This is a little bit off topic, but I feel obliged to mention that VN devs can (and do) submit their games to general (indie) games contests and events. Christine Love's "Ladykiller in a Bind" won the IGF award for Excellence in Narrative last month, and Lucy Blundell's "One Night Stand" was also a nominee in the same category. One of the games I'm working on first got its first recognition a local independent games festival called Freeplay, where it won the "Best Narrative" category."
andalusian wrote:with ifcomp, people vote for the games according to their camp in these 2 issues, and it can get very heated, because the competition makes the camps directly compete against each other. so ifcomp certainly makes these "wars" worse and breaks the community.
The Hugo awards similarly became unfortunately politicized recently, with some people attempting to form "factions" that engaged in "slate-style" voting, where you have people voting for or against works that they haven't even
read just because someone else has persuaded them that a particular work conforms to or is in opposition to the viewpoint that they hold.
I think that ratings and rankings tend to work best when people have an understanding of the judging process behind it, which includes knowing who exactly the judging body is, and my personal take is that I find the "awards" or "ranking" or whatever to be more useful if they are specific. For example, I tend to have less regard for anything based on public voting (such as ranking on a site like MAL or VNDB); public ranking systems can be frustrating when I see that a "controversial" work has a low rating and I'm left wondering if it's because the work is actually lacking in quality, or it's been "vote brigaded" by some group of people who dislike what it represents. For video games broadly, I prefer following the GOTY awards at sites like Giant Bomb where I am familiar with the site's staff, who even post their internal deliberations so that people can listen to the discussions that led to their awards. (In fact, these internal deliberations are more interesting to me than the final ranking of games.) And the "site lists" tend to be less interesting to me than the personal lists of individual site contributors. (I don't particularly care what "Giant Bomb's game of the year" is, but I am interested in finding out what Jeff Gerstmann or Rami Ismail's favorite game was.)
So, with that being said, I'd actually be much more interested in seeing personalized lists from individuals that I follow, rather than some sort of aggregated community ranking that attempts to "quantify" what the best game of the year was. (I'd rather see a bunch of articles saying "Here are my favorite VNs from last year" than "Here is the list ranking the 10 best VNs of the year.") I think it would actually be pretty easy for people to just start posting personalized lists absent the formation of any kind of "committee."
I think one of the things that complicates this is that most of the "voices" in the VN community that I'd be interested in seeing personalized lists from are VN devs themselves, and of course this leads both to issues where people can feel uncomfortable in critiquing their peers. (Also, the VN community is a lot more intimate than other communities, so even non-devs can fall victim to this.) It doesn't seem like the VN community really has "taste makers" in the same way that broader games criticism has. But I think that the community would be better off if people felt empowered to cross that bridge and just start making and sharing those personal lists.
So, with that being said, are there any people who, rather than forming a "committee" or "academy" of sorts, are willing to form a pact and say, "I'll post a personalized 'my favorite VNs of 2017' some time in January of next year?" Because not only does that seem a lot easier and more doable to me, but it also seems like it would be a lot more fun and potentially more useful as an exercise.