The Snubbies: An award for (Bloggie) losers

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Another year passes, another set of Bloggies is awarded. A round of applause is in order for the category winners, and a flower bouquet and fancy chocolates (perhaps even a bottle of wine) should be prepared for Sacha as thanks for the hard work of hosting, to be presented after the crowning of the overall winner.

The Bloggies this year truly presented a bumper crop of blogs, each of them would have been a worthy recipient of an award, but alas, only one could prevail in each category (I guess three if you count silver and copper Bloggies). There are just more good blog posts to go around than there are spots on the podium. This is good for us blog readers, but less so for all the awards hungry bloggers out there.

The Bloggies being decided by popular vote after the initial nomination process, there were votes whose outcome I disagreed with, but I guess this is just the curse of not being the median voter. Rather than complain about this, I'm being an adult about it: I'm taking my toys and going home to make my own awards with none of that pesky democracy. (Note that non-inclusion here does not mean that I didn't find the post award worthy, all Bloggie nominees were, this is just my personal selection of posts I want to highlight.) Eligible posts for this years Snubbies are all Bloggie finalists that did not win a medal (because the medalists were not exactly snubbed, even if they "only" won silver). So without further ado, here are the Snubbie categories and their winners:

Most important blogpost: Xandering is Slandering from DYI & Dragons

Sitting (perhaps slightly awkwardly) in the reviews category, this post is no ordinary review. Instead, it recounts the history of the term Jaquaysing, from its original coining (in misspelled form) by The Alexandrian, to it being sidelined in favour of "Xandering" for his book (and then retroactively erased from his blog). It shines an important light on the (perhaps unintentional) erasure of a prominent trans woman in the history of role playing, which is a bigger and more important issue than just talking about our silly little elfgames. An honorary mention (and prehaps honorary Snubbie?) goes to Ava Islam for facilitating a dialogue with Justin Alexander, that has provided further context to the events, and their unfortunate timing in relation to Jennell's passing last year.

Best review (series): Bathtub Review: Tephrotic Nightmares from Playful Void

Knocked out in the first round when matched up against a heavyweight post (and perhaps fellow Snubbie winner? scroll to find out) from Marcia B, a weakness in the Bloggies system is revealed when it comes to this type of post. To me, at least, the strength of Nova's bathtub reviews lies not in blowing you away with the analysis in an individual post, but rather by maintaining a consistently high quality, with a frankly frightening regularity of posting. I don't know that the Tephrotic Nightmares review was meaningfully "better" than Nova's reviews of The Undying Sea, Ave Nox, The Dream Shrine, The Parthenogenesis of Hungry Hollow, The Stygian Library, Tomb of a Thousand Doors, Desert Moon of Karth, or any of the 45 or so other Bathtub reviews released in the period of eligibility. Maybe Marcia's post was a stronger pick in isolation, but this is not a comparison that reveals the strength of Nova's Bathtub Review series (not to mention her I Read A Game series, as well as the newcomer Zungeon Zundays, and the festive Critique Navidad). I believe that Nova was probably snubbed twice (and I am not even counting about her Eight Intangible Tips, which was also snubbed), as the planned "Best blog series" was scrapped. This is were Nova would be a shoe-in, and I choose to believe it is because it looked bad to have an "Oops, all Nova" category. There are a bunch of good RPG reviewers in the podcast and video spaces, but in the blogging space? Very few that can hold a candle to Nova.

Best Hyperfocus Deep Dive: Genders Without Number from Traverse Fantasy

Rather than a traditional review of the whole book, this post from Marcia B focuses on the presentation of gender(s) in Cities Without Number, Kevin Crawford's cyberpunk game. Marcia is no stranger to writing about gender, and her analysis very interesting, offering an academic critique rather than telling me whether it's worth buying (I suppose the latter is also uninteresting to me in this particular case, as I already have the book, unread, on my shelf thanks to Kickstarter FOMO). It uses the game as a springboard for an interesting discussion around gender, and I am here for it.

Best theory theory: Rules Are A Cage (and I'm a Puppygirl) from Jay Dragon

Aside from probably having the best title of all this year's contestants, Jay has written an excellent exploration of why we want rules when we play, and what they offer over freeform make-believe. If the whole game consists of what we make up anyway, why constrain outselves? Jay offers good answers to this, and I recommend reading the blogpost, and taking its conclusions with you if you ever want to design a game.

Best recurring bit: What is an OSR game? from Playful Void

I was asking myself if I should really include two posts from Nova, but then I realised that it's only natural, because the writes so many posts (and they even manage to be good). Her explainer on the OSR is really good, and it is one I will be linking to when I inevitably encounter someone who doesn't know (and doesn't know that nobody really knows either, because we just don't agree), even if it seems like someone writes a post like this every year. A crucial weakness of the OSR seems to be that it will always need explaining, but at least that gives us some good blogposts.

Thus concludes this year's inaugural Snubbies, perhaps they will return again next year, if I am equally frustrated by good posts being knocked out of the Bloggies. Who knows? These posts were only my personal picks, if you feel that there are other posts from the past year that deserve to be highlighted, please post in the comments or on social media and let us know why! We should celebrate the good blogposts and the bloggers who write them!

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