Self as Fractal

2008 XYZZY Awards: day-after thoughts

And here we are! After a reschedule, many speeches and a failed call (or was it?) for NPC revolution by NamelessAdventurer, 2008's XYZZY Awards have come and gone. Congrats to all the winners! Now we can all focus on 2009!

I know some people were worried that there weren't as many unique nominees. Turns out, though, that quite a few different games picked up awards! Which was nice, even if it does render most of the awards-sweep puns I came up with unusable. (And I *liked* Nightfall Windfall.)

As for my votes, I went 5 for 10. My votes are in italics, and the winners are in bold.

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Best Use of Medium was first. Nominees:

Afflicted, by Doug Egan
Everybody Dies, by Jim Munroe (with spectacular timing)
Gun Mute, by C. E. J. Pacian
The Moon Watch, by Paolo Maroncelli and Alessandro Peretti
Violet, by Jeremy Freese

This was a very difficult vote for me. I was between Everybody Dies and Violet. I rated Afflicted high in my comp votes, but it wasn't for use of medium. In fact, I thought it could have used the medium better. Although graphics might get a bit gory (and if that's your thing, well then, there you go!) there's a lot that could have been done with NPCs. Mainly on the reactive end. I hadn't played Gun Mute or The Moon Watch.

My vote came down to how I defined Best Use of Medium. If I was thinking "graphics, sound, and overall innovative stuff," Everybody Dies would have won hands-down. If I was thinking "default messages and use of the parser," Violet would have won hands down. I ended up going with "default messages and use of the parser" because that was written on the page, but it's a contentious category anyway.

Then it turned out The Moon Watch, written for the One Room Comp, won. Oops. Cue egg on face. My incompetence. is showing. This means it's time to go play it. So I did. And after doing, so, all I have to say is: job well done. Well, OK, I've got more to say. (By the way, I suppose SPOILERS start here.)

The most obvious innovation here, or at least the first you encounter, is the graphics. There's cover art, a few images of certain objects, items, and/or NPCs, and the screen is framed by illustrations. Not static graphics, either - put on the spaceship and they become frosted over. That was a nice touch.

Then there's the conversation system. Maga didn't quite think it worked, but I didn't mind it at all. This kind of conversation system has obvious limitations: what if the parser misinterprets your keyword? But here's where my own definition of "use of medium" comes through: use of limitations. Keywords getting misinterpreted? Put the conversation on a far-away, precarious space station on a questionable phone and make your conversation partners a kid and a dying man!

The Moon Watch also has music, presumably originally composed, and most of it quite effective. I'm pleased that something with music won Best Use of Medium. A whole lot more can be done with it. (There's a self-serving side to that remark, mind you. One of my WIPs - well, a WNIP at the moment since I have a comp deadline looming closer every day and I'm waiting on Damusix - is heavily music-based.) It helps that the music's *good*. There was just one part, in the mouse scene, where this one note was a bit too high-pitched, but that clip was short.

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Best Individual PC was presented by Grunk from Lost Pig, which made for a quite amusing part of the ceremony. The nominees:

Graham (Everybody Dies): "First person that maybe win seem like good person for sitting and talking about thing and drinking beers with. But maybe not so good for swimming."

Mute Lawton (Gun Mute): "Some person say that doing louder than talking. If that true, then this next man very very loud. And Grunk not just mean going bang bang lots."

David (Nightfall): "Then there man that not afraid of staying when every other person go. Him not afraid of Enemy. Him only think about one thing: finding her.

Hardy Bulldog (Nightfall): "Last person not like other person in list. Him shorter and more hairy. And not have real thumb. But him still smart! Maybe even smart as pig.


Hardy the Bulldog won and I can't say I'm all that opposed to it. The thing is, though, that Ralph did this too, and A Day for Soft Food, et cetera and so forth. Also, I'm a cat person. But the game certainly got amusing mileage of the PC-as-dog conceit. I'll give it that.

My vote, however, went to Graham: the face of Everybody Dies. He's certainly not nice, but his writing never crosses the line into being obnoxious. You don't like him, but you don't hate him so much you can't play. And he isn't stereotyped or pat or lazily written. Accomplishing this with a standard PC would be good enough, but doing this with Everybody Dies' structure is even better.

