PDF Awards?

[cybermonkey]

Maybe there can be a panel of "celebrity" judges. People who we all respect. Obviously they would not have to have anything in the program, but there have to be tons of RPG legends out there who are not going to have anything in this program.

People involved in the industry but not necessarily the "e" industry could help make the awards mean that much more.

Mean more than what?

I thought that this award was to be used as a vehicle to launch PDFs into mainstream (ie the gaming equiv. of Sundance).

We need to establish why we're having the awards. Getting celebrity judges is a novelty, a gimmick, and it will be seen as such by those who don't normally get PDFs. I still think this is something to be judge by our own peers within the e-publishing industry. It should be our standards that we judge, not our standards given to someone else, or someone else using their standards.

It took Sundance a number of years for it to gain its prominence within the movie industry. This isn't something that will catapult PDFs into mainstream overnight. Who knows, this could become a showcase for publishers to come and check out which materials they may wish to publish in "hard form" before it's released.

That being said, is this supposed to be an award show looking back over the past year, or a showcase for new products all at once, with awards (as listed previously) given out at the end?

 

[Prest0]

Mean more than what? (snip)

IMO, it would mean more than a self-congratulatory pat on the back. Building a panel of judges made up of well known and respected members of the RPG community (non-competing e-publishers, reviewers, print publishers, etc.) would help build a perception of legitimacy. Otherwise it could be perceived as a bunch of guys handing out awards to one another for the sake of looking good.

To quote RPG Host earlier in this thread: "That won't work either as it just becomes a network of "Good 'o boys" voting for themselves (which is what the GAMA awards have become). ". I have no firsthand knowledge of the GAMA situation, but I could see the same people having the same perception about a award judged soley by other e-publishers--at least for the first few years. After a couple of years when people have had a chance to see that the awards really do represent the best in our industry, celebrity judges wouldn't be necessary.

(Edit: fixed vB tag)

 

[Fast Learner]

It seems to me that the ideal way to go would be to have the e-publishing community at large perform the intial evaluations in order to narrow the field down to a small set of nominations. Then have a more select group -- either e-publishers or print publishers or what have you -- vote to select the final. Otherwise you'll have a hard time (I predict) getting the final judges to review all of the contenders.

 

[Fast Learner]

It seems to me that this:

I think that restricting it to "pdf's" (for the moment) is a good idea because it raises the bar a bit. Anybody can paste together a .doc or .rtf file.

directly conflicts with this:

And for the record, there are free and legal programs out there that create pdfs. They dont have as many options as adobe however, but thats not my point.

which again conflicts with this:

A pdf establishes a certain quality that will be required for the awards.

Either PDF actually in some way establishes some kind of professionalism (though I don't know how) or anyone can create a PDF if they want to (which would indicate that the PDF format is meaningless, imo), and there's no reason to penalize them for not doing so.

Just my thoughts as well. I'll happily admit to a bias, though, as I'm working on an online product that generates RTFs and text files right now, and I'll only be able to afford to have it generate PDFs if the product is reasonably successful. I don't want to be out of the running automatically, though, because I can't install a PDF writer on my shared web server.

 

[smokewolf]

There needs to be a panel of people who judges. That is a fact. It could not be an open vote by every e-publisher out there. IF you were to try, you would have situations where several voters never returned votes or they only voted in one category and then you would need qurom rules and other complications.

Why get "celebrities"? Because the judges have to be people who are not nominated. Movie awards are not done by the actors, directors and such (except the Guild Awards), they are done by a group of people who know movies yet have no personal stake in a film if it wins.

So if we must go outside the publishers to get judged why not have Gygax or Chadwick do it?


BTW, by meaning more, I just meant more than like using a fan base or customers to decide.

 

[Warden]

I have set up a new thread on RPGHost's boards to discuss the eWards further.

http://forums.rpghost.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=14766

Please read the rather long intro and post all comments/suggestion here.