ENnies V - and beyond...
- Thread starter Michael Morris
- Start date
Psion
Adventurer
Dextra said:
Agree. I think what Chris was saying is we need some consistency.
Essentially fold them in. Good enough.
Two potential problems here:
- From what I have seen in this thread so far, that would cause much masonry incontinence among the ENworld natives, who feel that ENworld is a d20 fan site and that is the way it should be.
- I am not against it, but my major concern is that if the voting occurs here, the fact that the d20 fanbase is strong will cause a significant slant in the vote.
I argee. I think for this year, considering events, it may have been warranted, but now that 3.5 has come and gone, it is basically defunct.
If we do as you suggest above, I do think that's the way to go. As stated earlier, I really think that fan site could go.
Creates more categories and will have to deal with fringe, border, and blurry cases. From a judges standpoint, I would much rather live without it.
Um, yes.
Well, I'm just a RPG fan, not involved with the ENnies in any way. Here's my thoughts
I *like* that they award to all RPGs, not just d20. Heck, I'd love for ENWorld to open a 'Other Games' forum, so I could talk about Unisystem and such here. As for the award, it should go to the best book or product, despite what rules system they follow. Even if you don't play the game, a good book can give you ideas for the games you do play.
No need for external judges. Most agree that they've done a good job. Any kind of awards will get people not satisfied - heck I was disappointed that there were no Unisystem books nominated. But such is life, and there were many worthy books nominated.
I *like* that they award to all RPGs, not just d20. Heck, I'd love for ENWorld to open a 'Other Games' forum, so I could talk about Unisystem and such here. As for the award, it should go to the best book or product, despite what rules system they follow. Even if you don't play the game, a good book can give you ideas for the games you do play.
No need for external judges. Most agree that they've done a good job. Any kind of awards will get people not satisfied - heck I was disappointed that there were no Unisystem books nominated. But such is life, and there were many worthy books nominated.
Teflon Billy
Explorer
Dextra said:
Without any sarcasm at all, I can safely say I am one of the people Dextra is talking about.
I was thinking on the drive home, EN.World seminars could go a long way in paying the cost of the ENnies. As a group, a topic is picked, a lession plan outlined, information is taken and compiled as an agenda and then a few of us that make it to GENCON give it, the return I don't think will be that great $1.50/ticket 30 seats equals 45$ 5 seminars totals 225$, but it is something.
KB9JMQ
First Post
As a member who does not have a lot of influence on what happens nor does a lot to shape it, I totally agree with everything Dextra posted.
I do think we could do things a little more professionaly. I felt kind of silly when I was working the EN Booth and someone asked who was nominated and we didn't even have a list. Yes a computer which had net access would have been nice to show off the site.
I think the work done this year was great and I think we have a great future ahead of us as long as we stay focused and remember why we are all here in the first place.
To have fun.
I do think we could do things a little more professionaly. I felt kind of silly when I was working the EN Booth and someone asked who was nominated and we didn't even have a list. Yes a computer which had net access would have been nice to show off the site.
I think the work done this year was great and I think we have a great future ahead of us as long as we stay focused and remember why we are all here in the first place.
To have fun.
Mission Statement/Voting Scheme
First off: Thank you to EN World and its members for the Silver ENnie for Book of Fiends. It's a tremendous honor and means a ton to all of us who worked on the book.
My extremely long comments are based on 1) winning two silver ENnies, so please understand these aren't coming out of bitterness, but out of concern for an awards ceremony that I think is the bee's knees; 2) my experience creating and running the premiere awards in the videogames industry (www.gamecriticsawards.com). Those awards are nominated and voted on only by game reviewers and have no public element.
Mission Statement:
I agree that the awards need a mission statement. Here's the conclusion we came to creating the mission for the game critics awards.
The game critics awards are given for games shown at E3 (the biggest industry event in videogames), where it is literally impossible for all the voting members to see every game and the games we were seeing were not done yet. So, the internal "mission" of the awards was to dub the games and systems with the best buzz from the show. We talked about what won the show -- as in, what walked out of the show with the best word of mouth. It would be impossible to say objectively what would be the best game, only what did the best job of presenting itself during the limited timeframe of E3.
If I were to try to reverse engineer a mission statement for the ENnies based on how it is structured now, I would say that its mission is to 1) name a list of products of the highest quality through a screening pass by elected judges and 2) name the products on that list with the best "buzz" from the year through an open public vote.
I say this because I think we all accept that we, the voters, cannot have read all of the products on the slate. I think we also accept that we aren't limiting our votes to products that we have personally read cover-to-cover. I believe it a reasonable assumption that most of us are voting for products we've only heard about, talked to friends about, read reviews of or flipped through at our FLGS. Because we haven't read all of the nominees, we are voting positively (scores of 8-10) for the products that have earned the best "buzz" by leaving a good impression on us, our gaming group, or critics we trust. We are voting negatively (scores of 1-3) for the products that have made a negative impression on us, our friends, or critics.