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Best Individual NPC, with comments by the Lost Pig gnome:

H.R. from 'Escapade!', by Juhana Leinonen - "This year's first nominee brings up an important question: what do you give to someone who has everything? Fortunately, he's not that picky."
Solemn Gertrude from 'Gun Mute', by C. E. J. Pacian - "The second nominee doesn't waste words. So I won't either."
Your Pet in 'Snack Time' by Renee Choba - "Our third nominee is a clever fellow who has learned several tricks. And I gather that he's even housebroken."
'Violet' from 'Violet' by Jeremy Freese - "Our final nominee for Best Individual NPC is a lady who knows how to get things done. Or to put it another way, she knows how to make *other* people get things done."

Including winning XYZZY awards. Possibly one of the least suspenseful categories this year. Disclaimer time: I was a beta tester for Violet. But honestly, what is there to say? The game is suffused with a personality so forceful that it more than makes up for the fact that Violet only physically appears in the game briefly, at the ending. Yes, she's idealized, but that's the point. The truly remarkable thing, though, is that there are almost no slips in character, no quips that don't quite fit the voice. With the amount of text she gets, that's quite an accomplishment. So. Not much else to say about this category except well done.

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Next was Best Individual Puzzle, presented by Hugh Dunnett presenting for a mysteriously vanished Christopher Huang. The finalists:

Putting the vampire together in Afflicted. (Hugh Dunnett: "Seriously?")
Finalist: Calling for help in Escapade! by Juhana Leinonen. (Hugh: "Just use the telephone, I say.")
Finalist: The gallows in Gun Mute. (Hugh nods approvingly. Not that he's biased or anything.)
Finalist: Disconnecting the Internet in Violet.
Finalist: Getting rid of the key in Violet. (Hugh shakes his head disapprovingly.)

Another disclaimer: I am terrible at puzzles. If it weren't for hints and walkthroughs I probably wouldn't have finished a lot of the IF works I've played.

The Afflicted puzzle, essentially, was a treasure hunt (if you can call dismembered body parts treasure) (oh, the search terms that one will see) but I have a much greater tolerance/appreciation for treasure hunts than most. Very old-school, very built-in-marker-of-your-progress.

Honestly, Violet winning this one surprised me. Not because of puzzle quality, but because I was so sure having two puzzles nominated would split the votes. (Apparently they may have been combined, though...?) The win was well deserved, though. The entire rigmarole of the puzzle makes it. You have to try so many things that go wrong in so many ways - and the whole process is streamlined to boot. There's no guess the verb or "where did I put that widget?" Nothing ruins a puzzle like poor coding, so that's another big point in its favor.

Plus, the game already had a bit of an advantage, considering the sets of IF players and people who'd have to lock up an ethernet cable and throw away the key just to kill the Internet probably intersect. Not that I've ever done that.

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Best NPCs was next, presented by the aforementioned ax-grinding Nameless Adventurer. (A nice touch to the ceremony, I thought.) Finalitss:

April in Paris by Jim Aikin.
Everybody Dies
Gun Mute
Snack Time!
Violet

The voters and I were again in agreement here, choosing the game which, in Nameless's words, "made great strides in really helping PCs and NPCs understand each other's position." The line between NPC and PC was admittedly blurred, unblurred, and blurred back again, but for my vote, I took the position that a NPC was defined as anyone who wasn't the PC at the time. I'm *sure* I let some PC aspects filter into my thinking, of course, making this more akin to "Best Characters," but what can I say? Characterization was among the strongest parts of this, and if it's going to be honored anywhere, this is the category to do it in.

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Next was Best Puzzles.

Best Puzzles (Dan Shiovitz, for Lucian P. Smith)

Escapade! (Juhana Leinonen; Z-code).
Gun Mute (C.E.J. Pacian; TADS 3). Pacian exclaims, "Is Nameless here? Most of these puzzles were about bringing harm to NPCs, and I'm not sorry about that, either!"
Piracy 2.0 (Sean Huxter; Z-code).
Violet (Jeremy Freese; Z-code).

My reasoning for voting Violet's been explained adequately above. This was a bit unfair on my part, though; I didn't play Gun Mute either. So.

