Nominations Instructions

[extrapenguin]

Noms will start tomorrow 7 Feb 11:30 am EET (in your timezone | countdown) or a few minutes earlier.

Tags that do not conform to these instructions will not be approved.

Please disregard everything AO3 says on the "nominate" page. Do NOT choose the canonical versions of whatever tag you're nominating. Tags are NOT restricted to characters only. Thank you. (AO3 doesn't let mods adjust what's on the nominations page.) If you have questions, please ask!


Please check what was agreed for your fandom on the franchise wrangling post. Write the fandom's name based on what was decided there. If your fandom has not been discussed on the franchise wrangling post, use the AO3 canonical. Please do not use "- All Media Types" tags unless decided on the franchise wrangling post. If you're nominating a character who's found in many canons (eg. Superman), has many versions, or who has a very common name, or a relationship with such a character, please add the fandom name in (brackets) after the name(s). If nominating a crossover between two space canons, that is allowed; nom it under Crossover Fandom.

Nominating Characters
If you wish to receive a Thing centered on a character, nominate your character tag as Character: Character's Name. Some examples:
Character: Aria T'Loak
Character: Urdnot Wrex
Character: Miranda Lawson
Note: if you are nominating a RPG character whose gender one can choose (Shepard, The Jedi Exile, etc), please specify.

Nominating Relationships
If you wish to receive a Thing centered on a relationship between two or more characters, nominate your tag as Relationship: Character A/Character B if you want a romantic or sexual relationship between A and B, or as Relationship: Character A & Character B if you want a platonic or familial relationship between A and B. Alphabetize by surname. (Yes, it goes into the slot called "Characters". This is so that matching would work.) Some examples:
Relationship: Miranda Lawson & Oriana Lawson
Relationship: Urdnot Wrex/Garrus Vakarian
Relationship: Male Shepard & Liara T'Soni
Note: if you are nominating a ship containing a RPG character whose gender one can choose (Shepard, The Jedi Exile, etc), please specify.

Nominating Worldbuilding
If you wish to receive a Thing centered on worldbuilding, nominate your tag as Worldbuilding: A Clear Description. (Yes, it goes into the slot called "Characters". This is so that matching would work.) Some examples:
Worldbuilding: Citadel Sewage System
Worldbuilding: Source of Cerberus' Funding
Worldbuilding: Mass Relays.

If you are unsure of what you want – say you'd like something with Ashley Williams exploring the Citadel sewage system. Would you be happier with Ashley Williams doing something completely different, or with someone else looking through the Citadel sewage system? Or, if you don't know what to nom at all, go trawl through the fandom recruitment post in search of inspiration.

If you find these instructions confusing, or otherwise wish to flail, please comment here or PM me. The tag set is HERE!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hi mod!

Would there be any chance of interactive fiction creations? Sometimes these look like text with choices/choose your own adventure (but there's still a word count that's more or less well-defined) and sometimes it looks more like a game (it'd be harder to define a word count minimum).

[extrapenguin]

I'd be happy to include IF as something to match on. What sort of a minimum do you think would be equivalent to 1k of fic? And what "medium" of minimum – wordcount? Length of time spent playing? (I am not really a connoisseur of IF and thus have no idea what's the reasonable metric.)

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm, excellent question... I would think (I'm also not a connoisseur per se, just someone who really likes them) that a reasonable metric would depend on the gameplay - the more closely something resembles a narrative text, the more closely your original 1k minimum can apply without much tweaking. The more its mechanics vary and tend towards a computer game, the more you'd want to consider time spent playing. IF isn't intended to be prioritising gameplay over narration, though. So if you split it 50/50 game / text, I'd think 10 minutes to play the game from start to finish would make sense.

For example, if it's a work that has a puzzle in it (let's say, a casefic where you solve the case), then the complexity of the puzzle should give for that 10 minutes play time, which would include the time to read the background, clues, etc. Assuming average reading time is of order 200 words/minute, and that it's split 50/50 reading vs solving puzzle, then 5 minutes reading gives you about 1000 words already (TIL: I am a very slow reader) and then ballpark 5 minutes to solve the puzzle. 10 minutes might be too short, but it could be better to err on a minimum and have people surprise themselves. It's your call, though.

For most types of narrative IF where the focus is really on more on the text than on a gameplay feature (like choose your own adventure type stuff - mostly the document is text with a few choices) - you could apply something like 1000 words / (number of possible paths in the story from start to an end state, ignoring loops if there are any). Therefore, if there are no choices, there's only one path, and it recovers your previous word minimum. That might be too simplistic.

For parser games/text-adventure type games, I think aiming for 1000 words as a minimum is already doable, and you'd probably make this just from the background text alone.

I don't know what kind of generators people intend to use, but speaking from my own experience in Twine, you could also consider setting a minimum based on number of passages. I think at least 15 total passages would be pretty reasonable. While that may not result in 1000 words in an average run of the game from start to end state, accounting for slightly different paths in different episodes would. It'd presume that the recip would be interested in replaying the game and making different choices. (Also, passages in Twine have a tendency to, uh, proliferate. 15 is a pretty easy minimum to make.)

I doubt people who are offering IF (in fact I... may be the only one) will code a parser game or a puzzle game, so this would more likely be a choose your own adventure type with a few paths. It should be easy to calculate a minimum off that using the guidelines above, but AO3 won't reflect that in the word count (especially if the game is linked to from another website).

Anyway! Just throwing some thoughts out there. It might be easier all things considered to a) tell people who are interested in IF to just wait for an unconventional fanworks exchange (that's valid, I'm still keen on signing up without IF) or b) tell those recipients who would be interested in potentially receiving IF to leave a comment on an opt-in post, like Yuletide did this year. And maybe IF can wait for a future year when we have better minimums formulated for it. If that's your decision, I would totally accept this too.

