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.