The first round of the XYZZY Awards, celebrating the best interactive fiction of 2021, is now open.

The XYZZYs are open-voting, and use your IF Comp login; if you need to register an account with the Comp, or you’ve forgotten your account details, go here. You can log in here (you’ll get kicked back to the front page, but do not adjust your set: you are in fact logged in) and then vote here. 

In the first round, anyone can nominate up to two eligible games in each category. (You are asked not to vote for your own work, or to organise voters to support a particular game or slate.)

First-round voting will remain open through December 3.

Voting is complete on the 2020 XYZZY Awards, and the recipients of the Awards are as follows:

Best Game: Vampire: The Masquerade — Night Road (Kyle Marquis)
Best Writing: Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale (Kreg Segall)
Best Story: A Rope of Chalk (Ryan Veeder)
Best Setting: Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale (Kreg Segall)
Best Puzzles: The Impossible Bottle (Linus Åkesson)
Best NPCs: Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale (Kreg Segall)
Best Individual Puzzle: Leaving the house in The Impossible Bottle (Linus Åkesson)
Best Individual NPC: tie: the parrot in The Magpie Takes the Train (MathBrush), and Kingfisher in Vain Empires (Thomas Mack, Xavid)
Best Individual PC: The doppelganger in Doppeljobs (Lei)
Best Implementation: The Impossible Bottle (Linus Åkesson)
Best Use of Innovation: The Impossible Bottle (Linus Åkesson)
Best Technological Development: Adventuron
Best Use of Multimedia: Crocodracula: The Beginning (Ryan Veeder, Harrison Gerard)

Congratulations to the winners!

The results are in for the first round of the 2019 XYZZY Awards. Congratulations to our finalists!

Voting in the second round will be open through September 27th.

The XYZZYs use your IF Comp login; if you need to register an account with the Comp, or you’ve forgotten your account details, go here. You can log in here (you’ll get kicked back to the front page, but you are in fact logged in) and then vote here. 

(Anyone may vote, but you are asked not to vote for your own work, or to organise voters to support a particular game or slate thereof.)

Best Game

• Crème de la Crème (Hannah Powell-Smith)
• Skybreak! (William Dooling)
• Turandot (Victor Gijsbers)
• Zozzled (Steph Cherrywell)

Best Writing

• Crème de la Crème (Hannah Powell-Smith)
• The good people (Pseudavid)
• Limerick Heist (Pace Smith)
• Out (Viktor Sobol)
• Speed Demons (Pleroma)
• Turandot (Victor Gijsbers)
• Zozzled (Steph Cherrywell)

Best Story

• Crème de la Crème (Hannah Powell-Smith)
• Dull Grey (Provodnik Games)
• The good people (Pseudavid)
• Heretic’s Hope (G.C. Baccaris)
• The Missing Ring (Felicity Drake)
• Out (Viktor Sobol)
• robotsexpartymurder (Hanon Ondricek)
• Turandot (Victor Gijsbers)
• Zozzled (Steph Cherrywell)

Best Setting

• Additional Tales from Castle Balderstone (Ryan Veeder)
• Dull Grey (Provodnik Games)
• Founder’s Mercy (Thomas Insel)
• Heretic’s Hope (G.C. Baccaris)
• Pirateship (Robin Johnson)
• Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing (Ryan Veeder)

Best Puzzles

• Chuk and the Arena (Agnieszka Trzaska)
• Hard Puzzle 4: The Ballad of Bob and Cheryl (Ade McT)
• Pirateship (Robin Johnson)
• Skies Above (Arthur DiBianca)
• Sugarlawn (Mike Spivey)
• Zozzled (Steph Cherrywell)

Best NPCs

• Crème de la Crème (Hannah Powell-Smith)
• Heretic’s Hope (G.C. Baccaris)
• Mental Entertainment (Thomas Hvizdos)
• The Missing Ring (Felicity Drake)
• robotsexpartymurder (Hanon Ondricek)
• Zozzled (Steph Cherrywell)

Best Individual Puzzle

• Finding the good ending in Dull Grey (Provodnik Games)
• Helping Madame Ping Ping with the séance in Zozzled (Steph Cherrywell)
• Inspiring the artist in Zozzled (Steph Cherrywell)

