Ponycorns at the IGF Awards: Not Wanted on the Voyage?

[this article is cross-posted from the Untold Entertainment blog, which is awesome]

When we released Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure earlier this year, gamers and non-gamers alike were delighted at the unique collaboration between a kids' video game developer and his five year old daughter. Scads of journalists, bloggers, developers and fans called for Ponycorns to be named Game of the Year. Following a successful showing as a finalist at IndieCade, Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure is now a 2011 IGF (Independent Games Festival) Awards entrant. Many early predictions have it sweeping the show, actually beating out every game in every other category (including Technical Achievement and Best Use of 3D).

We'll need new shirts that say "i have all the awards".

It's absolutely certain that Untold Entertainment is poised to take home a LOT of hardware from the Game Developers Conference in March, but there's one little snag: according to the GDC website,

What this means is that when Ponycorns does win every single IGF award (including Most Memorable Explosion and Most Tasteful Deployment of a Nude Patch), the game's five year old co-creator may not be permitted to attend her own awards ceremony. It's likely that conference organizers did not anticipate this problem when they drafted the rule, but the question remains: should they make an exception? Should five-year-old game developer Cassandra Creighton be permitted to attend GDC in order to claim her inevitable armful of IGF Awards?

Update

Meggan Scavio, GM of GDC (who kicks ass, and has helped me out of a conference-related jam in the past), says that the proviso is insurance-related. If Cassie is nominated, she can attend once i fill out a waiver. Hooray! Of course, the only problem i have with this is "IF Cassie is nominated." Clearly, she is poised to take not only the IGF award for Best Fractal Raytracing Shader Navmesh AI Programming, but ALSO the special "Chancellor's Choice" award for Most Instructive Game in the Art of Ladycraft. (Now if only i could scrape together the airfare.)