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Hugo Best Game: a look at the stats
Aug. 24th, 2025 04:07 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
zarfhome_blog_feedCaves of Qud just won the Hugo Award for Best Game or Interactive Work. This is extremely awesome.
I was pushing for a "Best Game" category ten years ago. Here's my list of suggested nominees which a 2015 award might have gone to, if there was one, which there wasn't. But a couple of years later, the Nebulas (a different SF award) added a Best Game Writing category. (Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was the first winner.) Then in 2021, the Hugos added an experimental Best Video Game category. (Hades won.) The experiment was deemed a success, so the fans got down to the necessary rule futzing to add a permanent Best Game award. In 2024, that went to Baldur's Gate 3; in 2025, Caves of Qud.
I should point out up front that I haven't played Qud. I've read many articles about Qud, including the essays in the very excellent Procedural Game Design books (ed. Short/Adams). I've chatted with my friend Jmac, who has sunk many hours into playing Qud. But the prospect of sinking my hours into Qud felt scary, so I just didn't. Sorry!
Yes, I submitted a Hugo ballot. I will say only that 1000xResist was my top pick. What an amazing game. I replayed it last month, to refresh my memory, and it blew my mind all over again. I was on a Worldcon panel with Remy Siu, the creative director of the game, and I got to tell him so.
But see how I said "top pick"? Hugo voting uses an "instant runoff" system, which is a ranked-ballot model. You can vote for any or all of the candidates, putting them in preference order. That way, if your top pick doesn't win, your ballot isn't completely ignored. Your second- and lower-rank preferences still influence the outcome.
The Hugo site has a complete explanation, but let's look at this specific race -- the Best Game voting for 2025. The Hugo admins have posted detailed stats (PDF) about the voting, including some wonderful "Sankey diagrams" that illustrate how the runoff-voting system works.
Best Game 2025 runoff. Click for larger version.
As you see, we have six nominees:
- Dragon Age: The Veilguard
- Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
- Caves of Qud
- 1000xResist
- Tactical Breach Wizards
- Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
"No Award" is also an option, for voters who feel that no candidate is worthy. That was important a few years ago (google "Sad Puppies", I'm not getting into it) but it was not an issue this year.
As you can see, the Dragon Age and Zelda entries were initially at the top. The stats post also gave the exact numbers. (Bold shows the top candidates for each round.)
| Title | R1 | R2 | R3 | R4 | R5 | R6 | Runoff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Caves of Qud | 104 | 104 | 112 | 143 | 159 | 246 | 331 |
| Dragon Age | 109 | 109 | 121 | 134 | 169 | 193 | |
| 1000xResist | 98 | 98 | 115 | 137 | 147 | ||
| Zelda | 108 | 108 | 116 | 123 | |||
| TBW | 81 | 81 | 94 | ||||
| Lorelei | 74 | 74 | |||||
| No Award | 29 | 34 |
The first column shows the first-rank votes on each ballot. In the flow diagram, the width of the colored stripe shows the same thing graphically. So 109 people ranked Dragon Age: Veilguard on top; Zelda and Qud were a hair behind at 108 and 104.
But we want to consider all of everybody's preferences, not just which game they ranked first.
We'll have seven rounds. In each round, the lowest-ranked candidate is eliminated. Here, we start with "No Award". 29 people voted for "No Award" -- I guess taking the fuddy-duddy view that the Hugos should not have a game award. Okay, that's an opinion. But with just 29 votes out of 603 ballots, it did not carry the day.
Next round. We're looking at a pretty close race, really! Lorelei and the Laser Eyes has 74 votes, which isn't that far behind the leader. But, sadly, it is the lowest ranked candidate, so out it goes. (I really liked Lorelei, for what it's worth.)
Here's where we can see the "instant runoff" in action. Lorelei's votes are distributed to other candidates, based on what those voters ranked second. Look at the purple stripes that splay out. Of the Lorelei ballots, 17 put 1000xResist second; that's the widest stripe. 13 went for TBW, 12 for Dragon Age, 8 for Qud, 8 for Zelda. Looks like the other 16 didn't give a second choice, so they fall off of the chart. (That's the bit of the Lorelei bar that looks cut off.)
