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With the number of XYZZY nominations every year, no one could meaningfully rate each game against the others unless it was their full-time job, and as the rules point out no one is expected to. In the finalist round it's of course a different question.

Apparently no one remembered to inform the Choice of Games community that this was an awards for Interactive Fiction (TM).

Unfortunately, it is not. It has always been a source of profound perplexity (and, in the beginning, when I was still an angry young man, a little anger) to me that some people voted in the second round without having played all the games in the category they voted for. How could you possibly decide that A is better than B if you have only played A? But alas, the XYZZY judging rules have never made playing all the games in a category mandatory.

I understand that such a rule would be unenforcable, but I don't think that is a big problem.

And of course, when I say "play" I do not mean "play to completion".

I find that to be in rather poor taste. Especially after you argued on Twitter this week that puzzles are only added for nostalgia's sake, it's extremely hypocritical to mention that Zombie Exodus is up for "Best Puzzle" without some qualifying statement about how it doesn't even have puzzles.

I can accept that the first time out you didn't realize what would happen. But the followup makes it look as though you knew perfectly well and that you are not the least bit ashamed for dumping on a venerable community institution.

Then it needs its own set of competitions. You can't throw parser games with non-parser ones in the same pot. But the XYZZY Awards aren't a competition. Therefore a category for CYOA still makes sense.

I think the take home message of the last ifcomp was that you can put parser and non-parser interactive fiction together, given that two gamebooks were successfully judged against 36 parser games.

As zarf noted upthread, I think we can throw The Play and Taco Fiction in the same comp, or the XYZZYs, and judge them on a level playing field. However, for the XYZZYs, I would prefer it if we included just the games that somehow engaged with the IF community -- entered into a comp, or at least had an IFDB or IFWiki entry. The issue isn't so much that Zombie Exodus is a CYOA; it's that many or even most of us had never heard of it. That could have been true of a parser game as well.

_________________
There are books on computers? Isn't the point of computers to replace books?
-- C.C.

Surely the issue is that, presumably, most of the people who voted for Zombie Exodus hadn't heard of any of the other games?

FWIW, Choice of Games did not blog about IFComp in 2011; the rules of IFComp make it explicit that campaigning for votes is forbidden, and I was afraid that we'd stack the deck in favor of The Play, which would have been a clear violation of the rules of IFComp.

As a result, I hypothesize that most people in the ChoiceScript community were entirely unaware of IFComp and "The Play". I mentioned "The Play" in passing in my earlier XYZZY blog post http://www.choiceofgames.com/2012/01/vo ... zy-awards/ but the emphasis was quite clearly on the ChoiceScript games.

I'm trying to work out what our options are.

Short-term, there are three outcomes:
a) Zombie Exodus sweeps the awards, rendering them effectively meaningless. The IF community feels that one of its most important institutions has been violated, and the goodwill that dfabulich has worked patiently to establish goes up in smoke.
b) Zombie Exodus wins few or no awards. The IF community is still thoroughly pissed off, but to a lesser degree. This is probably the best outcome for everybody concerned.
c) the organisers take some kind of high-handed action to prevent a), probably on the premise that this constitutes a community invasion. Everybody gets deeply pissed off and looks bad. Obviously I'd prefer that we avoided this option.

Long-term, the stakes are a bit more complicated. We need to thread the needle of being open to cross-pollination and fostering relations with related communities, without leaving ourselves vulnerable to this kind of thing. I don't have any answers right at this moment.

One perhaps less obnoxious version of c) would be to do a run-off instead of first-past-the-post for the final round of voting. If, as I think you said, the ChoiceScript voters were a minority but had more concentrated votes, then one plausible voting outcome would be that in lots of the categories, Zombie Exodus gets 40%, Parser Game 1 gets 30%, Parser game 2 gets 20%, Parser game 1 gets 10%. But if all the parser voters prefer Parser Game 1 to Zombie Exodus, then Parser Game 1 would win the runoff. And if they don't all prefer Parser Game 1, then at least we know that Zombie Exodus won by converting some people from outside the Parser If community.)

UPDATE: Of course a considerable disadvantage of this approach is that it amounts to changing the rules mid-stream.

(By the way, Dan, I have a question which as you can probably guess is a little hostile in intent: What innovations do you think that Zombie Exodus makes?)