I don't think the result can reasonably be said to be the "objectively best" product. We could reasonably say the nominees are among the best products produced that year, according to our community, because we elected judges to seek out those products and form a list of them. It seems apparent that they're doing a great job of that. But once we open the voting to everyone, we're no longer shooting for "the objective best" but for "the best buzz." In other words, the winners are the products that have netted the highest average of positive word-of-mouth. There is NOTHING wrong with this, in my opinion. As a consumer, it matters to me what the wider community of gamers has a high opinion of, based on what they've read and what they've heard from other gamers. It also matters to me what the elected judges think is the highest quality, and I have made buying decisions based on both the nomination lists and on the winners.
Voting:
That said, the voting system works against whichever mission you might isolate: highest quality or best buzz. The current voting scheme favors a minority of partisans who have a specific loyalty or hatred.
I will explain my point with a now impossible and wholly imaginary example so as not to draw any parallels with real ENnie contests. The judges nominate five excellent products for best campaign setting: Book of Happy Fun and four WotC products. We know all five are of high quality because, I think the overwhelming majority of us agree, the judge screening process has worked quite well. Now we open the voting...
No one has heard of Book of Happy Fun except for 100 people who religiously read HappyFun.com. The overwhelming majority of voters give the WotC books a range of scores from 6-9. Most people don't vote on Book of Happy Fun because they've never heard of it. Were this the end of the story, we could have a very clean result indicating which book was considered by the voters to be of the highest quality or to have the best buzz.
However, the partisans enter into the voting. People who hate WotC on principle (and I think we all know such people exist for every publishing house in the industry) all try to pull down WotC's score by giving their books 3s or lower. In this case, winning an ENnie under the current system is in part a measure of how well a publisher has managed to keep people from hating them and trying to pull down their score, which is orthoganal to the purpose of the awards.
On the other hand, the 100 people who read HappyFun.com all come in and vote only for Book of Happy Fun, every one of them giving it a 10. In this case, winning an ENnie is in part a measure of how well a product has managed to maintain obscurity so that only the people who love it will vote for it, also orthoganal to the purpose of the awards.
When the averages are tallied, Book of Happy Fun wins. It has neither won because it is of the highest quality (it may have been of the highest quality, but that's not why it won) nor because it had the best buzz (it won precisely because no one had heard of it and no one pulled down its average with realistic scores). WotC has lost neither because their products were low quality nor because they had the worst buzz. This scenario, which I think is likely to have actually occurred at some point under the current voting scheme, fails to live up to whatever mission statement might be intended. A voting system should never benefit people who want to game it -- and the current one does.
Proposals:
I propose two things, both of which I proposed two years ago. I apologize if I'm starting to sound like a bi-annual broken record:
1) Voting be open ONLY to members of EN World. This will come closer to allowing the awards to reflect the opinions of the members only and not outside partisans. Give people a chance to sign up for membership up to a week before voting begins to maintain a broader "gamer public" aesthetic.
2) Voting should be done through points and not averages, with voters ranking at least 3 of the nominees. Your first choice gets five points, your second gets four points, etc. The winner is the product with the most points.
Voters must vote for at least three to keep people from coming in and voting for only one product and unnaturally weighting their opinion higher than the opinions of other gamers. Put simply, if I vote only for Book of Happy Fun and give it 5 points, those 5 points end up being "more powerful" than if I'd diluted it by giving 4 points to another book and 3 points to a third. If you do not require people to vote for at least three products, then people interested in gaming the system will do so by voting for only one product. If you cannot vote for three products, then you skip the category.
The only way I know of to game this system is to vote for products you think are unlikely to win in the 2 and 3 slot. While that is gaming the system, it is much less likely to tilt the balance in anything but an incredibly close contest (and if enough people do it, may have surprising consequences) -- neither of which can be said for the ways of gaming the current system.
The result of this voting scheme is that it benefits the product that has the plurality of positive opinion. A product that 500 people vote for in the #2 or #3 slot will win handily over a product that 200 people put in the #1 slot and no one else has voted for. It does not allow for negative opinion -- particularly artificial, partisan negative opinion (I hate company X, so I'm giving them a bad score!) -- to skew the results.
Alternative:
If this seems too complicated, I submit that people voting for only one product out of the 5 as the one they think is the "best" would still be better than the current system. One-Person-One-Vote has a lot of flaws (and they're very serious, bad flaws) but it is still less gameable than the current voting system.
The current system is likely to produce results that are actually the opposite of whatever mission the awards might reasonably choose. My recollection is that this system was chosen to do away with the unfair tyranny of the majority (in the old one-person-one-vote system, the most popular product was nearly guaranteed to win -- thus, it was assumed, the WotC sweep of three years ago). In my opinion, the current system has the very real potential of something even worse: the tyranny of the vocal and fanatical minority. I can't believe anyone wants that.