Now we have new totals. The following rounds work the same way. TBW is eliminated next, with the greater part of its votes going to Qud and 1000xResist. Then Zelda is eliminated; many of its votes go to Dragon Age, but about half disappear (no lower-ranked vote for any remaining candidate).
1000xResist drops out next, with the majority of its votes going to Qud. This is enough to put Qud over the top in the showdown.
(There's a final step to check whether the winner is really more popular than "No Award". Qud passes easily.)
That's a lot of vote algorithm, but the diagram lets us see a few things. There's a pretty clear split between fans of mainstream games and fans of indie games.
(I know, those terms are an infinite swamp. "Triple-A" is just as bad. Let's just say that Nintendo and Bioware are big companies with big budgets to sling around, whereas the other games on the list were made by small teams and either self-published or handled by indie publishers.)
If you look at the chart, every indie game that was eliminated (Lorelei, TBW, Resist) handed the majority of its votes to the other indie games. And when Zelda was eliminated, the largest share of its votes went to Dragon Age. So the fans of each group tended to favor their entire group over the "opposite" group. Half the Zelda didn't bother to put Qud or 1000xResist on their ballot at all.
To put it another way: the two mainstream games were on top in the first round, but the mainstream group was behind the indies 213 to 361. And that was a pretty good predictor of the final showdown between Dragon Age and Qud.
I don't have any particular opinion about this. It makes sense that a lot of people didn't play Qud. I didn't! I just think it's neat that this insight jumps right off the page when you visualize it this way.
To be clear, Qud aside, I am the indie type. Don't even own a Nintendo Switch.
Is this an ongoing pattern? The 2024 Hugo stats post doesn't have the nice diagram, but we get the numbers:
| Title | R1 | R2 | R3 | R4 | Runoff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baldur's Gate 3 | 564 | 564 | 581 | 627 | 943 |
| Zelda: TotK | 241 | 241 | 253 | 259 | |
| Chants of Sennaar | 199 | 199 | 200 | 210 | |
| Dredge | 111 | 111 | 117 | 124 | |
| Alan Wake 2 | 87 | 87 | 87 | ||
| Jedi: Survivor | 59 | 60 | |||
| No Award | 57 | 76 |
This doesn't tell us a lot, because BG3 started a mile ahead and stayed there. We can say that Jedi Survivor and Alan Wake 2 gave the better part of their votes to BG3, and almost none to the "indie" candidates (Dredge and Chants of Sennaar). But after that BG3 had an absolute majority so further rounds were unnecessary. We never saw what the indie voters ranked second.
And in the future? I dunno. I guess the lesson is that nominations matter. If next year's nominee list is four big-studio games and one weird indie game nobody's heard of, the indie will have a hard time breaking out.
But what do I know? I'll tell you this: in our game panels, just one title drew appreciative "yeah"s from each roomful of Worldcon fans, consistently. I'm giving Blue Prince good odds for 2026.
Weird little games, summer edition
Aug. 23rd, 2025 09:44 pmzarfhome_blog_feedI have been playing weird games that are little. I mean, short. One evening, two evenings tops. Maximum weirdness density.
(Twist ending: one of the games listed here is not short. Read on to find out which one! Spoiler: it's the last one. I said twist ending, I mean, obviously.)
- Strange Jigsaws
- Öoo
- Sword of the Sea
- Mini Mini Golf Golf
- The Drifter
Strange Jigsaws
Jigsaw puzzles from the 20 Small Mazes guy. If you didn't play that, here's the deal: the screen fills up with a mess of jigsaw puzzle pieces, and then you realize that they all have weird little tricks to them.
It gets meta. You know that line about "uses every part of the pig"? This game uses every part of the jigsaw, including the fourth wall of the box and the outside-the-box.
