Monte on Origins awards and ENnies

[DaveMage]

Since there is already one up?

Heh. I know that poll won't tell me what I want to know since I didn't even bother looking at the subject line once I saw the thread "header" is "Non-d20".

 

[Erik Mona]

Why wouldn't you join a professional group that was taking steps in the right direction and cleaning up their act?

Because I've heard talk about "steps in the right direction" every year since I started paying attention, and every year, 'round this time, the internet is always filled with apologies "for what happened this year" and calls for more people to help out. It's beginning to look like a pattern.

But if everyone takes the attitude of, "prove to me they're worth saving", then there are going to be a lot of people sitting around watching and not too many people helping to turn the awards into something good.

That's a fair assessment. I'll still be over here waiting for things to improve.

#3: So you like the Ennies better. Good for you. There's nothing wrong with that. But why do you have to pee in the Cheerios of a guy whose trying to make the Origins Awards better? Doesn't it benefit everyone to have the Origins Awards actually mean something? And what do you mean that "the ENnies serve the segment of the industry I'm interested in just fine." Are you saying that you only care about the small segment of consumers that frequent EnWorld?

No, I'm saying that I don't really care about "best 15mm historical miniatures game." The ENnies, at least, are selected and voted upon by members of my products' audience. The Origins Awards, on the other hand, seem to be decided by industry insiders and the RPG.net crowd. Basically, pick your website, and you have an award ceremony whose biases seem to map well to that website. I'll choose the site filled with D&D players rather than the site that views them as somehow less than true gamers. As a side bonus, my chosen ceremony won't have awards handed out by bellydancers and stormtroopers, which is a nice extra.

I applaud anyone who is working to make the Origins Awards better. After this year's ceremony, they definitely have their work cut out for them and deserve all the support they can get. But after having heard promises by well-intentioned folks for half a decade, I hope you'll forgive a little healthy skepticism.

--Erik Mona

 

[Conaill]

Too late, I already got it (finally)

Michael, could you confirm for us how the 2nd place winners are currently being chosen?

And if you are currently deviating from the voting specs, would you still be willing to go back to them? That should also remove a lot of the complexity from the code (no need to remove the top product and rerun the IRV!)

 

[TerraDave]

The Origins award ceremony

From Ken Hites column. The best description I have seen of the now infamous ceremony.

What If They Held A Debacle And Nobody Came?

If someone had told me last year that I'd be wishing for the days of ten-minute long acceptance speeches for Best Play-By-Mail Miniatures System Under 15mm or whatever and of watching game company executives in tuxedos fail to master PowerPoint, I'd have laughed in his face. But no, the Academy apparently contrived this year's Origins Awards ceremony starting with the notion that people still cared too much. And had too many chairs. So the innocent Pete Panzieri wound up announcing the awards from a corner podium in the hallway, over the heads of a middling clump of gamers waiting to get into the dealer's room at 9:30 in the morning on Thursday. (Yes, I said 9:30 in the morning. I didn't know they made one of those either.) I and a tiny knot of industry folk stood in slack-jawed mortification as two belly-dancers, a stormtrooper, and "not Sailor Moon" carried nominee placards past the podium like the ring girls at Purgatory Arena and the winners were hustled up and down to grab their own celebratory signage without so much as a "thank you" for the tepid crowd. God knows what the gamers made of it all, but as far as I could tell, only about thirty of them were watching at any given time. This kind of thing makes it very hard for me to continue my argument that the Origins Awards are not a joke, or at least are no more a joke than, say, the Golden Globes. The Vanguard and Gamers' Choice awards were announced on succeeding mornings, and for all I know there was a packed house dazzled by holographic presentations from Boba Fett. I had panels to attend instead. But I suspect I didn't miss anything.

 

[Michael Morris]

Michael, could you confirm for us how the 2nd place winners are currently being chosen?

And if you are currently deviating from the voting specs, would you still be willing to go back to them? That should also remove a lot of the complexity from the code (no need to remove the top product and rerun the IRV!)

For those capacle of reading it - here's the (tenatively) final code that does the counting.

function calculate_winner($category)
{
	global $DB_site;

	// Initialize internal arrays
	$votes = array();
	$drop_list = array(0 => 0);

	// Get the votes		
	$getvotes = $DB_site->query("SELECT $category FROM ennies");

	// Build the votes array
	while ($getvote = $DB_site->fetch_array($getvotes))
	{
		$votes[] = $getvote[$category];
	}


	for ($x = 1; $x < 5; $x++)
	{
		// Initialize $voted_for array
		$voted_for = array(
		1 => 0,
		2 => 0,
		3 => 0,
		4 => 0,
		5 => 0
		);
		
		// Now unset members of $voted_for on the drop list		
		foreach ($drop_list as $drop)
		{
			unset($voted_for[$drop]);
		}
		
		// Iterate over the ballots to count votes
		foreach ($votes as $ballot)
		{
			// Break the tally string up into an array.
			$tally = split_str($ballot);

			// Reverse the array because the ballots are stored backwards.
			$tally = array_reverse($tally);
			
			// Flip the array to align the keys with the drop values. This also destroys unwanted duplicate entries.
			$tally = array_flip($tally);

