The annual AGS awards debate

[bicilotti]

I like that you have the games' titles right in front your eyes; I will no more fail to nominate a great game inadvertently just because I've played it long ago and it wasn't mentioned in the big "for your consideration" thread.

The only minor drawback of this setup (me thinks) is that the list could/will be pretty long. That means you will check some of the boxes without being able to see the labes above -> room for mistakes.

But other than that, an excellent reshape of the nominations page!

[LimpingFish]

I like the concept, and the new grouping of categories. The only concern I would have, as already mentioned, is the practicality of the full version.

But this is a great start.

[SSH]

I think I'd better knock up a full-size version so that we can see if the problems people are worried about occur. I'd like to know, too:

1) Does it still look OK if you are colour blind?
2) I've tried it in FF3, IE6 and Chrome. Let me know if any more obscure browsers make it look odd.

[bicilotti]

2) I've tried it in FF3, IE6 and Chrome. Let me know if any more obscure browsers make it look odd.

In Opera it looks fine.

[Snarky]

Hmmm... it seems pretty confusing, and like a lot of work to go through.

Before, I would usually go award by award and try to think of the best games I've played for that category. Now it seems like I have to go game by game and try to think of all the things it might be eligible for.

In a system like this, I also think you need a way to review your selections at the end. Otherwise, it would be easy to end up not nominating any games for the "Best Tutorial" category, for example. How is stuff like the "You can only nominate 5 games in each category" going to be enforced, anyway?

What I think might be better would be to have a simple main page, that initially just lists the award categories. Then from each category you can go to a list of all the games eligible in that category, checkmark each game you want to nominate, and OK to return to the main page. Your selections then show up listed under the category. If you have too many, you can remove some directly from the main page. If you don't, you won't be able to submit your nominations.

It would also be great if you could have a category for "Games I've played", where you could go through and mark the games you've played (duh!). Once you do this, only those games get listed in the lists for the other categories, which would make the rest of the nominating process much quicker. (Might also make for some interesting stats.)

Finally, it would be great to have access to a screenshot from each game, in case you don't remember it from the title alone. It could simply be the screen from the AGS games database. You probably don't want it in the table itself, but maybe as a popup if you click on or hover over the game name?

[Pumaman]

I'm not sure about this potential look for the nomination page -- it is nice and compact, and easily fits all the choices into a small area. But on the other hand, it is quite a lot of information to be presented with in one go and could be confusing for some people.

How about keeping the same type of nomination page as last year, but having (say) 10 drop-down list boxes to choose nominations for each category, rather than having text boxes for people to type the game names in by hand?

[Ryan Timothy B]

I do like Snarky's idea of having an initial: click yes or no to the games you've played... then after you submit that, it'll throw you the entire nominations page with only the games you've played.  (I imagine you have the knowledge to do this - from the things I've seen you do)

Also, don't forget to make the link to the database on each game title, open a new window.  You don't want anyone closing the vote window by accident, or having the vote check boxes erase when they hit back (i've seen this happen before).

I can see the Non-player character text box being quite inconvenient for you sort out afterwards.  Bad spelling or an input like 'that guy with the knife'.  I imagine you'll only be limited to 5 names for this as well?

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I think CJ's on to something with the drop-down list, though this would not be workable for the non-player character category.  Drop-down lists with the game titles for each category would probably work better than radio buttons, overall.

[SSH]

Good points, folks. OK, so seems like there's two better ideas:

1. Choose the games you have played and then these are the only ones available to choose from

2. Have drop-down lists

Of course, we could do both. There's also the possibility of using "multiple select" list box instead of multiple dropdowns, or even checkboxes in option #2

As for mis-spellings, in previous years I had to deal with misspellings in EVERY category. Not to mention completely invalid entries.

[Bai Karl]

I checked the nomination page for AGS Awards. It looks fine. But if this a full list of games or just an example how the page will look like? There are many more games made in 2008.

You can include nomination for best location - island, planet, bar and e.t.c

[SSH]

OK, quick mock-up #2: http://ssh.me.uk/ags_nom_mockup2.html

This time you choose the games you have played in the checkboxes at the top, and this enables them to be selected in the listbox below. Ctrl-click for multiple nominations.

[Bai Karl]

Quick mock-up #2 looks better.

[bicilotti]

Nice execution! 

But on IE 6.0.29 (I'm at work), whenever I select one game the list is filled with them all...

Let me post a screenshot



And whenever I deselect everything the listbox remains visible. 

[SSH]

Fliiping IE. The listbox doesnt go away when everything is deselected becuase my coding was lazy... but IE6 seems to to respect the "display:none" style on <OPTION> tags

Grr. Googling indicates that solutions are very convoluted. We might need to use checkboxes instead.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I like it.  It keeps things simple.

[Makeout Patrol]

OK, quick mock-up #2: http://ssh.me.uk/ags_nom_mockup2.html

This time you choose the games you have played in the checkboxes at the top, and this enables them to be selected in the listbox below. Ctrl-click for multiple nominations.

Actually, this works much better. I like this a lot, assuming we can get it to co-operate.

[Pumaman]

Yes, I think something like that could work. It could always be split into two pages -- a "select games you've played" page followed by a "select categories" page in order to let the server do the processing of generating the listboxes.

But the technical details can be worked out later once we've agreed how we want it to look.

Agreed that Best Non-Player Character would need an additional field to specify the character name.

[Makeout Patrol]

Having thought about it a little bit more, I suggest that we break it into two pages, and divide the checkboxes on the first page into sections so that it's not one massive wall of options - maybe one section per letter of the alphabet with a bit of blank space between them, just so it's a bit easier to read through, and not so difficult to plow all the way through.

The problem with lists this big is that it's difficult to make them look like they're possible to read all the way through; I think breaking it up a little will result in more people participating in the nominations.

EDIT: If we're concerned about the order of presentation affecting people's choices, maybe we could list them by random chunks of 10 or so?

[TwinMoon]

I suggest that we break it into two pages, and divide the checkboxes on the first page into sections so that it's not one massive wall of options - maybe one section per letter of the alphabet with a bit of blank space between them, just so it's a bit easier to read through, and not so difficult to plow all the way through.

I was just going to suggest that.

My idea would be to have one page where you select which games you played (divided into A, B, C, etc.), the second you could have the categories, each with a dropdown menu next to it containing all the games you selected.

[Makeout Patrol]

I suggest that we break it into two pages, and divide the checkboxes on the first page into sections so that it's not one massive wall of options - maybe one section per letter of the alphabet with a bit of blank space between them, just so it's a bit easier to read through, and not so difficult to plow all the way through.

I was just going to suggest that.

My idea would be to have one page where you select which games you played (divided into A, B, C, etc.), the second you could have the categories, each with a dropdown menu next to it containing all the games you selected.

Yes, and the menus on the second page would be ordered at random to avoid placement bias. I'm not sure what I was thinking by suggesting that we order the part where people are looking for specific games randomly...