With that wild collage of ideas, it's not surprising that the game is a bit uneven. I thought the best gimmicks turned up in the first half. And the finale metapuzzle should have been better telegraphed. (You get the keys before you discover the big gate, as it were. That always feels like an anticlimax. You want the narrative tension of finding the lock first!)
Those are minor complaints, though. Strange Jigsaws was a great way to kill an evening. I snickered and said "Oh jeez" a lot.
Öoo
A short puzzle-platformer. You are a bug that poops bombs. You can't jump, but you can lay a bomb underneath yourself and then blow it up.
Note: this is not a precision platformer, but some moves require setting off bombs in tight intervals or while falling. There's a lot of "squish" to make the timing easier, but it's still timing. So, not a pure puzzle game.
That aside: Öoo is impeccably designed. The entire game is built around you and your two bombs. No power-ups, no new abilities. (You start with one bomb, so getting the second bomb is like a power-up, but really it's the end of the tutorial.) Every room requires a different trick, and I'm pretty sure every possible trick with two bombs is used in exactly one room.
"No new abilities" doesn't mean no new mechanics. A few room elements are introduced as you move through the game. But the real tricks are the things you learn to do with those elements -- and with your bombs. You have to discover these tricks on your own; but the game does a fantastic job of leading you into them. If a room makes you say "Wait, why is that there?" then I guarantee you that the answer is important.
The final sequence is a bit shaky. The intent is clearly to force you to use every trick you've learned, in places where you've already been, but in ways you couldn't before. That works -- but it's not as stitch-perfect as the earlier parts of the game. No matter! Öoo is absolutely worth a go; I'd put it up with Monster's Expedition for tight design work.
Sword of the Sea
I looked back at my Abzû review (2016!), where I wrote:
Sometimes I just want to sit down with a couple of hours of narrative experience that has arc, theme, variation of interaction model, a bit of challenge, and (not tangentially) is really, really pretty.
Same comment exactly again!
In between Sword and Abzû, this studio did The Pathless, which was a more traditional openish-world-exploration game of a more traditional size: 15-ish hours. Explore large areas, do a lot of bonus quests in each one, wrap up with a boss fight, on to the next area.
I enjoyed that, but that's not where Sword of the Sea landed. This is a three-hour tour of small areas (or large but zippily-traversed areas). There's a few well-defined goals in each. You can coin-hunt -- there's bonus stuff all over each map, some of which is quite tricky to reach. But that's all very optional. The game's momentum (embodied as streams of sparkly fish and dolphins) always pulls you on to the next area.
Which is really, really pretty. The is-it-sea-or-desert motif reminded me a bit of Jusant, although the style is completely different. Same magical space whales, though. Well, the designer has always had a cetacean fetish.
The point is swooping around in a world of sparkly sand-or-sea. Or snow, etc. Top-notch swooping. Well done.
Mini Mini Golf Golf
Man alive, I do not know what to say about this one. It's 2057 -- I think? you've got a 2050s-era teletype-tablet along with three janky 1990s CRTs. Climate change almost destroyed Europe, but humanity has survived through large-scale geo-engineering... hang on, I'm tapping my headset and getting a message that maybe it didn't. The message is from the future. It's encoded in a mini-golf game from the past. Got it?
The mini-golf game is glitchy, and in fact you have to proceed by playing glitchily. Hints are embedded in an adorably low-budget Euro talk show about videogames and life. (You can play in easy mode, which obviates the golf challenges and makes the hints unnecessary. But watch the talk show anyhow; it's the best part.)
This absolutely ought to be my jam. It's got everything: glitchy live video, videogame interfaces warped to other ends, messages allusively encoded in other messages, metaphors about videogames and life. I love that stuff. I found this game almost impossible to play. Something about the slow-roll text -- literally slow roll; letters appear as you putt the ball. The putting interface is slow to begin with. You have to wait just a teeth-cracking moment too long for the ball to come to rest.
Then, at the end, the mini-golf game got stuck. I'm pretty sure this was on purpose -- one last glitch-puzzle. I couldn't figure it out, though, and quit out of the (real) game. Oh well.