(edited for clarity -- added section headers. Sorry this is so long! Had a lot to say.)
First off: Thank you to EN World and its members for the Silver ENnie for Book of Fiends. It's a tremendous honor and means a ton to all of us who worked on the book.
My extremely long comments are based on 1) winning two silver ENnies, so please understand these aren't coming out of bitterness, but out of concern for an awards ceremony that I think is the bee's knees; 2) my experience creating and running the premiere awards in the videogames industry (www.gamecriticsawards.com). Those awards are nominated and voted on only by game reviewers and have no public element.
Mission Statement:
I agree that the awards need a mission statement. Here's the conclusion we came to creating the mission for the game critics awards.
The game critics awards are given for games shown at E3 (the biggest industry event in videogames), where it is literally impossible for all the voting members to see every game and the games we were seeing were not done yet. So, the internal "mission" of the awards was to dub the games and systems with the best buzz from the show. We talked about what won the show -- as in, what walked out of the show with the best word of mouth. It would be impossible to say objectively what would be the best game, only what did the best job of presenting itself during the limited timeframe of E3.
If I were to try to reverse engineer a mission statement for the ENnies based on how it is structured now, I would say that its mission is to 1) name a list of products of the highest quality through a screening pass by elected judges and 2) name the products on that list with the best "buzz" from the year through an open public vote.
I say this because I think we all accept that we, the voters, cannot have read all of the products on the slate. I think we also accept that we aren't limiting our votes to products that we have personally read cover-to-cover. I believe it a reasonable assumption that most of us are voting for products we've only heard about, talked to friends about, read reviews of or flipped through at our FLGS. Because we haven't read all of the nominees, we are voting positively (scores of 8-10) for the products that have earned the best "buzz" by leaving a good impression on us, our gaming group, or critics we trust. We are voting negatively (scores of 1-3) for the products that have made a negative impression on us, our friends, or critics.
I don't think the result can reasonably be said to be the "objectively best" product. We could reasonably say the nominees are among the best products produced that year, according to our community, because we elected judges to seek out those products and form a list of them. It seems apparent that they're doing a great job of that. But once we open the voting to everyone, we're no longer shooting for "the objective best" but for "the best buzz." In other words, the winners are the products that have netted the highest average of positive word-of-mouth. There is NOTHING wrong with this, in my opinion. As a consumer, it matters to me what the wider community of gamers has a high opinion of, based on what they've read and what they've heard from other gamers. It also matters to me what the elected judges think is the highest quality, and I have made buying decisions based on both the nomination lists and on the winners.
Voting:
That said, the voting system works against whichever mission you might isolate: highest quality or best buzz. The current voting scheme favors a minority of partisans who have a specific loyalty or hatred.
I will explain my point with a now impossible and wholly imaginary example so as not to draw any parallels with real ENnie contests. The judges nominate five excellent products for best campaign setting: Book of Happy Fun and four WotC products. We know all five are of high quality because, I think the overwhelming majority of us agree, the judge screening process has worked quite well. Now we open the voting...
No one has heard of Book of Happy Fun except for 100 people who religiously read HappyFun.com. The overwhelming majority of voters give the WotC books a range of scores from 6-9. Most people don't vote on Book of Happy Fun because they've never heard of it. Were this the end of the story, we could have a very clean result indicating which book was considered by the voters to be of the highest quality or to have the best buzz.
However, the partisans enter into the voting. People who hate WotC on principle (and I think we all know such people exist for every publishing house in the industry) all try to pull down WotC's score by giving their books 3s or lower. In this case, winning an ENnie under the current system is in part a measure of how well a publisher has managed to keep people from hating them and trying to pull down their score, which is orthoganal to the purpose of the awards.
On the other hand, the 100 people who read HappyFun.com all come in and vote only for Book of Happy Fun, every one of them giving it a 10. In this case, winning an ENnie is in part a measure of how well a product has managed to maintain obscurity so that only the people who love it will vote for it, also orthoganal to the purpose of the awards.
When the averages are tallied, Book of Happy Fun wins. It has neither won because it is of the highest quality (it may have been of the highest quality, but that's not why it won) nor because it had the best buzz (it won precisely because no one had heard of it and no one pulled down its average with realistic scores). WotC has lost neither because their products were low quality nor because they had the worst buzz. This scenario, which I think is likely to have actually occurred at some point under the current voting scheme, fails to live up to whatever mission statement might be intended. A voting system should never benefit people who want to game it -- and the current one does.