Best Individual NPC

• Kim Kitsuragi in Disco Elysium (ZA/UM)
• The mother in Night Guard / Morning Star (Astrid Dalmady)
• Pontiff Apocrita in Heretic’s Hope (G.C. Baccaris)
• Turandot in Turandot (Victor Gijsbers)

Best Individual PC

• Hazel Greene in Zozzled (Steph Cherrywell)
• Leonora in Night Guard / Morning Star (Astrid Dalmady)
• Sniff Chewpaw in Dungeon Detective 2: Devils and Details (Wonaglot)

Best Implementation

• AI Dungeon (Nick Walton)
• Dull Grey (Provodnik Games)
• Pas De Deux (Linus Åkesson)
• Pirateship (Robin Johnson)
• Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing (Ryan Veeder)
• Skies Above (Arthur DiBianca)
• Sugarlawn (Mike Spivey)

Best Use of Innovation

• AI Dungeon (Nick Walton)
• The Ballroom (Liza Daly)
• Dull Grey (Provodnik Games)
• Flight of the Code Monkeys (Mark C. Marino)
• Heretic’s Hope (G.C. Baccaris)
• Pas De Deux (Linus Åkesson)
• Pirateship (Robin Johnson)
• Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing (Ryan Veeder)

Best Technological Development

• AI Dungeon
• Chapbook
• dMagnetic

Best Use of Multimedia

• Dull Grey (Provodnik Games)
• The good people (Pseudavid)
• Heretic’s Hope (G.C. Baccaris)
• Mushroom Hunt (Polyducks)
• robotsexpartymurder (Hanon Ondricek)
• Wolfsmoon (Marco Innocenti)

The XYZZY Awards for the interactive fiction works of 2018 is now open for first-round voting. (Probably setting a record for the latest in the year; sorry about that.)

The XYZZYs use your IF Comp login; if you need to register an account with the Comp, or you’ve forgotten your account details, go here. You can log in here (you’ll get kicked back to the front page) and then vote here. In the nominee round, you can nominate two works in each category. You should not nominate works that you authored, and you should not direct voters to vote for particular games or slates of games.

The first round will remain open through the 19th of July (technically, with votes closing at 1 AM US-Pacific time on the 20th).

The full list of eligible games, harvested from IFDB with the help of juxi and Claire Furkle, is here; if there are any errors or omissions, please let me know (either at sam.kabo.ashwell@gmail.com, in comments here, or on Twitter at @XYZZYAwards or @tsawac ).

Below the cut are the list of works listed on IFDB which were not eligible for the Awards.

Continue reading →

Voting has closed for the first round of the XYZZY Awards. The final round will remain open through the 21st of July. You can login here, then vote here. (Once again, voting uses your IF Comp login, which you can register or recover here.)

A polite reminder: you’re not allowed to vote for your own game, and canvassing for votes – for purposes here defined as ‘any action which results in a large number of people showing up specifically to vote for a particular game or slate of games’ – is strongly discouraged, and may result in votes being discarded.

Without further ado – congratulations to our 2016 finalists!

Continue reading →

As part of an effort to  tighten up the post-Awards review panel, I’ve drafted some standards. They’ve been through a private edit, but before we commit to them for next year it’s worth putting them up for public comment.

The alternative title of this might be The Rights and Responsibilities of the In-Depth Reviewer; if you needed to condense those to one line, it’d be ‘to be diligent and to be honest.’

(In other news, I’m also considering alternate titles, since ‘Reviews’ might give the wrong impression. ‘Analyses’ has been suggested, but though accurate, that’s kind of a clunker.)

Continue reading →

Today someone pointed out to me that a) old comments on the blog seem to have vanished, and b) new comments weren’t showing up at all. Oh dear.

Problem b) has been fixed, as far as we can tell. Problem a) is leaving us scratching our heads – there have been somewhat-similar issues in WordPress before, it’d seem, but the analogous things have known solutions which don’t work for us. Poking around on the backend has not found anything.

Anyhow. We apologise. If you’ve tried to post comments recently and failed, you should be able to do so now. We’ll see what we can figure out about restoring lost comments, but right now it’s not looking promising.