			// Drop out votes for candidates that have been elminated in prior voting rounds.			
			foreach ($drop_list as $drop)
			{
				unset($tally[$drop]);
			}

			// Flip the array back to put the values back where they belong.
			$tally = array_flip($tally);

			// Now count the ballot on the first element IF any elements still exist.			
			if (count($tally))
			{
				$voted_for[reset($tally)]++;		// Increment the element of $voted for corresponding
			}						// to the first element of tally		
		}

		
		//Sort by value, retaining keys, arrange in reverse order.
		arsort($voted_for);
		
		if (count($voted_for) == 2)
		{	
			$finalists = array_flip($voted_for);
			
			if (count($finalists) == 2)	// If it drops to 1 there is a tie.
			{	
				$winners[0] = reset($finalists);
				$winners[1] = end($finalists);
			}
			else
			{
				$winners[0] = reset($voted_for);
				$winners[1] = end($voted_for);
				$winners[2] = "tie";
			}

			// Return the result for this category back to the main ennies program. Note that this function gets called multiple times - once for each category.		
			return $winners;
		}
		else
		{
			//Find all the keys of the array.
			$voted_keys = array_keys($voted_for);

			// Pop the last element into the drop list		
			$drop_list[] = array_pop($voted_keys);

		}
	}
}

As you can see, once the system has narrowed things down to 2 finalists it sorts them out and returns them. If they are tied it is set to return two gold winners but not return a silver - we're still debating what to do in that situation, one that is in any event unlikely to occur anyway.

EDIT: Added additional comment text (in orange) to clarify the flow for laymen.

 

[Conaill]

As you can see, once the system has narrowed things down to 2 finalists it sorts them out and returns them. If they are tied it is set to return two gold winners but not return a silver - we're still debating what to do in that situation, one that is in any event unlikely to occur anyway.

AH! Well, in that case the only that's wrong is the tdescription on the launch screen. Sounds like you're doing it exactly like the voting specs (and fusangite and myself) recommends. We just got thrown off by this line on the launch screen:

[...] until a winner is determined. Once this occurs, the winner is set aside and the whole process repeats to determine the winner of the silver ENnie award.

 

[Michael Morris]

AH! Well, in that case the only that's wrong is the tdescription on the launch screen. Sounds like you're doing it exactly like the voting specs (and fusangite and myself) recommends. We just got thrown off by this line on the launch screen:

That's the way I initially thought it was supposed to be done.

 

[fusangite]

Thanks for being vigilant on this Conaill. Well spotted.

 

[woodelf]

The second is that the system used for determining the awards produces results that are unsatisfactory to industry members and consumers alike. And as long as the people handling the awards believe they are more qualified to judge merit than gamers at large -- the very audience for which the games are designed -- these two problems are unsolvable.

What's the point of an award that's just a popularity contest? Isn't that a sales ranking? Until someone presuades me of an even better solution, i still think that the best way to make the awards both relevant to gamers in the they-get-to-directly-influence-the-results sense and relevant to gamers in the identifying-the-best-stuff-out-there-regardless-of-popularity-or-exposure sense is to have the nominations open to the general public and the voting done by a select group.

But there's more to it even than that. It might just be that an award system designed to compare the merit of games designed by one guy in his basement alongside those produced by multimillion-dollar corporations is inherently flawed and can't be fixed.

Interesting. I wonder if that is part of the solution: categorize games on company size as well as type. Hmmm...

Not that I wouldn't mourn its passing. On the contrary, I truly wish there were some kind of professional recognition of merit in the industry that was worth paying attention to.

And here's where i smell the contradiction: does he want games judged by the public at large, or by professionals in the industry? Or is he talking about two different sets of awards?

As it stands now, it seems clear that the ENnies are the industry awards worth supporting, and so that's what I'm doing.

Huh? the ENnies are an "industry" award? They're even more skewed than the industry itself in favor of one segment of the RPG market. The voting methodology may be better (though i still think they're backwards), but giving a dozen-ish awards to D20 System products, and lumping everything else into one award, is hardly a good merit-based award system for the RPG industry as a whole. Now, eliminate the "Best Non-D20 System game" category and eliminate the implicit "D20 System" from all the other categories, and then i think we'd be fine. Even if the process still led to 95% of the winners being D20 System.

edit: actually, looking at the categories for the 2005 ENnies, it looks like perhaps they've mostly done that? Are the awards officially open to all game systems, except for the "Best D20 Game" category? Or is the D20 System-ness just assumed, given the venue? And, while i'm asking questions, is the "Best D20 Game" category really intended to only accept games with a D20 System logo, and not, say, Everquest D20? (versus being about D20 System games, regardless of D20STL status.)

 

[BiggusGeekus]

What's the point of an award that's just a popularity contest? Isn't that a sales ranking? Until someone presuades me of an even better solution, i still think that the best way to make the awards both relevant to gamers in the they-get-to-directly-influence-the-results sense and relevant to gamers in the identifying-the-best-stuff-out-there-regardless-of-popularity-or-exposure sense is to have the nominations open to the general public and the voting done by a select group.

Actually, I agree with Monte that there should be one category that is totally open and a popularity contest. A "gamer's choice" for best game, be it d20, Unisystem, card, wargame, or whatever. And if that always goes to WotC, then so be it.

Note: I said "one", not "all".