Proposals:
I propose two things, both of which I proposed two years ago. I apologize if I'm starting to sound like a bi-annual broken record:
1) Voting be open ONLY to members of EN World. This will come closer to allowing the awards to reflect the opinions of the members only and not outside partisans. Give people a chance to sign up for membership up to a week before voting begins to maintain a broader "gamer public" aesthetic.
2) Voting should be done through points and not averages, with voters ranking at least 3 of the nominees. Your first choice gets five points, your second gets four points, etc. The winner is the product with the most points.
Voters must vote for at least three to keep people from coming in and voting for only one product and unnaturally weighting their opinion higher than the opinions of other gamers. Put simply, if I vote only for Book of Happy Fun and give it 5 points, those 5 points end up being "more powerful" than if I'd diluted it by giving 4 points to another book and 3 points to a third. If you do not require people to vote for at least three products, then people interested in gaming the system will do so by voting for only one product. If you cannot vote for three products, then you skip the category.
The only way I know of to game this system is to vote for products you think are unlikely to win in the 2 and 3 slot. While that is gaming the system, it is much less likely to tilt the balance in anything but an incredibly close contest (and if enough people do it, may have surprising consequences) -- neither of which can be said for the ways of gaming the current system.
The result of this voting scheme is that it benefits the product that has the plurality of positive opinion. A product that 500 people vote for in the #2 or #3 slot will win handily over a product that 200 people put in the #1 slot and no one else has voted for. It does not allow for negative opinion -- particularly artificial, partisan negative opinion (I hate company X, so I'm giving them a bad score!) -- to skew the results.
Alternative:
If this seems too complicated, I submit that people voting for only one product out of the 5 as the one they think is the "best" would still be better than the current system. One-Person-One-Vote has a lot of flaws (and they're very serious, bad flaws) but it is still less gameable than the current voting system.
The current system is likely to produce results that are actually the opposite of whatever mission the awards might reasonably choose. My recollection is that this system was chosen to do away with the unfair tyranny of the majority (in the old one-person-one-vote system, the most popular product was nearly guaranteed to win -- thus, it was assumed, the WotC sweep of three years ago). In my opinion, the current system has the very real potential of something even worse: the tyranny of the vocal and fanatical minority. I can't believe anyone wants that.
(edited for clarity -- added section headers. Sorry this is so long! Had a lot to say.)
Last edited:
buzz
Adventurer
I just wanted to chime in with Dextra on some of the "fluff" parts of the Ennies.
I totally agree with a "dress code" for any presenters, judges, and MCs.
I'd love to have some sort of "processional" music for when recipients are coming to/from the stage. The dead air after each award was announced wasn't great for the atmosphere. Some pre-show and post-show music serving as a cue for when the show begins and ends, as well as getting poeple in a party mood, would be a valuable addition. I have a truckload of audio software so would be happy to help make up a CD of cues and tunes. If I have a laptop by next GenCon, I'd be happy to come and be "music director".
thalmin (who was sitting next to me) commented that he'd love to have the names of the people accepting each award announced. I agree. I had no idea who most of the people accepting were.
A brief "halftime show" is a great idea. Get one of the Dead Gentlemen to do a dramatic reading from Piratecat's story hour or something.
Guest presenters. Guest presenters for certain key awards would rock. Heck, recruit some of the actors signing autographs in the dealer's hall. Lord knows Lt. Boomer looked pretty bored the whole time. Ply him with beer!
Do whatever is necessary to get recipients to show up. It's maybe not as big a deal for some of the "lesser" awards, but Chaosium not showing up to collect their best game of the year award was just lame. When was the last time they won anything?
I totally agree with a "dress code" for any presenters, judges, and MCs.
I'd love to have some sort of "processional" music for when recipients are coming to/from the stage. The dead air after each award was announced wasn't great for the atmosphere. Some pre-show and post-show music serving as a cue for when the show begins and ends, as well as getting poeple in a party mood, would be a valuable addition. I have a truckload of audio software so would be happy to help make up a CD of cues and tunes. If I have a laptop by next GenCon, I'd be happy to come and be "music director".
thalmin (who was sitting next to me) commented that he'd love to have the names of the people accepting each award announced. I agree. I had no idea who most of the people accepting were.
A brief "halftime show" is a great idea. Get one of the Dead Gentlemen to do a dramatic reading from Piratecat's story hour or something.
Guest presenters. Guest presenters for certain key awards would rock. Heck, recruit some of the actors signing autographs in the dealer's hall. Lord knows Lt. Boomer looked pretty bored the whole time. Ply him with beer!
Do whatever is necessary to get recipients to show up. It's maybe not as big a deal for some of the "lesser" awards, but Chaosium not showing up to collect their best game of the year award was just lame. When was the last time they won anything?
Farland
Explorer
Here is my comment, and it relates to pairing down the categories: I didn't win an ENnie for www.farlandworld.com this year, but I want a shot at it in the future. Please don't do away with best fan site.
