Some of you may have heard of the XYZZY Awards, a longstanding awards ceremony that happens annually, with categories like Best Game, Best Story, etc.
Those awards were originally tailored towards parser games, although several Choice of Games games have won awards recently (like Creme de la Creme). It also has rules against campaigning for votes.
At the intfiction.org forum, we’re currently working on adding a couple new yearly competitions, called the Interactive Fiction People’s Choice Awards (which has public voting and allows campaigning) and the Interactive Fiction Author’s Choice Awards (which only authors can vote in and is private). Categories are currently being determined by public vote.
If you’re interested in participating in the process, you can check out the original announcement here:
And here is the thread for nominating categories:
Any post with at least 15 likes will become a category in the awards.
There were problems before with the XYZZYs where this forum, the CoG forum, overwhelmed the vote because you guys are so big compared to the parser/twine group. But we’re actually counting on that this time! A lot of categories people are talking about include langage-specific ones, and you can add any category you are excited about. So if you wanted to include a whole slew of choicescript specific awards, you could nominate ‘Best Hosted Game’, ‘Best Romantic Characters’, ‘WIP I most want to see finished’, etc.
If no one’s interested, that’s fine, just wanted to extend the offer. Thanks for making great stuff!
Great idea but question, how will this impact given most CSGs are payment based and most other kinds tend not to be (although there’s exceptions.) I would think (apart from the purely add supported and free (itch, comp entry) games) this would narrow the voting audience for CSGs to mainly forum users over here anyway? Is there enough of an audience for CSGs over at infiction? (Genuine question here, I hang out a bit here and there, and don’t tend to see a lot of CSG discussion happening over there often outside of the occasional comp entry.) Would there be categories for non commercial (free and add supported games) vs pay to play ones?
These are great questions. There isn’t a lot of cross-talk; I’d like there to be.
The categories are all separate competitions; there is no need to vote in one to be able to vote in another. There just has to be enough interested people to vote in a specific category. That’s why there’s currently a threshold of 15 ‘likes’. If we can’t get 15 people to interact with a forum post, then we can’t get enough people to vote in the actual awards.
The awards themselves will be held at IFDB. It’s possible that this whole format just won’t work for this forum’s users, and that’s just fine.
As for the different possible categories, right now the method is just to post an idea and then to vote on it. It may be hard or annoying for people here to get an account there; if a lot of people here are interested, we could just allow posts in this forum as well as on that one. If only five or six people care, then they can join up at intfiction.
Yup, I think it’d be great to have a more cohesive IF community too with lots of discussions about it as a whole . There does seem to be a fair bit of a divide, I find even CSG comp entries rarely find a place of discussion here either (and there’s been quite a few in places like IFComp amongst others, some of which have placed highly too) so I’m gathering there are few people regularly visiting multiple IF based forums at the moment at least.
That is a good point. A lot of the appeal of the those Zork-like games is in solving puzzles. And also you mentioned that COG gamebooks are behind a paywall but typically nominees for the annual IF Awards are free to download - I had downloaded them in the past to play before. And as far as I can recall back when I visited those forums in the distant past, they did not really talk about gamebooks, though that could have changed in the interim.
One thing to look out for: the fact that CoG has a reasonably large, dedicated fanbase means that in other awards the fans were able to push CoG titles unrepresentatively far in the competition and extra considerations had to be made by the organisers to prevent this. I wouldn’t want the same thing to happen here!
In coming up with these awards, I intentionally decided to allow for that. There are two sets of awards; one is People’s Choice, and allows for campaigning (it’s basically ‘who can advertise better’). If CoG flooded this, I’d be okay. That one also includes categories that would be hard to automatically win like ‘best short game’.
The other is author’s choice; only people who’ve published a game can vote in that, and it would be much harder to flood.
I don’t know enough about how to properly balance an award show, but I do know I am always excited to see more of them and hope this works out. I’ll have to go register over there so I can vote in the author awards.
The voting will be held at ifdb.org, and authorship will be determined by IFDB’s system for assigning a game to userids. So if you have a game on there (or add one if it’s not up yet), you can edit the page to associate the author with your user ID.
Rules - in an update since the previous discussion,
“-Voting must be in good faith and be based on personal experience with the games involved.
-Campaigning or organizing voting is not allowed if it breaks the above rule.”
Of particular interest, there are categories for Outstanding ChoiceScript Game - Player’s Choice and Author’s choice (authors are free to vote in both). I’ve added all of the Choice of Games published in 2022 and a lot of the Heart’s Choice and Hosted Games to IFDB, so you can vote for those (or create your own pages if they don’t already exist).
You can add the games yourself @hustlertwo. HG’s don’t seem to get added by COG usually, so just go for it and add any missing games
@autumnchen question for you, what’s the difference between author and player awards, I’m guessing you only vote in one or the other. Is author only if you have a game in the running for that particular category otherwise you vote under player?
I can answer that: author’s choice is for only people who have written a game listed on IFdB. The votes are anonymous.
The players choice is open to everyone and votes are public.
Authors can vote in both polls.
It’s supposed to be that players choice is kind of wild and a free for all while authors choice is supposed to be more of a dignified thing by people with experience.
This is the first year, so if the split between polls doesn’t make sense we won’t do it next year.
I definitely hope a ton of people vote for best Choicescript game, this forum is the main place for well-informed voters in that category.
. There does seem to be a fair bit of a divide, I find even CSG comp entries rarely find a place of discussion here either (and there’s been quite a few in places like IFComp amongst others, some of which have placed highly too) so I’m gathering there are few people regularly visiting multiple IF based forums at the moment at least.