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Tonight, London’s Southbank Centre will host the 20th edition of the BAFTA Games Awards. For twenty years, among the most distinguished awards from the world of movie and television has actually held a devoted event to identify quality in computer game and there are no indications of the organisation losing any of its interest or interest for the medium.
The market is practically unrecognisable compared to when the very first video games BAFTAs were held. In 2004, the PlayStation 2 was still king, Xbox was an adventurous beginner to the area, retail was still the dominant channel for purchasing video games, and mobile titles had probably still peaked with the years-old Snake.
In time, we’ve seen the increase of online multiplayer video gaming, the mobile phone transformation, the adoption of virtual truth, the growth of the indie scene … the list goes on. And BAFTA’s head of video games Luke Hebblethwaite states the organisation has actually done its finest to progress the awards appropriately.
“If you recall at BAFTA’s really first event 20 years back, it showed a various, somewhat more innocent time, we may state,” he informs GamesIndustry.biz“It felt a bit more like a business conference occasion, whereas nowadays our awards stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the movie and television awards. They’re red carpet occasions, they’re high eminence, and they’re extensively covered by the media.
“Film was viewed as a lower art and theatre, television as lower than movie, and BAFTA was an essential organisation that assisted alter that. That can be our function in video games too”
“The program itself has actually progressed rather a lot– if we kept the very same classifications that we had 20 years back, those would look really out-of-date. We no longer have genre-based awards, we do not have platform or device-based awards. 257 video games were gone into for the BAFTA video games awards this year and they are throughout every gadget type, throughout all type of categories and video games, and they have the ability to contend similarly on equivalent footing with each other nowadays.
“BAFTA’s awards show the craft of making video games, and we see those video games that master what they’re doing get acknowledged by our ballot members and our juries to position them among the very best in our market.”
There isn’t precisely a scarcity of computer game awards events– nearly every market conference has its own awards connected– however what makes the BAFTAs stick out is the eminence it brings from a history of acknowledging quality in other home entertainment sectors. Hebblethwaite stresses that BAFTA itself is “an arts charity that exists to promote the imaginative and cultural value” of home entertainment, and video games are a crucial medium within that objective.
“Coming from the heritage of movie and television that we have actually developed over those 75 years, BAFTA’s name brings a great deal of weight with it that originates from that cultural value,” he continues.