[extrapenguin]

I was thinking that maybe a minumum number of choicepoints would make more sense for IF. (5? IDK.) I could put this up for vote later in the weekend to see whether people would prefer matching on it or matching on something else and opting in to IF.

[(Anonymous)]

That could work but solely for the IF that is the choose your own adventure type. Also without further note about what choice point entails it's hard to gauge the complexity of choices that land you in different game states vs dramatically changing the outcome of a story; and whether the choice is binary (much easier to program) or anything higher.

I think to work off of minimum choice points would bias you to a particular IF structure. Unless the point is to restrict to solely that structure, which would be a choice you could make. To go back to your original minimum requirements for Other, "equivalent effort" in the IF should probably relate to some judgement on the blend of: a) the complexity of game structure, and b) the length of total text in the fiction from start state to finish, such that games that are pretty convoluted to program but don't have a lot of text are judged on the same relative level as a game that has relatively few choice points but a path from beginning to end is guaranteed 1k words. But it's up to you how precisely you want to define what "equivalent effort" is and whether people will take that in good faith. And this all might be annoyingly and unnecessarily complex to code into a rule anyway. Personally I (and everyone I know who has received IF) have yet to be disappointed with an IF piece - as in there was never a feeling like IF gifts were somehow lacking, in exchanges where there was nothing more precise than "text must be 1k" - but others might have had different experiences.

A vote sounds great!

[extrapenguin]

I've put it up to vote (and will count anon comments as well). I'm open to having multiple types of minimum, so a piece of IF would have to be, say, at least 500 words long OR have at least 2 distinct paths from start to finish OR take at least 10 minutes to complete, to pull numbers out of my ass for sake of example.

People generally take things in good faith, but the rules have to be there both to guard against any potential bad egg, and give people clear guidelines of what to expect, creating and receiving. They're both a means to protect people and a scaffolding around which giver and recip can build a mutually satisfying exchange experience, if that makes sense? And I'd want to treat IF fairly and give it its own creation minimum to make it feel an equivalent part of the exchange, just like art gets its own minimum instead of "your art must be 1k long".

Children of Time

[weakinteraction]

I'm not sure it's all that obvious from the tags, but I promise this book is very space-y - roughly half of the narrative takes place on a planet that's a terraforming experiment gone very off its original plan, and the other half on a spaceship carrying the last survivors of Earth after the collapse of the civilisation who started the experiment, who have convinced themselves said planet is going to be a paradise they can make a new life on.

Re: Children of Time

[extrapenguin]

Don't worry, i've read it. Spiders in space!

Re: Children of Time

[weakinteraction]

:D Indeed. (I do keep having to be cautious when reccing it IRL to check that people aren't arachnophobes ...)

[tigerlily]

Re: the Star Wars Crossovers section: I nominated a few things that, until last December, would’ve fit there perfectly, but now I am not sure. There’s a scene in the last movie of the sequel trilogy in which ghosts talk to Rey. They don’t appear visually, but their voices are distinct and identifiable as the characters they belong to, and their speaking is an action which occurs in the present and affects the outcome of the plot. Would this mean they could be nominated under the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy instead of Star Wars Crossovers?

[extrapenguin]

They can be nominated under the Sequel Trilogy.

[tigerlily]

Thank you! They were already approved by the time I checked back; may I re-nominate them under the Sequel Trilogy, and can the current ones be deleted? This is how they appear now:

Relationship: Rey (SW:ST) & Ahsoka Tano (SW:R)
Relationship: Rey (SW:ST)/Ahsoka Tano (SW:R)
Relationship: Rey (SW:ST) & Anakin Skywalker (SW:OT) & Ahsoka Tano (SW:R)
Relationship: Rey (SW:ST)/Anakin Skywalker (SW:OT)/Ahsoka Tano (SW:R)

[extrapenguin]

Yes, re-nominating is fine. As per your wishes, I've deleted the original tags.

[tigerlily]

Thank you!

[cupidsbow]

Hi Mods,
I think I've put through some nominations, but I'm feeling pretty unsure about it. Is there any way you can check if they have gone through?

[extrapenguin]

If you go to the tagset and click on the "My Nominations" button, you can see the status of your nominations. A green tickmark means it's accepted and added to the tagset, while a grey ?! means it's still under review. (A red x would mean it's rejected. This should not have happened to anyone this year.)

[cupidsbow]

Thank you!

[batman]

Are works where the story is set on a lost space colony eligible? They're aware that they were colonised from another planet (though it was a long time ago), there was tension between the colonisers and the colonised, the actual immigration ship is a place they can visit, and at one point new aliens show up to terraform the planet again.

[extrapenguin]

They're eligible. Go forth and nom!

in case delay in approval due to lack of familiarity...

[rugessnome]

I wanted to note that I nominated Johnny Maxwell in light of the first book in the trilogy, Only You Can Save Mankind, being about aliens and interstellar travel (although technically it takes place in video games and sequences that might or might not be dreams)

I also nominated a bunch of space physics stuff (which I could explain a bit if wanted?) Other than probably "neutron star matter" (though it could maaybe be a destination) and possibly "relativistic space time" (but that's the medium in which space travel is generally undertaken), they all either travel through space or involve it.

Re: in case delay in approval due to lack of familiarity...

[extrapenguin]

Thank you for the clarification! Wikipedia was being supremely unhelpful. Noms approval has been slow going due to AO3 being slow on the mod end and dropping associations at the drop of a hat. (Re-adding them is an annoying and cumbersome process.)