March 4, 2007
Clap 2006 hooray XYZZY yay Awards
The applause-filled, frivolity-filled XYZZY Awards have just concluded. Congratulations to all the interactive fiction authors whose work was nominated. Various characters from IF games (and some of the usual characters from ifMUD) gave the awards, as is traditional. Amid the humor, there was also some time to remember XYZZY award winner Star C. Foster.
The Best Game award this year went to The Elysium Enigma by Eric Eve; that game also won the Best Individual NPC award. Emily Short’s Floatpoint took the awards for Best Story and Best NPC. Andrew Plotkin’s Delightful Wallpaper took the Best Individual PC, Best Puzzles, and Best Writing awards. By the way, since these were done in TADS 3 (The Elysium Enigma) and Inform 7 (the two others), that’s a lot of wins for brand-new IF development systems.
The winner of Best Use of Medium, also nominated for several other awards, was De Baron by Victor Gijsbers; the game, winner of the Spring Thing contest, was released in English and Dutch. One of the nominees for Best Setting was JB’s Ekphrasis (GTxA announcement) which was released only in French. So, unless you count the two awards that The Gostak got in 2001, this seems to have been the best year yet for IF in other languages.
Again, the full list of nominees and winners is over at ifwiki, and it’s linked to ifwiki’s entries for each of the games.