Zarf Updates

Caves 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.

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.)

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:

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.