m sure there are puzzles where part of the puzzle is realizing that there’s a puzzle to be solved in the first place (though the only one that comes immediately to mind is from howling dogs), but judging by the past nominees I’ve played this seems relatively rare. Whereas I think when we’re talking about moments or scenes it would be a lot more common to have things that are moments of realization, surprise, or discovery that can’t really be referred to without undermining their effectiveness. But I could be wrong.
Re: Supplemental Materials, my silence was agreement, anyway. As far as I understand the awards right now, thinks like multimedia effects and presentation currently tend to get nominated for Best Use of Medium, where they don’t really seem to fit comfortably, so expanding a sparse category like Supplemental Materials to include that makes sense to me. Though I’m not sure why it would have to be a drop-down menu instead of write-in?
EDIT: Silly me, Best Use of Medium doesn’t exist any more. And maybe I was insane thinking it ever included things like multimedia and presentation anyway.
It would be good to clarify that Best Multimedia includes things outside the works themselves so that those writing in formats which don’t natively support media can provide some as feelies.
I like supplemental materials. I think it’s cool seeing a roundup of the interesting experimental additions that people bring to the table. Don’t axe it.
The aim isn’t to axe it: it’s to expand it (in a way which people are already kind of doing) and be clearer about the kinds of thing it covers.
To expand a bit on that: first-round voting in Supplemental Materials is very low. If that’s true of a category, I can think of several reasons: