Sandy's Soapbox
Okay, I've never actually heard anyone say "I won a Callie!", but hey, cute names sell. Cute names like... 'Cosmic Cow'.
This year, you won't hear "Cosmic Cow won a Callie!". This is in part because no one calls them Callies. But more importantly, because "Cosmic Cow" did not make the 'cut' by the board game jury.
It's a simple process, see. Publishers nominate their games so that a jury can select the top ten in order to compile the top five so the Academy of Adventure Game and Design members can vote on the Origins Awards winners while the general public also votes, but on a different award (Gamers' Choice).
If you need details, you can just go to the Origins Awards website, which a decent websearch will list as off the Origins Convention site (originsgames.com), except that page sends you to the Academy of Adventure Arts and Design, also named on that webpage as the Academy of Adventure Game Art & Design, not to be confused with the Academy of Adventure Games and Design that I joined in order to be part of the award-making process, except they are all the same organization, "AAGAD", and we'll just call it "The Academy", okay?
Anyway, that leads you to the AAGAD site (aagad.originsgames.com), except now it's the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design, so it's a good thing we know "The Academy" whatever nom de plume it uses. At least it has a site under Origins, since GAMA has nixed the 3rd search result google kicks up for 'academy gama' and I couldn't find it via GAMA's home page. But remember, it's actually a GAMA organization (the Academy), which happens to present something at GAMA's gaming Con (Origins). So it's all the same family, GAMA and Origins and the 4 Academy cousins.
Anyway, if you're a good game, and your publisher nominates you to be considered for a 'Callie', you're in the running. Five esteemed jurors (or, for board games this year, four esteemed jurors and myself) then decide on the top picks for future voting.
Now I'm going to stop picking on GAMA and look at three philosophical ways to judge:
- Wise jury looking at 'big picture'
- "Many eyes" collected weighting of shared wisdom
- Best selling
The 'best selling' is simple. You try and figure out the highest selling games, and since the free market is never incorrect, those must be the 'best' games! After all, 'Monopoly' is far better than an of those German board games that are oh so trendy now!
More seriously on the 'sales' criteria, is a brilliant indy game that sold 2 copies (one to Mom, the other via web) a viable contender for "best game", when compared with a fairly brilliant game that also managed to reach 10,000 people? As with any argument, you have to weigh the value of sales, not be guided solely by it nor ignore it entirely.
Taking a different tact, we can use an aggregate of many voices approach. For board games (for example), one could simply take the stats from boardgamegeek.com reviews, total them up, and put the highest 5 as the choices. For RPGs, some weighted tally of RPGnet and ENWorld and the Forge. Sort of 'librarian as jury'. It's certainly be cheaper.
One issue with aggregate reviews is the reviewers tend to have different criteria. One thing I like about the Origins awards was we had to define our criteria. I suppose one could meta-review-- collect all existing independent reviews of the game, recalibrate their ratings based on the awards criteria, then tally them.
GAMA chose the third approach-- to have a selected jury look at a subset of games which publishers chose to put up for contention.
- Quality of game play [quality, fun and/or versatility, genre/theme and mechanics match up]
- Originality, innovation, uniqueness and creativity.
- Presentation and quality of components.
- Replay value
- Balance of skill versus luck
- Ease of setup, clarity of rules, and ability to quickly get into the game
- Value, or Cost vs What You Get (as an extreme, a great $20 game with all pewter figures beats a great $80 all-paper game that you can only use once)
I don't think there is a single objective 'best', and I think people will complain regardless of which is chosen. Like or it nor, GAMA chose a jury. There are problems with subsets and Juries, and awards in general. Some of them are unsolvable, because everyone has their own biases.
For example, if a bestselling game doesn't make it onto the 'final 5', the Awards are flawed because bestsellers must have done something right. But if a bestselling game does makes it, that's pandering to the largest ad budget rather than the best game, so the Awards are flawed. Either way, bestsellers mean any pundit can claim an error.
A more valid issue is whether a generally recognized 'excellent game' doesn't make the 'final 5'. This is often bandied about, for example, "Caylus" didn't make this year's final 5.
However, this only matters if the 'final 5' are, well, sucky. There's always a matter of personal taste, and to some (such as one game shop staffer I talked with today), a game like "Caylus" is great, but not necesarily 'the best'. Gee, opinions differ, what a revolutionary idea I propose. Still, we'd like to at least approach 'best', even if it's a fuzzy target.
It's a good thing we have our defined criteria to fall back on, as that is what seperates the Jury stance from the general mix of reviews. Reviews are generally about 'a game', perhaps relative to other games that reviewer played.
A jury system, however, has to review a game fully in context of the other potential award winners. It's a more head-to-head experience and, I think, better at winnowing a list of good potentials into a final list of 'likely best'.
Given this, if a game that is not excellent makes it into the 'final 5', the integrity of the Awards is called into question. Which brings us to "Cosmic Cows".
"Cosmic Cows" is a great 'beer and pretzels' game. It's an english issue of "Kniffel Duell", but skipping that, the point is it's very "fun". And I have to put "fun" in quotes because "fun" is an intangible.
"Cosmic Cows" was loved by half our jury, dismissed by the other half. It fulfilled all the criteria, but how do you evaluate a UFOs-stealing-cow 10 minute dice game against a top-flight four-hour pure strategy German boardgame? Should you?
Being one of the pro-Cosmic Cows, I found it had that 'fun' thing that some 'better designed' games lacked. It's one of those games where I've actually been approached in a restaurant with "what are you playing" and "where can I get a copy". I can play it with gronards or 5-year olds.
In some ways, though, it also exemplified the 'beer and pretzels versus avalon hill model' split in board games, or how people favor different ratios of the luck/skill mix (which some games actually mark on the box now, thank goodness.)
I loved "Cosmic Cows". I'm also very pleased with the final 5 that our jury chosen, and think they present a good sampling of the possible top-top board games of 2006. They were: "Amazonas", "Parthenon", "Rheinlander", "Shadows Over Camelot", and "Vegas Showdown".
I'd wager any board game fan seeing that list can instantly spot which 1 game should not have been nominated. And can also add in at least 1 game that really should replace it. I just hope that the pulled game and the added game are different for each board game fan, and we didn't universally screw up. Heck, even I would pull at least one and substitute another, because not all five of my top picks made it.
That's the point of a Jury and a summed vote-- that a small, informed jury will screw it up slightly less than any other method.
In the end, I don't think any award can do better than present a sampling. We've seen the different biases and how most are unresolvable. It will always be difficult to compare, say, "World of Warcraft The Board Game" against "Redneck Life" for the same award.
What ultimately makes the Origins Awards have any merit is the amount of trust people are willing to put in the process and the execution of the process. My own opinion is that the Origins Awards may occasionally (oh heck, often) miss the 'best' game, and certainly will piss off a lot of fans of every single genre out there. But I think each game that makes it is indeed a great game.
So I'm looking forward to see who wins this year's "Origins Award for a Really Excellent But Perhaps Not the Best-Best Board Game". And I don't mind if they shorten it to just "Origins Award".
Heck, maybe I'll even try calling it a 'Callie'.
Until next month,
Sandy
sandy@rpg.net
