Monthly Archives: April 2016

Xyzzymposium: Yoon Ha Lee on Best Writing 2014

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Yoon Ha Lee is the author of the IF The Moonlit Tower, which placed 4th in IF Comp 2002 and won the 2002 XYZZY Award for Best Writing. He also authored the StoryNexus game Winterstrike for Failbetter Games. His short story collection Conservation of Shadows came out from Prime Books in 2013, and his fiction has appeared in Tor.com, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other venues. His space opera novel Ninefox Gambit is forthcoming from Solaris Books in June 2016.

The Best Writing nominees for 2014 were Eidolon and With Those We Love Alive.

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Xyzzymposium 2014: Joey Jones on Best Implementation

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Joey Jones is a writer of text games including Andromeda Dreaming and Danse Nocturne. Co-author of the weird-fiction puzzler Sub Rosa in IF Comp 2015, he is currently working on a long-form ChoiceScript game set in the 18th century underworld.

The Best Implementation finalists were Hunger Daemon, With Those We Love Alive and Hadean Lands.

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Xyzzymposium 2014: Gabriel Murray on Best Story

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The Xyzzymposium, formerly the Pseudo-Official XYZZY Reviews, is a series examining the shortlist-nominated games of the previous XYZZY Awards, tackling nominees in terms of their category. A lot of the critical writing in the IF world comes in the forms of general reviews; that’s great, but we wanted to see more in-depth writing that considered games through specific foci.

The XYZZYs have no cash prizes or shiny trophies, no red-carpet parties; all we really offer is the respect of your peers, and a slightly more prominent mark in the history of the medium. Both of these become a little more concrete if they’re combined with in-depth critical attention. The Xyzzymposium isn’t intended to be a triumpal march; we’re not here to lavish praise on anointed champions. The purpose of the Xyzzymposium is to show that we’re taking a work seriously enough to wrestle with it.

This year, we’re rolling out the 2014 Xyzzymposium to coincide with first-round voting for the 2015 XYZZYs. We hope you enjoy the articles – and if it helps you think about the sort of thing you want to see in this year’s nominees, so much the better.

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XYZZY Awards 2015: first-round voting open

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Voting is open on the first round of the XYZZY Awards. You can go here to login, then here to vote.

First-round voting will be open for the remainder of April, closing one minute past midnight on May 1 (US-Pacific time).

This year we’re adding an experiment to the first round: instead one nomination each category, you can now make two. You don’t have to nominate two games, but you can’t vote for the same game twice. The hope here is that this will lead to somewhat more balanced categories; the vote can be so spread out in the first round that there have often been many-way ties, leading to a second round where there are either way too many nominees, or way too few.

A polite reminder if your game is nominated: you’re not allowed to vote for your own game, and canvassing for votes – which for purposes here I’m going to define 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.