The XYZZY Awards, honouring the best interactive fiction of 2014, are open for the first round of voting, whittling down hundreds of IF releases to a shortlist of 3-6 nominees in each category. Voting is open, so if you love interactive fiction, please consider taking part! (Your vote is especially important in the first round.)

Apologies for the slightly discombobulated login this year: the XYZZYs use the same login system as the IF Comp, and the Comp site has changed around. Your IF Comp account will still work fine for voting, but if you want to make a new account you’ll have to register over at the IF Comp site.

You can also log in with an existing account, and then vote over here.

Some guidelines for voters to keep in mind:

• Anyone may vote, and you can vote in both first and second rounds. One ballot per person.
• Authors may not vote for their own work.
• While we’re happy for you to talk up the XYZZYs, canvasing for votes is strongly discouraged, either for your own game or on behalf of others. It’s fine to talk about the XYZZYs – but if doing so results in a flood of voters all voting for the same game, those votes will be discounted.

First-round voting closes April 5 at 0:01:00 US-Pacific.

Back in 2010, the XYZZYs changed up the awards roster, creating (among other things) the new category Best Supplemental Materials. Based on community feedback, the award was specifically crafted to focus on material outside the work proper – predominantly feelies and books.

There are some historical reasons for that focus, but these don’t seem as relevant to games being made now. In an age where IF is overwhelmingly distributed by download – which has been the case for over two decades – feelies are inevitably a little anachronistic. A really cool anachronism, to be sure – but it’s tough to justify as the centre of a category, or to expect that they’ll appear in a wealth of games each year.

As such, the award has always been a little bit uncomfortably apples-and-oranges. Nobody would really deny that Aaron Reed’s Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 was deserving of the inaugral 2010 award – but at the same time, its competitors included a teaser image for the as-yet-unreleased Counterfeit Monkey – nice work, to be sure, but odd to weigh on the same scales. Supplemental Materials has had the lowest first-round voting of any category; I think this indicates that it’s confusing and doesn’t quite fit with what’s needed. Some voters have used it to vote for in-game art, which – as was the case with Best Use of Medium before it was split in two – suggests a need that wasn’t being clearly addressed. And text-entry always presents a problem about how specific or general a nomination should be.

So this year, we’re renaming the award Best Use of Multimedia and making it a drop-down choice rather than a text-entry one. (We’re conscious of the irony that this bold, forward-thinking word choice puts us into the bright new era of 1997.) The award covers all aspects of media used by a game, beyond straight text within the game itself: sound and graphics, presentation and fancy text effects, feelies, tie-in novels, whatever. This does exclude work in the IF sphere that wasn’t tied to a specific game – though if Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 was released today, you could still justify it under Sand-dancer.

Stay tuned for the first round. (We are running behind a little this year, for which I apologise.)

OK. I’ve had a run to burn off my fighting mood and a walk to get my brain working, and here’s where things are going.

When I started the Pseudo-Official XYZZY Reviews, a couple of years ago, it was strictly a side-project. It ended up on the Awards site, but it was off in a little corner and didn’t feel as if it was part of the main thing. It was my first year helping out with the Awards, and I didn’t want to rock the boat too hard. The Reviews were to a large degree an attempt to encourage the kind of IF writing that I wanted to see more of; as far as recruitment goes, I just made public posts asking if people wanted to participate. I got a lot of responses and didn’t turn anyone away, even if their work didn’t fully meet the expectations I had for the project, because those were just my expectations, and who am I to make demands, right? While the results were decidedly mixed, nobody cared all that much, because it was all bonus.

The next year, things got changed around: instead of putting out a general call, I headhunted known-quality reviewers, preferably with category-specific expertise or interests. This worked way better, both in terms of the raw number of responses and in how consistently the reviewers were able to match the expectations I had for the event – which were still articulated as an informal list of rough principles. In a last-minute decision based on the realisation that doing it the old way was stupid, the reviews got adapted to blog format, moved to the front page of the site and rolled out slowly, rather than getting dumped en masse in one gigantic plain-HTML page.

This year… was mostly treated like last year again, apart from doing a bit more to promote it. That was an error, partly because ‘business as usual’ often tends to mean ‘let things slide’, and partly because the thing’s nature was changing even if I wasn’t.

The response to the last post has made it clear that a bunch of people who are not me have taken on some of those expectations. Which is great news (please! go and write similar things in other venues! I want your essay on representations of power in early Cadre!), but it means that now I have to take the job of fulfilling them more seriously. So, it’s probably time to drop the Pseudo part, acknowledge that this has become an established component of the Awards, and start treating it as such. What does that entail?