Well, now I know why this was nominated for Best Use of Medium. It's quite ingenious. The puzzles here boil down to "Shoot things. Don't get shot." There are variations, but most of them involve figuring out what to shoot, and when, and how not to get shot. And there are a few which don't quite fit the mold, but more on them later.

In that way, it's more like an action game than an IF - but consciously so, mind you. The various 'stages' are even referred to in the hints as Levels. You beat one level, advance to the next, reload, etc.

It's a good game, but I'm not entirely sure the puzzles translated perfectly to IF. The game sets them up as routines, so it's easy to miss some of the puzzles that don't involve shooting until you go back to the hints and realize that a few of the levels haven't gone away. Since the game relies so heavily on timing, furthermore, it isn't intuitive - or characteristic, really - to examine everything. It throws off your puzzle timing. As far as I can tell, the baddies just keep shooting at you in their cycles, so you can examine, hide, and get back in the game, but a lot of timed-puzzle paranoia is based on the assumption that you can't do this. And besides, the impression I got of the PC's mindset was "shoot first, ask questions later."

I'd still love to see more games like Gun Mute, though.

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Next was Best Setting. The finalists:

Buried In Shoes (Kazuki Mishima; Z-code).
Gun Mute (C.E.J. Pacian; TADS 3).
Piracy 2.0 (Sean Huxter; Z-code).
Nightfall (Eric Eve; Glulx).
Violet (Jeremy Freese; Z-code).

Another choice for me. No other game felt as expansive or rooted in place. Out of all the comp games, its setting is the one I remember most. I freely admit there's an element of nostalgia here, so to speak - the time I spent with big, expansive games like Anchorhead and Christminster had to have rubbed off on me and on my memories - but David has a clear relationship to the city, and the prose brings this out.

On the technical side, the implementation of commands like "GO TO" takes a lot of the "where am I going now" fiddliness out of the picture. It's hard to get immersed in a setting when you're trying to fight it.

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Best Story:

Afflicted (Doug Egan; Z-code).
Everybody Dies (Jim Munroe; Glulx).
Gun Mute (C.E.J. Pacian; TADS 3).
Nightfall (Eric Eve; Glulx).
Violet (Jeremy Freese; Z-code).

I voted Everybody Dies here - if it's half about characterization, the other half is story. So much, in fact, that some people thought it was too railroaded. That's another thing, though, that my tolerance is much higher for. (Is there anything my tolerance is lower for? Sure. Fiddly machinery puzzles with turning dials to 3432 or something.)

Except Nightfall, the other games stood out for things other than story. And although Nightfall wasn't my vote, I can appreciate its winning; it did have a thought-out, involved story, with obvious effort.

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Best Writing was next. Writing, in the words of presenter Admiral Jota, "is the knack of stringing together letters, punctuation, spaces, and even the occasional number to form coherent sentences. Such as '@ least thats wut ppl say it iz l0l' or 'THAT IS NOT SO HARD BOOBY !!!' or 'South wall have big curtain hanging on it.'"

Finalist: Everybody Dies (Jim Munroe; Glulx).
Finalist: Gun Mute (C.E.J. Pacian; TADS 3).
Finalist: Nightfall (Eric Eve; Glulx).
Finalist: Violet (Jeremy Freese; Z-code).

(The commentary's petering out as I go along, I'm afraid...) This was one of the better categories, I thought. All the finalists had at least competent-to-good writing, if of very different styles. I chose my vote because Violet's writing was the most showy, if that makes any sense. (I use the word in a positive sense.) Apparently the other voters agreed.

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Best Game. The finalists:

Everybody Dies (Jim Munroe; Glulx).
Gun Mute (C.E.J. Pacian; TADS 3).
Nightfall (Eric Eve; Glulx).
Piracy 2.0 (Sean Huxter; Z-code).
Violet (Jeremy Freese; Z-code).

Between Everybody Dies and Violet here. In the end, I went with Violet, mainly because I did wish Everybody Dies did more with the multiple PCs. It's a great concept, but a bit underutilized.

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And that's that! Off to write now...

Posted by Sarah at 1:18 PM

Labels: interactive fiction