Woe, wall of text be upon ye! I still intend to be on the committee next year but if I don't write this down now I'll probably forget things.
Stronger push for more committee activity on the forum between meetings - This is the biggest problem I noticed this season. We had two meetings go into significant amounts of overtime just to be able to get things finished on time, and as far as I can tell, the major culprit is that we had several extensive discussions about adding/swapping nominees and adjusting scope, mostly for new awards, despite having forum threads open for a week to discuss exactly that sort of thing. To name a couple of examples that especially stuck out to me, Favorite Scribble Round took 25 minutes because no one objected to including Circuit's challenge rounds until a few hours before the meeting and that upended things quite a bit, and Favorite Extra Mode took almost half of a meeting on its own by the time we were done with adding/swapping nominees beyond what was already suggested, determining the final scope, and ironing out some of the finer details. This is, frankly, pretty bad and could've been easily avoided. I'm not at all against the occasional last-minute thought because that's just going to happen, or tossing in a few extra nominees if there's space left over, but this feels like we're slipping into outright ignoring the threads. I don't say this to make anyone on the AC feel bad or put them on blast, because on the whole we had an excellent team, but this is not going to be sustainable and needs to be addressed.
This will probably involve some top-down efforts from the directing staff (More reminders throughout the week? More strictness on what changes can be brought to the table post-thread?), but I would also strongly encourage anyone on the committee next year to take more initiative and be proactive about checking in on these threads if they have opinions about it.
I also noticed that quite a few ideas from the incubator ended up being tossed just because there wasn't much work done on them by the time we decided which ones to pursue, which I'm guessing stemmed from being pushed behind schedule? I don't recall this being an issue in earlier years, anyway.
The staleness problem, revisiting old awards, and one-offs - Awards is 20 years old, which is really cool! The award slate is starting to show its age, though. Most of what's "obvious" has been done by now, and a lot of them have gone stagnant and needed to be cut at some point. In the interest of creating new things, I fear we might be starting to trend towards more vague awards that are harder to define, which is more work for the AC and more confusion for the casual voter who may not understand our intentions very well. I'm all for new ideas, but I also think we could be making a stronger effort to bring back past awards after giving them some time off and seeing what happens with them. We did that with Worst Mario Party Board this year, and it was a great success story with a totally different top three than its very stale 2012-2015 run!
I'd particularly like to see some of our more specific game awards return when there's new content for them. Over the past several years, we've cut pretty much all of them for being stale with the stated intention of revisiting those awards when something new comes out, only to not actually do that. Even Favorite DK Game wasn't really being considered until Revin, who wasn't even on the committee, suggested it, and we saw how well a new release shook things up there. Granted, most new games probably aren't going to set their awards on fire like Bananza did, but I checked and besides 2D Platformer every one of those awards has had at least one release since it got removed:
- Favorite 3D Platformer - Donkey Kong Bananza
- Favorite Mario Kart Game - Mario Kart World
- Favorite Mario Party Game - Super Mario Party Jamboree
- Favorite Mario RPG - Mario & Luigi: Brothership
- Favorite Puzzle Game - Mario vs. Donkey Kong (Nintendo Switch)
- Favorite Sports Game - Mario Tennis Fever
- Favorite Wario Game - WarioWare: Get It Together!, WarioWare: Move It!
- Favorite Yoshi Game - Yoshi and the Mysterious Book
I don't think there's any harm in giving a new game a shot, even if it may seem unlikely. With that in mind, let's not shy away from using new content to introduce relevant awards as one-offs. I think something like Favorite Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Creature could actually be fun (assuming the wiki finishes its coverage by then), even if it's pretty niche and probably not going for round 2. But we had an award for Showtime transformations so I really don't think that's a sticking point.
Meeting scheduling - The merits of alternating Friday/Saturday meetings was brought up this year, and at this point the old reasoning of avoiding 'Shroom meetings isn't very relevant anymore since those are pretty rare and usually happen outside of the meeting cycle anyway. There's potentially still merit to it, since some folks may generally be able to work Fridays or Saturdays better and it gives them a chance to participate, but obviously this is going to depend the committee's makeup from year to year. I suggest asking for general availability on Fridays/Saturdays with applications and scheduling meetings based on that. If it turns out Fridays work better for everyone who signed up, then we can mostly forego Saturday meetings (with the exception of 'Shroom release nights, if you please) or vice-versa, and if it's a split, continue alternating.
A few structural thoughts on specific awards
- Biggest Guilty Pleasure - I actually think this award is mostly fine (including SPM and Galaxy Movie's presence), but its presentation isn't doing it any favors in communicating our intentions to voters if the amount of commentary saying SPM doesn't belong here is any indication. Tweak the definition a bit to focus more on media with a notably divisive reception, rather than calling everything on it low quality off the bat, and give it a less loaded name, since the current one seems more like a holdover from when this was pitched as the Hotel Mario and Super Mario Bros. Special award anyway.
- Most Embarrassing Nintendo Moment - Honestly, I don't like this award! It was a fun idea at first, but in practice, it's a very vague and subjective award, speaking as someone who was involved in the process of sifting through the write-ins. Shameless was already a lightning rod for "thing I don't like" votes, and Embarrassing is even moreso without having Shameless' fairly defined scope. I've personally been messaged by a user who was wondering why their write-in didn't count, and I didn't really have a better response than "it's pretty subjective, sorry". Please please get rid of this one, I know we wanted to have an award to poke fun at Nintendo but this isn't it. I'm not convinced we absolutely need one like that, but I'd rather go back to Shameless than bring this one back out for a second run.