This is the most creative narrative game I've seen in a year. (And that's after I played Occlude and Phoenix Springs!) I wish I could have gotten into it more.
The Drifter
Okay, this one isn't a tiny little game. It's a full-sized adventure game.
Have some Australian pixel-art point-and-click pulp. Grindhouse? Thriller? I'm not sure what label I'm looking for, but The Drifter sure is one. You're a loser ("I'm not homeless, I've just got a nomadic lifestyle") hobo-ing across the country to attend one last family affair. The family you ran out on. Then someone shoots up your train car and kidnaps a reporter, and also there's monsters? Or hallucinations? You're not really in good shape here.
This roughly alternates between high-tension cliffhangers (window-ledge hangers, precarious-mine-tunnel hangers...) and more traditional detective-game scenes (ask everybody about every topic you've got, collect more topics). Puzzles are a distant third place -- lightweight, not too many, meant to move the narrative along rather than hold it back.
The funny thing is, this is the "polite" style of adventure game. You can't get stuck or lock yourself out of winning. Familiar ground -- but it's a weird fit for a plot built of escalating life-or-death crises. A lot of scenes are narratively high-tension but mechanically "try as many times as you want until you figure out what to do." The actors do their best to sell it, as do the music and sound effects and everything else, but it wears thin at times.
In fact you can die... maybe. The first chapter introduces your apparent ability to rewind death by a few minutes. Unless that's a hallucination? This is a story element so I won't say more. But, gameplay-wise, it's just another way to say you can experiment forever.
"Loser" and "I can't tell what's real" aren't great hooks for a story. I was initially worried that this would go off the rails. But once the game gets into your real history (your wife, your child, characters who talk to you instead of just threatening to open fire...) then the plot firms up. The game is on solid footing thereafter. Or, you know, on a solid rollercoaster of life-or-death crises.
The Drifter has adopted the recent point-and-click concept that you don't have to click on absolutely everything. Hovering your mouse over a scenery object displays its description, tooltip-style, with an x cursor. No clicky! This is great; it saves time and avoids hearing "I can't do anything with that" a million times over. (Return to Monkey Island did something similar.)
(The game is fully voiced, but "fully" means dialogue and the narrator's internal monologue. Scenery descriptions are text-only. I approve of this too; you can get in a lot more descriptive detail without blowing up your voice budget.)
A wild ride and goofy in parts, but it's good fun and good writing in the end.
Worldcon after-action report
Aug. 23rd, 2025 12:23 amzarfhome_blog_feedI went to the Seattle Worldcon and I had a good time.
(Some Worldcons take on a unique name. The last one I went to, in Montreal, was Anticipation. The 2001 Worldcon in Philadelphia was called the Millennium Philcon and I went purely because of the name. Also because it was great. But it didn't occur to me to look up the Seattle Worldcon's name until just now. Turns out it was called "Seattle Worldcon 2025". Oh well.)
My stack of Worldcon souvenir books. Mixed in with other cons and a couple of issues of Games magazine.
I've posted my trip photos on a separate page. Mostly Seattle tourism, rather than Worldcon per se.
I was on three panels. They all went great. I don't believe any of them were recorded or streamed, so you'll have to use your imagination. (Worldcon was slightly hybrid -- they had like 25 event rooms and streamed five of them. Understandable, to be sure.)
Thanks to my co-panelists, and to Justin for moderating two of the panels and Eleri for the third. Justin did heroic work this event -- I think he was on eight panels on the (brand-new) gaming program track, and moderated five of them.
We got one question of "Where can I donate my collection of Infocom memorabilia?" and Justin jumped right on that with an IFTF business card.
(IFTF doesn't have physical storage space, but Justin has plans for one set of memorabilia. He teaches college in his mundane existence so it's probably useful for that. If we get more donations? I don't know! Contact us and ask.)
My best panel moment: in the last 90 seconds of the Q&A for the IF panel, someone asked if we'd considered using LLMs for interactive fiction. I immediately pumped my fist in the air and said "Yesss!"
