XYZZY Award medallions
J. Robinson Wheeler
thought this would be a good time to bring up an idea that's been on
my mind for some time.
Newer authors may not know that the awards weren't always just an
acknowledgement of achievement, but there were at one time actual,
physical awards distributed to winners. These were handsome, solid
medallions with a relief image of a brass lantern on the obverse and
the details of the winning author, game title, category, and year on
the reverse. I was fortunate enough to receive the last round of these
that were handed out back in 2001; I'm proud to have them, and it
makes me think that it's a shame that winners since then have not had
the same pleasure.
So, that leads me to think that maybe the practice should be revived
starting this year. But, ideally, I'd like to see winners from the
past several years receive their awards as well.
The person who used to take care of this was David Dyte, who has since
moved on to pursue other interests. I don't know whether he still has
the templates for casting the medallions -- this particular type of
medal requires a two-part process of getting blank medallions made,
then later having the engraving done on the reverse. There are cheaper
solutions these days, like acrylic awards that companies have on stock
in quantities, and then you just order them with the text you want
printed on them. I don't want to rule that out, because it's an
economical solution that makes it easier to hand off the making of new
awards in future years to someone else down the line, because it's
more of a one-click effort. On the other hand, the fact that there are
a lot of make-up medallions to create may mean that the fancy ones
could be ordered in a batch large enough to make it worthwhile to go
for it.
Complicating this further is that there used to be two different
versions: Best Game medals were gold-tinged, and all the others were
silver. It may be economically unviable to do that even if it works
out to do the silver ones; I'm not sure. (I've got a tiny image of
each type on my IF game pages: http://raddial.com/if/images/silver_xyzzy.jpg
and http://raddial.com/if/images/gold_xyzzy.jpg)
I wanted to see what kind of popular support there was for this
enterprise before pulling actual quotes, tracking down and hassling
David Dyte, etc., but basically I'm volunteering to make this happen
if people thought this was a terrific idea.
--
J. Robinson Wheeler
http://raddial.com/if/games