Games Journalism Prize Winners Announced
"Exceptional" pieces of work highlighting games journalism progress.
We all love video games. It's why developers make them, why you play them, and why we write about them. And this week, at a BAFTA event focusing on press in the games industry, the writing element was championed as the winners of the Games Journalism Prize were announced.
A large number of articles were assessed by a panel of judges, consisting of 16 UK and US journalists. You can see the longlist of features and read them at your leisure right here. The overall winner, however, was Eurogamer's Christian Donlan for his piece titled Night and the City.
Awards organiser Dan Griliopoulos told SPOnG that Donlan's piece won because it was "superbly human and very much about a game. Christian was lucky that Team Bondi made a game that was so relevant to his family's history - but he really made the very best of that opportunity. After all, a lot of modern media writing is about mining your own personal history and drawing wider lessons.
"Night and the City was exceptionally well-written - Christian's talent at turning a phrase has come on noticeably over the past year and Simon Parkin [freelance writer who also writes for Eurogamer] and him are making this humanistic mix of investigation and storytelling their own."
Other winners included Tom Bissell and Jason Schwartz, the latter of which Griliopoulos said was "an exceptional piece of investigative journalism that happened to be about a game studio." A freelancer games journalist himself, Griliopoulos said that the aim of the Games Journalism Prize was to "bring great examples of writing to the attention of the journalist community and the gameplaying public.
"I'm not sure we achieved that this year - I know we brought them to the attention of the games journalists, at least the proportion our promotion could reach, but the wider public probably still aren't aware of these pieces. Hopefully, 2013's prizes can build on that and get an ever wider selection of pieces for nomination.
"For me, a real sign of success would be if one of the winning pieces in a few year's time was completely outside of the awareness of the games journalism field. There were a few pieces in made it onto the longlist that fitted that remit, but they didn't make it through to the shortlist, let alone to the winning spots."
Congratulations to all the winners, and let's hope the next year will be host to even more incredible works.
A large number of articles were assessed by a panel of judges, consisting of 16 UK and US journalists. You can see the longlist of features and read them at your leisure right here. The overall winner, however, was Eurogamer's Christian Donlan for his piece titled Night and the City.
Awards organiser Dan Griliopoulos told SPOnG that Donlan's piece won because it was "superbly human and very much about a game. Christian was lucky that Team Bondi made a game that was so relevant to his family's history - but he really made the very best of that opportunity. After all, a lot of modern media writing is about mining your own personal history and drawing wider lessons.
"Night and the City was exceptionally well-written - Christian's talent at turning a phrase has come on noticeably over the past year and Simon Parkin [freelance writer who also writes for Eurogamer] and him are making this humanistic mix of investigation and storytelling their own."
Other winners included Tom Bissell and Jason Schwartz, the latter of which Griliopoulos said was "an exceptional piece of investigative journalism that happened to be about a game studio." A freelancer games journalist himself, Griliopoulos said that the aim of the Games Journalism Prize was to "bring great examples of writing to the attention of the journalist community and the gameplaying public.
"I'm not sure we achieved that this year - I know we brought them to the attention of the games journalists, at least the proportion our promotion could reach, but the wider public probably still aren't aware of these pieces. Hopefully, 2013's prizes can build on that and get an ever wider selection of pieces for nomination.
"For me, a real sign of success would be if one of the winning pieces in a few year's time was completely outside of the awareness of the games journalism field. There were a few pieces in made it onto the longlist that fitted that remit, but they didn't make it through to the shortlist, let alone to the winning spots."
Congratulations to all the winners, and let's hope the next year will be host to even more incredible works.
Games:
L.A. Noire
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