TOM FRANCIS
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An Idea For More Flexible Indie Game Awards

I just read Zach Gage’s post proposing some changes to the IGF. My summary of his problems with the current system would be:

• For ‘best audio’, it’s not clear whether jurors should a) prioritise audio alone, or b) take into account the quality of the rest of the game and how important audio is to it.
• Currently jurors usually go with b), which “leads to games that are very well designed making it into multiple categories”, reducing the number of distinct games recognised.
• Medium-length single player games also get disproportionately recognised because they’re easier to judge than huge or multiplayer games, and feel more significant than tiny mobile games.

Generally I think b) is fine, but I do agree that over-celebrating single games is needless, and I think the categories themselves are a pretty rigid and inadequate way of capturing what’s worth celebrating in games.

Zach’s suggestion is to change the categories to reflect game length/type, and have developers choose one category to submit for. I’m not wild about this because a) the categories are still rigid and don’t capture gaming’s diversity of form, and b) a developer could screw themselves by miscategorising their game, which is not the skill we are trying to evaluate or award.

As it happens I’ve been thinking about a different kind of award ceremony I’d like to see ever since the BAFTAs in 2013, and I think it would address a lot of this.

Gone Home and The Stanley Parable were both nominated for the narrative category, and I thought: “This is ridiculous. Here are two games that did different things brilliantly, and we’ve invented a system where we have to say ‘You two are competing at the same thing’ and then, worse, point to one and say ‘You lose!'”

Also Gunpoint lost to GTA V, so clearly the system is deeply broken.

I think the solution to the rigidness of categories, the judging problems therein, and the artificial pitting of specific games against each other, is all the same thing: make the categories freeform.

Here’s the awards system I’d like to see:

1. At the time the nominees are normally announced online, instead a similar number of winners are announced. But what they’ve won is unannounced.
2. On the night, every game wins a unique award. Gone Home wins Best Emotional Drama. Stanley Parable wins Best Introspective Comedy. Some categories are invented to recognise this specific game, but they don’t have to be: you can still give a Best Audio award if you like, or you can give one for Best Use of Audio if that’s closer to what you mean.
3. The only rule is that the one fixed category is ‘Grand Prize’ or similar.

This way:

• The fact that games are so diverse, unique and ever-changing becomes a strength rather than a problem.
• It’s a purely positive thing, no game loses to another except for grand prize.
• Tiny games can be acknowledged for brilliance at being tiny games.
• Games can be recognised for excellence at something we didn’t know you could be excellent at until we played that game.
• It’s fun to find out what weird and new categories are being awarded on the night. Currently awards shows are actually pretty dull: list of nominees, winner. No insight to why.
• Since it’s X games that are recognised rather than 5 slots per X categories, one game can win multiple awards without reducing the number of games recognised.
• It’s also a stronger recommendation for every individual game. Best Audio honestly tells me little about whether I should buy it. “Best Aural Hellscape” would have me intrigued.

I don’t know if this is for the IGF, it’s just how I’d do it. It doesn’t solve the ‘multiplayer and huge games are hard to judge’ problem, and I’m sure it’d give jurors its own set of challenges – though hopefully more interesting ones.

Update: this is pretty close to what Rock Paper Shotgun do for their end-of-year Advent Calendar, though the categories there are more genre-focused than I had in mind for this.