• In the short term, I’ll be bringing on another writer or two to take a second pass at Individual Puzzles. Individual Puzzle is an inherently tough category to tackle. In an ideal world, 2+ reviewers per category serve as the safety-valve for when a reviewer reacts strongly against a work. In an imperfect one, where we will often be unable to ensure that level of coverage, we obviously need other mechanisms. This is a stopgap, not a long-term solution. (And it will, for reasons that I hope are clear, take a little while.)
• We’ll be drafting a document laying out in detail the expectations for what the reviews should be, so that both the people writing and reading them are given a clear picture. We have some informal lists of goals and mission-statement-ish things right now, but they’re not really something you can work to. The final result will not satisfy everybody, but it will at least give us all a concrete point of reference.
• The event will probably move to later in the year. Initially, the idea was to have the reviews form part of the same event, more or less, as the ceremony. That’s more fun, but it inevitably loads all the socially-hardest work of running the Awards into the same time-period, so it’s not really compatible with giving the Reviews the degree of attention they require.
• I’ll be looking into a system of sub-editors, or peer review among writers. More eyes on a thing makes for better results. I don’t want my volunteers working alone in the dark, and alone I am not able to give them all the support that they should have.
• A name change. The Pseudo bit is a caveat, basically, and if that doesn’t fly any more then it’s just deadweight. It’s been pointed out, too, that ‘reviews’ may suggest the wrong emphasis.

Let me be absolutely clear. I’m not blaming Lucian for this: he worked to the standards he was given, ran into some honest bad luck with his games, and ran into a deadline. Any failure here is mine, and I apologise for it.

Finally: my volunteers produce giant piles of quality work. They’re talented people with other commitments, who have agreed to do a challenging job with rewards that barely count as for exposure. If I’ve asked them to participate, that means I value their labour and trust their ability for the task. Please keep this in mind in your responses.

Thursday will be the last day of voting in the final round of the Awards, so if you haven’t yet done so, go and vote. (You can also update your previous votes.) Several categories are very close, so your vote matters.

We hope you can join us for the ceremony, which will take place on ifMUD this coming Sunday at 1:30 PM Pacific time.

Congratulations to the finalists!

You can now vote in the final round here. Voting will be closed on April 4th. Full list of finalists below the cut.

Continue reading →

The nomination round of voting in the 2013 Awards is open. You can log in here and then cast your votes here. The first round will remain open through March 9th.

A reminder: it is not OK to canvass for votes, either for your own games or for someone else’s. Talking about the Awards is fine, but “hey guys, this game I wrote is up for an award, go and vote for it” is not, regardless of whether you do so on a major game blog or your personal Facebook page. Exercise your best judgement.

The exception to this rule is the set of (experimental) For Your Consideration polls on IFDB for the Individual categories – Best Individual Puzzle, Best Individual Player Character and Best Individual Non-Player Character. These awards can be more challenging to vote for, so if you’re struggling to come up with something and would like to try a few more games before you make your mind up, or if you think there’s a puzzle or character that deserves a second look, go forth and have fun.

IF Comp is over, the year’s end is not far off, and we’re beginning to get ready for the 2013 XYZZY Awards.

The first big step will be compiling the list of eligible games. Starting this year, we will no longer be scouring the internet for every isolate publication and dispersed cache of IF that we can find. That was becoming an increasingly laborious task, and one that was impossible to carry out with any great degree of consistency. So starting this year – I’ve announced this before, but it bears repetition – only games with IFDB entries will be eligible for the XYZZY Awards.

So if there is a work of interactive fiction published in 2013 that you feel deserves consideration for the XYZZYs, check whether it is listed in the Interactive Fiction Database, and if it isn’t, create an entry for it. As is normal on IFDB, you may create entries both for your own work and on behalf of other authors.

(That is not the only qualification for eligibility – we have to confirm that the game exists, for instance, and our understanding of ‘interactive fiction’ is significantly less broad than ‘any game with narrative elements.’ I’ll be outlining our approach to this shortly.)

Secondly, some of the Awards are given to particular things within games, rather than the game as a whole. As an experiment, three of these have polls running in IFDB – Best Individual Non-Player Character, Best Individual Player Character and Best Individual Puzzle. These polls are totally optional and have no effect on eligibility for these awards, but the hope is that they’ll help voters get a better grasp on a very big, difficult-to-list field. It’s not meant as a straw poll: if a character or puzzle is already listed there, it’s not necessary to vote for it again. Unlike the voting in the awards proper, you’re allowed to nominate your own work here.