Woodlings draw near!

We try to do the gameblogging awards in December; they're part of our year-end wrap-up. However, this year, a dead coyote and an even deader mental state (which I haven't gotten around to writing about yet, appropriately enough) led to that slipping. So, uh, here we are with some belated 2021 game nominees.

2021 by the numbers: 24 games completed, 1 game abandoned, and 1 ongoing, for a total of 26 gameblogging entries. This narrowly edges out 2017 (the first year we ever did this, in which we had 29) as the lowest amount of entries in the history of us doing game writeups. You would think that losing my job and getting waylaid with the kind of ADHD and executive function struggles that left me practically bedridden for months on end would have led to playing more video games, because what else was I doing all day? But, uh, apparently not.

Some of these categories are bare enough that we may as well not have them, while others still managed to have a lot of great games in contention for a highly competitive award. Which ones are which? I guess you'll have to keep reading to find out.

( Onward, at last? )

Look, I'll be honest with you: The focus end of my mental health has taken an absolute nosedive, I've been so bad at getting around to doing basically anything that I completely forgot about IFComp this year, 2020 has been a thing as I'm sure you're all aware, and there is a tremendous urge to just crawl back into bed forever while the completely ignored work and house tasks and unpaid bills (my finances are fine and I can totally afford them; I just, like, forget to get around to sending in the payments) and concerned "hey I haven't heard from you in like three months, are you still alive or what" IMs pile up. It's gone well past the point of me just being lazy and sucking and into the territory where I think I have a legitimate neurodivergency-related problem here. (Either this is an antidepressant side effect or there's an undiagnosed "okay great we nuked the anxiety, now what about the ADHD" or something lurking back in there somewhere.) Kurt joined our system several months ago and (as of when I'm writing this, updating it is on the to-do list for later) this Dreamwidth icon of the system still only has Ardei, Sara, and me. There was a whole big story about how he came to be, his relationship with us, the struggles and growing pains we had getting used to the new addition to the family, that I just... haven't told yet. People who hang out with us every day on Telegram have watched it unfold, but to the Dreamwidth audience, there's just this sort of "oh yeah there are four of us in my head now, don't worry about it, I'll explain later maybe" handwave that has yet to come to fruition.

Basically what I'm saying is that the final few months of 2020 have seen me blow past the point of not just dropping the ball, but somehow losing my hands in a tragic rock/paper/scissors accident and evolving into a lesser form of life that is now physically incapable of grasping the ball. As such, yeah the gameblogging awards are a little late this year.

We're expanding to let all four of us (yes there are four, I'm going to add Kurt to the icon eventually, shut up) weigh in with our respective picks and preferences. As always feel free make your bets and predictions as to how we're each going to vote, though we're on a bit of a compressed schedule since I was maybe a little behind schedule turning the nominations post in.

2020 by the numbers: 24 games completed, 8 abandoned (though that includes a bunch of last-minute housekeeping entries,) and 3 ongoing, for a total of 35 games blogged, a number that exactly ties last year's overall total. Considering how much of a void day the entire last quarter of the year has been for us, I find that hard to believe unless we had a really strong early lead that I just kind of blew at the end there, but that's what the figures claim, anyway.

Anyway! Awards. Nominations. Categories. Words.

( Awaaaayyyy )

It's that time of year again! (With a dash of "Aaaa is it that time of year again already, what do you mean this entire post is due today" as usual.)

Game Year 2019 is officially closed; anything we play, complete or abandon, or otherwise write up starting now counts toward the 2020 awards. The 2019 field is set, and... things feel a bit mixed? I feel like the pickings among some categories might be a bit lean, while others have some of the strongest and greatest competition yet, worthy of contesting even among the previous years' winners.

2019 by the numbers: 26 complete, 7 abandoned, 2 ongoing, for a total of 34 game reports in 2019. (Bugs and Kisses was dual-classified as Complete/Abandoned.) This puts 2019 with slightly more gaming activity than 2017, but significantly less than 2018. Still, anything that gets me to write 34 mini-articles in a year has to be considered a success. I know 2019 itself hit our clanmates pretty hard, such that we're the only ones left still doing this this year, but we're still having a good time with it.

Speaking of which, because we both had a blast doing this last year, Sara and I will resume our co-hosting roles. As always, some of these we agree on, others we'll split our votes, some we have no idea what we're going to pick and others are a foregone conclusion that we're just trying not to spoil in this post. Speculation and predictions are welcome and highly encouraged--who knows, you might even change our mind if you make a good enough case.

( Onward to the nominees, then! )

I was checking my archive posts to see what kind of timeframe the month of December looked like--I recall it being a busy month with the Gameblogging Award nominees post, the actual winners post, and of course the sentimental year in review thing, but which of those happened when again?

Turns out AAAA THE NOMINEES ARE TODAY AAAA

Okay. So. Gaming Year 2018 is officially closed, meaning even if I beat a new game tomorrow, that would count as 2019 for the purposes of next year's nominations and awards. (This also means that games from last December are included here.)

According to a quick rough count that may or may not be 100% accurate, in gaming year 2018 I completed 38 games and abandoned 5. (Note that these figures include one point each to Completed and Abandoned for Varenje and Escape the Game. The batch of 24 Hours of ZZT contest entries got lumped together and are only worth one Completed entry combined, but every IFComp game was counted separately.) In 2017, I completed 21-24 games depending on how strictly you want to count certain special cases, and abandoned 5. So, this was a good year for gaming.

This year, there is one major change to the format, which particularly eagle-eyed viewers might have noticed from the post title: It's not just Celine's Gameblogging Awards anymore. Sara wants to be involved! :3

Sara:
Hi! ^^

Celine:
And no, this isn't a way to cop out and split the votes on some of those really tough "pick your favorite child" decisions I had to make last year. We've already done some preliminary discussions and found a few cases where I would have picked two winners for a category if I could, because it was a really tough choice between several worthy contenders, but she's going to end up breaking the same way I probably eventually do. Likewise, there are a few cases I feel are the kind of slam-dunk obvious choices where I'd like to just vote for that one twice if I could, but she disagrees. :P No, we're both just approaching these independently, without worrying about how our picks look next to each other.

We keep an overall spreadsheet for at-a-glance info of this and previous years' nominees and winners all right here, if you're interested. Handy!

( And the nominees are... )

Whew. And there you have it. So, as always, we strongly encourage you to speculate on the picks either of us are going to make, and to discuss the picks you would make. We each have pretty good ideas what we're picking for at least a few of these already, but not all of them are 100% decided yet. Crowd participation making really good points why one particular game deserved a particular category actually did sway a few of my picks last year!

But mainly, I just look forward to the participation because... you know. Games are fun. Responses and comments and discussions are fun. This is all a big party and I want everyone invited.

Sara:
Including me! :3

Celine:
Absolutely. <3

I will probably make my final decisions and post the winners for my 2017 Gameblogging awards sometime next weekend. In the meantime, two things:

1) There's totally still time to speculate, predict, and discuss who you think will win! Yes I am blatantly fishing for comments here, but what can I say, comments are nice. When a certain sqrlmog did it, I won't give the exact numbers because I don't want to give too much away, but I will say she had at least one prediction that was 100% correct in everything from winner to the exact logic why that one wins, at least one where she was just as completely wrong about everything, and at least one where I was going to pick something else but she made such a good point about why that one's the logical choice that she might have changed my mind. We'll see! A lot of these aren't final yet! Anyway, my point is this is actually a lot of fun and more people should play.

2) Also speaking of sqlrmogs I stole the categories from her award post that she'd added, because those were really good additions and why didn't I think of those.

( Have some more last-minute nominees for things! )