Monthly Archives: January 2021

XYZZY Awards 2020, and an announcement for 2021

It’s the New Year, so we’re ramping up to Awards season.

If there’s a 2020 game you would like to see eligible for the Awards, make sure it’s listed on IFDB by January 15.

Looking forwards to 2021, we’re planning on a fairly radical experiment in how nomination for the XYZZYs work. An ongoing issue with the Awards is that the list of games listed on IFDB for any one year is pretty large. This is a bottleneck in getting the XYZZYs running, since we have to check them all for basic eligibility requirements (such as ‘this is a real game that exists’), and it makes first-round voting more difficult.

Roughly speaking: the goal is that for 2021 games, anyone will be able to nominate any game for consideration, with submissions open throughout the year. You’ll be able to self-nominate in round 0, but will also be able to nominate other works. (The details aren’t fully ironed out on this yet; I’d like to avoid the case, for instance, where someone writes a script to automatically nominate every single game in IFDB, or some other extensive listing; but it’s also not ideal if people feel like they have to save their nominations). We’ll probably want to periodically update a list of existing nominees. )

(The last time we considered this change, we had fairly mixed reports about the ‘zeroth round’. We welcome your feedback. Either way, the plan is to have the system set up to go by the end of the 2020 Awards.)