XYZZY Awards

An annual popular-choice award formerly organized by Eileen Mullin of XYZZYnews, and currently organized by Sam Kabo Ashwell.

Browse the XYZZY Awards either by year:

• 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022

Or by category:

• Best Game | Best Writing | Best Story | Best Setting | Best Puzzles | Best NPCs | Best Individual Puzzle | Best Individual NPC | Best Individual PC | Best Use of Medium (1997–2009) | Best Implementation (2010–) | Best Use of Innovation (2010–) | Best Technological Development (2010–) | Best Supplemental Materials (2010–2013) | Best Use of Multimedia (2014–) | Other awards

See also:

• Statistics

The XYZZY Awards are similar to Oscars in the movie business. The awards take place each year in the early spring, with the ceremony occurring online. The awards ceremony used to take place on ifMUD, but in 2017, the event changed venues. The award winners are now announced on Twitter instead.

There are two stages of voting. In the first stage, games are nominated by the IF community for the different categories. Any game that was published in the previous year is eligible for nomination. Games that have been nominated frequently become finalists. In the second stage, members of the community vote on the finalists to pick a winner of each category.

Fine Print

• Regarding IntroComp games: The year that an IntroComp game is completed is the year that game becomes eligible for the XYZZY awards.

Trivia

• Speed-IF XYZZY and Speed-IF Century were two minicomps that used the XYZZY Awards ceremony as a setting.

Links

• XYZZY Awards. As of February 2010, this is the new website for the XYZZY Awards, beginning with XYZZY Awards 2009.
• XYZZYnews (archive). The IF newssite which originally hosted the XYZZY Awards for most of its existence.
• http://www.spod-central.org/~psmith/IF/xyzzies.html - Dylan O'Donnell's page of XYZZY Award nominees and winners.
• XYZZY Award at Wikipedia.