Of course everyone stared at me like I'd crapped my pants. I smiled gently and said "...I just won a bet."
This wasn't literally true. But in panel planning discussion, I mentioned that the AI question was 100% likely to arise. Everybody on the panel agreed that we didn't really want to get into it. Welp, it did, and we didn't. No time!
The actual answer is "yes, many people have considered it." (See repeated threads on the IF forum.) There's more to be said, but if you think that tech-giant LLMs are a one-size-solves-all revolution for IF, I assure you that's not the case.
So what was it like returning to Worldcon after sixteen years?
Honestly, I felt a bit disconnected. I had a good time. Really! But I'm definitely not in the scene the way I used to be -- and that was never very much.
Look, I am an introvert. (You will be absolutely stunned to hear me say this.) I get anxiety about inserting myself into random social situations.
I used to have a pretty steady SF convention habit. I would, roughly in order of importance: (1) go to panels; (2) wander the dealer's room and browse books; (3) hang around the con suite and eat snacks; (4) wander into room parties and eat snacks; (5) sit in back in the filk room and sing along. When tired of one option, pick another. Sometimes I ran into people I knew and we'd chat. Sometimes I'd get into a conversation with J. Random Fan. Or not! No pressure. (The "no pressure" part is important. Also the snacks.)
(By the way, if you are J. Random Fan, please don't hesitate to come up and say hello to me. That's fine, I appreciate the effort, it doesn't freak me out. If I want to be left alone, I'll be in my hotel room.)
(Also, of course, if I'm on a panel or running an event, I'm there to talk to people about that topic. Please ask questions. I am prepared.)
Anyhow. This year's Worldcon was terrific for (1) and (2). The program schedule was first-rate; every single time slot (for five days) had multiple talks that I was interested in. I feel like the dealer's room was smaller than I remember from 2009 (or 2001, etc) -- but I don't have a solid comparison. Anyhow there's been this enormous self-publishing boom since then, so there were lots of new-to-me authors with stacks of books I've never heard of. Highly variable, but fun to look through.
Not so good on (3). There was no con suite. Usually the con hotel -- or the hotel attached to the convention center -- will have a penthouse suite set up with snacks for grazing, chats, and quiet time. (Reading in the con suite is totally a thing.)
Seattle didn't do that. Possibly because the "attached hotel" was three blocks away. The convention center had many lounge spaces, and some of them had food concessions -- pretty good stuff -- but it wasn't the same vibe at all. Plus, I had promised myself to keep the N95 mask in place wherever I possibly could. This interferes with snacking as a pastime.
Room parties, same problem. I looked in on one and realized it just wasn't going to work for me. And singing in a mask doesn't work at all, so filk was out too.
(Yes, I took off the mask when speaking on a panel, and for meals. But I tried to eat in the least populated corner I could find. I ate dinner out with small groups of people I knew. Worldcon has had some COVID post-action reports, but my nose-test remains negative as of today, so I guess my plan worked. This time.)
More generally, the Worldcon crowd has just shifted. I used to recognize most of the authors who attended. Some of them were the authors I read, some were authors I wasn't into, but I knew the names. Now, not so much. See above about self-publishing. Good in some ways, bad in others.
Not everybody who attends Worldcon is an author -- it is a fannish convention, not a professional conference. But, you know, when you go to the event every couple of years, you see a lot of the same people. Even I (partially face-impaired) wind up recognizing people. I might wave. They might wave. It's introvert-friendly.
If you skip fifteen years of the event, that falls away.
I dunno. Next year's Worldcon is Los Angeles. In 2027 it's Montreal again. I like Montreal better! I could go back. Two Worldcons in a row is a lot, anyhow. Once every couple of years feels right.
Also, I know more fans in Montreal, because I sometimes go to a smaller con there. Those folks weren't in Seattle, because the US is not attractive to tourists right now, but they'll all absolutely be at Worldcon 2027. Some as guests, even.
Hopefully I can make it. Depends on how jobs work out.