Effective RPG Awards
The Origins Awards have been announced. I know this because I've seen some mentions of them in various blogs and journals. The RPG industry has long wrestled with building an effective awards establishment. I have no idea if TCG and miniatures designers care as much, but I think it's telling that we never saw a real set of awards come out tailored to either of them. The Origins awards just sort of absorbed them via new categories.



So, RPGdom lacks an effective awards structure. Assume that by "effective" I mean "a body capable of discerning a good game from a bad one, a niche game from a generally popular one, and in the collective possessing as much or more knowledge of the field than the high end fans." I don't think we've ever had an effective organization for awards, but that's another story.

1. If only a few people run the awards, the group needs to be insulated from the people who can win the awards. Currently, the people organizing the awards can also win them. This is terrible. Awards are a zero sum game. Everyone involved in putting together the awards wants to win, but they also want everyone else to lose. That is obviously a horrible environment for cooperation, trust, and understanding to thrive.

Past "discussions" (if one can call a shrieking cat fight a discussion) over the direction of the awards seemed to center on the utter inability of the Dancey and Lindross factions to trust each other. Both sides were convinced that the other was going to destroy GAMA as we knew it. Of course, they were both wrong: it took the two groups working together to effectively destroy the awards, but that's another story.

Sadly, we'll never actually see this happen. The RPG industry is too small to support a body of professional critics. We're stuck asking people who want to win awards to also organize them.

2. If the people running the awards can also win, the group needs to be as large as possible. If 1,000 different people vote for the games, then we can assume that any biases, factions, and other distortions can balance each other out. Unfortunately, this won't happen for a number of reasons.

To get that many people involved in the process, you'd have to open the nomination to a hell of a lot of pointless games. You'd have to tell people, "Hey, come join our awards process, but leave your game at home because it sucks donkey balls."

That's probably not going to endear many people to the process.

Worst of all, all it takes is one obnoxious crusader to drive away enough people, distort the process, and cause all the problems outlined in case 1. The strength of a group lies in the diversity of its views. Given the past history of the RPG business, after a year or two whoever didn't win an award would get pissed and walk out, or demand new rules to help them win, or new categories they can poach ("Best New RPG About Caveman Hippos").

And then there's the ENnies.

What about the ENnies? The ENnies are sort of funny. When I worked in the d20 industry, and still today when I read publishers' posts, I always detected a faint whiff of fear whenever people talk about the ENnies. It was like, "These guys are the only ones giving out awards that people might care about. I really want to pitch a nutty over the process and run rampant like I did with the Origins awards (either in public or in private), but if I do that I might not be able to win. On the other hand, unless I seize control and tell these guys how to run the awards, I might not win. What am I supposed to do?"

I think "industry" people are all quietly freaking the hell out over the ENnies, because they can't seize control of them without looking like a pack of hyenas. They can sort of make suggestions, and I'm sure they bitch endlessly over them in private, but in truth the ENnies are beyond the industry's control. That's good, because we need a firewall between the awards and those who win them.

The key is that the ENnies really need to fight to keep the industry out of their hair. As the years go by, there'll be more and more pressure on the ENnies to let the "professionals" take over, or at least have a voice in the process. The ENnies need to learn to gently, and quite nicely, tell the "professionals" to fuck off. The ENnies people should learn that, when a "pro" tells them what to do, everything that the "pro" says is silently led with "To help me win this award..."

The people organizing the ENnies hold all the cards. They're the ones that people respect. By the same token, they're the ones who have a lot to lose if "industry" people do the same thing to the ENnies that they did to the Origins Awards. And there's no shortage of blame for the OA mess, and there's not a single innocent party in the story of their demise. Both factions did everything they could to run them into the ground.