"This year it was all up to you, the JIG community, to hand out the awards to those games that earned the most votes."

If this was actually true, 4 of the flash categories wouldn't have had subjective "shared" awards not chosen by the community. And all 4 of the voted winners were Armor Games games... coincidence?

Why would you bother saying that ALL the awards were based on the vote of the community when that is clearly not the case. Should have done what you've done in the past and hand out JIG staff picks and the community pick as separate awards.

You sure can't please everyone.

@Tasselfoot I think you are being a bit harsh… Jay's been very transparent about how this site is run (See also: how he shows how the awards are divvied up after competitions and games being tagged with 'affiliate'), and I highly doubt he rigged these votes in any manner (See also: correlation != causation). As for the Audience vs Staff picks, it is easy enough to figure out what was what. I don't think there was anything 'tricky' going on.

Anyhow, thanks for this! I think it would be interesting to do a bit of a "vertical tasting" (to borrow some wine terminology), meaning to play each of the Best-Of games over the past couple years, grouped by category. It would be interesting to see how each of the genres has evolved. (Or even better, just hear Jay's thoughts on the matter as he has been living amongst these games for years now :) )

Thanks Jay and Staff for letting me be a part of this! Guess I better check out the winners that I didn't see coming.

Hooray for Small Worlds! I loved that one. Also glad to see This is the Only Level and Company of Myself up there. A lot of good games on all these lists.

Though, I'm disappointed to see Bridgecraft did so poorly. :( It was one of my favorites last year; played through it a half dozen times, trying to figure out how to tweak my score on each level to the best possible solution.

Staff pick or community pick, I feel those games really earned their shiny JIGMan badges. Some of the winners were obvious from the beginning, like Small Worlds, while other categories had so many good entries it was impossible to know which game would be standing when the dust settled.

Once again, congratulations to all winners, and to Jay and JIG staff as well, for bringing us this awesome feature every year. Cheers!

Cheers, Donut. It's community members like you that make the long hours and hard work all worthwhile. :)

Great stuff, awesome nominees and superbe winners. I sent this list to lots of friends I think stuff like this is great for the gaming scene :) Please never stop.

Otherwise, what I's like to know are the top 10 most votes categories and a "scale" of how many votes they had compared to each other and other categories. I'd also like to know what were the top 3 most voted games and again some sort of "scale" of how many votes they got (compared to each other and to other games). I'd rather have scale to retain at least some of the mistery :)

Again, great stuff, bravo to all game developers and collaborators!

Good picks.
I can't believe Spelunky beat Braid!
That made me so happy.
I love braid, but Spelunky just doesn't quit.

Also, Colourshift didn't even make top 10.
Pity, as I spent a month on that thing.

Well done to all the winners - very deserved although I'm sure we all have favourites that didn't do as well as we'd hoped!

I agree that a comparison with previous years could be good - as a true casual gamer I tend to forget what the games were like back in 2006, so I'm not sure how (or even if) they have evolved!

Thanks to Jay and the team - I'm looking forward to another 12 months.

Cogratulations to all the lucky winners :)

Cheers to "Alice is Dead", " Small Worlds", "Llama Adventure", "This is the only level" and "Machinarium" !! I really enjoyed playing all of them and I'm really glad they all got the recognition they deserved !

As Jimbog nicely said, we all had favorites that did not make it (I'm still strongly supporting Scarygirl ! Just got the comic book ! It's such a wonderful art that really catch the eyes. I guess it did poorly because of the bugs... Still I'm a bit disapointed).

I like reading these "best of" since It reminded of all the great games that were featured this year.
I'm looking forward to the next one ! Good Job you guys ! Bravo et bonne chance pour la suite !

I think what Tass is trying to say is that it's a bit misleading to say that all of the awards are community/user-derived when there are additional staff-defined awards (shared) in place that are typically present when it's clear the staff disagreed with the community's vote distributions.

He's not saying that the votes were rigged -- he's saying that it's incorrect to say "It's all up to you!" and then invoke shared awards (which technically dumps through a staff skew bias in terms of detracting from one's community-earned spotlight) when vote dissonance is present between community and staff.

I apologize if my wording was not exactly as I had written when we opened up the voting and invited the community to participate. From the Best of 2009 page:

"The games that you, the JIG community, vote on top will earn the coveted JIG "Best of 2009" award. The JIG reviewers and editors may also choose a game in each category to share the title, but this time we're leaving most of it up to you."

The fact that we did exactly as we said we would do should come as no surprise to anyone. Should it?

The results are more or less what I'd expected. I'm bitterly disappointed, though, about Emily's Holiday Season not even reaching the top ten management games :(. It's one of the loveliest games I've ever played.

Looking at the list of who DIDN'T win really highlights how far "casual" gaming has come. Anyone who still claims that games aren't (or can't be) art hasn't been paying attention.
Congrats to the winners, congrats to everyone who made the Top 10 lists, and congrats to everyone that was nominated.

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