Are the Bloggies Rigged?

I mean, you know how titles on the internet work by now. But I have some statistics in here that you may think are neat.

Feb 01, 2025

First off, the 2024 Bloggies are down to the final vote! You should go vote here before it is too late. My own Overloading the Random Encounter Table won Gold so is in the final running, but since I’ve already hosted before, I suggest you consider one of the other nominees. One of the quirky things about the Bloggies is that the overall winner gets to (or has to, maybe) run next year’s! It’s a loveably janky way of doing it. Maybe put me down as your 2nd favorite to show your love and affection for me as your beloved dear blogger, but definitely read all four gold-winners and vote what your heart tells you. Then read all 64 finalists, because they are all fucking great!

Anyway, I have heard it said that the Bloggies always is just the same blogs over and over. Is that true? I wondered myself. My first inclination was, “Well, it makes sense that a blog like Goblin Punch would always rise to the top—it’s an amazing blog, each post is great and he posts all the time!” But I am a scientist (legally, I have to clarify that I am not a scientist), so I wanted to test my hypothesis. Crunch the numbers, run the data.

So there have been 3 Bloggies so far, each with 64 blog posts thrown into the big bracket with 12 medals up for grabs each year (not counting the platinum medal, which is an extra medal for one post). That means there have been 194 slots and 36 medals.

There have been 104 unique blogs that have been nominated at least once for a Bloggie (excluding the recent “debut blog” category). That is actually way more than I expected! I follow the Bloggies pretty closely, having initiated them, and even I just assumed it was probably going to be 193 posts all from Goblin Punch. There are probably at least 1,000 active game blogs out there so being one of the 104 blogs is honestly a huge honor for any of us. You are already in the top 10% of blogs if you have been nominated even once.

Okay, but what about the 90 slots in 3 years of the Bloggies that featured a blog that has received at least one other nomination? Surely those must all be Goblin Punch! Wrong again, my Goblin Punch-loving self. Of the 104 blogs that have been nominated at least once for a Bloggie, there are only 16 blogs that have received 3 or more nominations across the first 3 years of the Bloggies.

Surely these blogs are all just legendary, S-tier blogs that sweep up all the medals? Okay, this time you are closer on the money. Of the 36 medals awarded, 19 of them have gone to a blog that has been nominated at least 3 or more times. But a fact that is fun (someone should invent a phrase for that) is that no blog has won a gold medal more than once. There have been 12 gold medals awarded and they have gone to 12 different blogs. That is a level of parity far beyond Chiefs vs Eagles in the Super Bowl again. (Go Birds, btw.)

Now I am just going to name some of the most decorated blogs in the Bloggies era. These aren’t necessarily a complete list of the best blogs that are in the posting game circa 2022-2024 but they should all certainly be included:

The “Peter O'Toole and Glenn Close” Award for Most Nominations and No Medals

It’s an honor just to be nominated each time, but these four blogs all have 5 total nominations and haven’t gotten a medal yet. For context, 5 is an absurdly high number of nominations. Only 4 blogs have received more nominations than these (there are a few others that have had 5 but won at least one medal). I would be surprised if one of them doesn’t rack up a Gold in the coming year, frankly.

A round of applause! I hope this award can at least be a consolation prize. It reminds me of a student organization I was in where the lowest officer position was “janitor” whose job was to clean our 200-year-old building. It was a thankless job, but we started the tradition of chanting “thankless job, thankless job” and clapping anytime an elected janitor spoke, which turned a thankless job into a job that was constantly being thanked. I think we should all clap and chant for these four.

The “Goblin Punch” Award for Most Consistently Great Blog

This award goes to Goblin Punch, obviously, but not for the reason I suspected. Goblin Punch actually has only racked up 4 nominations across 3 years! That’s less than each of the four I mentioned before. But Goblin Punch only knows one thing: winning. 3 of those 4 posts have won a medal. But never a gold medal. At least not yet. Never bet against Goblin Punch.

The “Rigged” Award for Most Nominations

The name of this award is in honor of Mr. Wayspell of the (criminally not yet nominated for a Bloggie) Wayspell blog, who shouts “Rigged!” at the mere mention of Bloggies, Ennies, U.S. Presidential Elections (don’t worry, he’s been pardoned), or Hot Dog Eating Contests, and who is a close and personal friend of the winner of this award. That’s right, folks, it’s Mr. Worm himself, Rise Up Comus has earned 8 nominations across the 3 years of the Bloggies. Because Bloggies limit each blog to being nominated only once in each of its categories, that means that 75% of each category in the past 3 years have featured at least one post from Rise Up Comus. That is truly astounding. I am astounded.

The “Self-Described King of Coppers” Award for Most Medals

Some bloggers are prolific, posting all the time, day and night, in hopes of striking gold. Others are like the best modern YouTube video essayists where they don’t release anything for years and then drop a 6-hour video on something you’ve never heard of and you have to cancel your dinner plans to go home and watch it. Just me? Okay, well what I am saying is that the winner of this award only posts bangers, which is why they have won a truly mindblowing 4 medals. That’s right, you know him, you love him, it’s Mindstorm Press! With 3 coppers and 1 gold medal, no one can touch Mindstorm’s dominance of the Bloggies. Okay, you might be thinking, that’s a lot of copper medals. I bet if we weighted the medals, like 1 point for copper, 2 for silver, and 3 for gold, then it would be someone else! Well, you would be wrong! The medals are just quite dispersed. Remember that no one has ever won more than one gold medal before. So even if we did the aforementioned point-scoring process Ty would still win with 6 total points with a three-way tie (heh, Ty, tie) behind him consisting of Goblin Punch, Traverse Fantasy, and my own very humble blog, Prismatic Wasteland.

Who is Rigging the Bloggies?

No one. I mean, someone really easily could rig them because they are an open voting process, but that would be a really poor use of your time. It’s just a fun little thing to highlight a bunch of the great writing that 100s (literally 104, but who is counting) of bloggers do for free every year just because they have the disease where they think about elves and dice too much. And frankly, I would expect a captured process to produce way more consistent results than the Bloggies do. There are a lot of “upsets” where a less known blogger beats a more well-established blogger. Just look at who is hosting it: Sacha Goat won with their very first blog post! You could win with your very first blog post. But frankly, the point was never and will never be winning. The point is writing stuff and reading stuff. So often blogging can feel ephemeral and like you are pissing into an ocean already too full of piss. You’ll get some clicks when you first share it, but then everyone moves on to the next piece of content their phone picks for them to look at. If the Bloggies can be an excuse for you to go back and read some posts from early last year, then heck yeah. If it makes you discover a blog you have literally never heard of but actually totally rules, then hell yeah. If it even just makes you re-read the Goblin Punch or Mindstorm or Rise Up Comus post you already read twice before, just because it was that good, then fuck yeah. I dunno, I just think blogging is cool.