We’re about done with compiling the list of eligible games for 2014. In line with previous years, and the interests of transparency, I’m also going to list the games which are listed on IFDB but were ineligible (and if I’ve done so in error, please let me know.)

In addition to an IFDB listing, a game needs to meet some minimal standards to be eligible for XYZZY voting:

Exists, in a form accessible to the general public. IFDB gets a certain number of entries from games which the author only plans to make, or which were only ever hosted in one place and are now gone. Neither are eligible. (It is often difficult, in practice, to distinguish one from the other.) A quick search is sometimes done if it seems likely, but we can’t exhaustively track down every game – so if you can do so, we’ll be happy to reinstate them.

This means that Everything you swallow will one day come up like a stone – released as ephemeral, but archived in various places – is eligible, but Ultimate Quest, a commercial work no longer available, is not. Entries ruled out for apparent non-existence include:

The Conversation I Can’t Have, Morgan Rille
Cuttings, nahuel denegri
Escaping a Nightmare, Wolly Wombat
Fire Safety Simulator, Luckyskull2
Normal Forest By Day, Dark Forest By Night Lepak, Vo, Lee, Thomack
Halloween, Tom Pod
He Grabbed a Hammer, Timothy Butcher
Hell’s Basement, Simon Leek, Peter Laskin
Hello, Nathan, TheSuperiorRealms
The Hunting Trip, whoshotjfk?
Into a mind of madness D.B.T.
La Source De Zig, Benjamin Roux
Lana’s Return, steter90
Landing in Nigeria, Nnamdi Christopher Iroaganachi
Match Made in Steel, aarthur9
Outbreak Day 2 : The journey begins, Andre Berthiaume
Postponing Destiny, Lindsey Gregor
Rhino Cyborgs, Rhino Cyborgs
The Sacred Staff of Deck Koji, ‘Dr. Al Gore’
Saturday Night, Eric Brasure
Second Destiny, Anonymous
Sir Gawain, Tasha McCartney
transgresion181288, luis sanchez
Ultimate Quest, Emily Short
Under a Mountain, niinik
Worst Day Ever, tynichole
You Can’t Go Out For A Cigarette In Space, Justin Hurst

Released as complete in applicable year. Each work only gets one shot at the awards, so we prefer to wait until they’re ready for it. This is an increasingly indefinite category, so we mostly rely on cues from the author for this. If an author describes the game with words like ‘alpha’, ‘beta’, ‘demo’, ‘unfinished’, ‘intro’, ‘test’, ‘under construction’ or the like, or if it’s an Introcomp release, we take the author’s word for it. This doesn’t apply to episodic works released as separate chapters.

Ports, updated versions, and re-releases are considered to already have been released, and are not eligible. Adaptations, remixes and translations are. (Again, this is something of a rule of thumb. Jim Aikin’s 2006 game Last Resort, considerably expanded and renamed Lydia’s Heart, was deemed eligible for the 2007 Awards.)

Bear Creek, Part 1, Wes Modes
Chalk Circles, Paul Jessup
The Night and Stars, Jufry Ananta
Scaffold 22, MoLoLu
Sigmund’s Quest, Gregor Holtz
Find the Gold: An Easy-To-Read Adventure, IFforEducation
SpirI7wrak, Otis T. Dog
Dark Unknown Planet, Mark Eaton, Barrie Eaton

Interactive fiction. This is a highly nebulous term for which we have not yet adopted a tidy standard, largely on the grounds that the communities we serve haven’t either; for now, we use best judgement, and apply sparingly – really only for hapless authors who have wandered into IFDB without any context, or for the eventuality that someone puts in a joke entry for Call of Duty. No games were rejected under this standard this year.