9th Game Developers Choice Awards Opens Special Nominations

Author: by Staff

The 9th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards has launched a call for nominations for its three Special Awards, including Lifetime Achievement, Pioneer, and Ambassador Awards, with nominating power for Gamasutra members. Voted on entirely by game professionals, next year’s 9th Annual Award Ceremony will be hosted on March 25th, 2009 in the Esplanade Room in the South Hall of San Francisco’s Moscone Center, as part of Game Developers Conference 2009. As the first part of this year's voting process, three special Choice Awards - the Ambassador Award, the Pioneer Award, and the Lifetime Achievement Award - are available for nominations after logging on with your main Gamasutra.com user ID. (You can register for free if you do not currently have one.) These special awards honor individuals whose achievements have made an impact on games and the game community as a whole, and not necessarily only over the past year: - The Ambassador Award honors an individual (or group of individuals) who has helped the game industry advance to a better place, either through facilitating a better game community from within, or by reaching outside the industry to be an advocate for video games to help further the art. - The Pioneer Award (the successor to the First Penguin award) celebrates those individuals who developed a breakthrough technology, game concept or gameplay design at a crucial juncture in video game history, paving the way for the myriad developers who followed them. - Finally, the Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes the career and achievements of a developer who has made an indelible impact on the craft of game development. 2008's G4-televised Choice Awards, which saw Portal win the Game Of The Year award, gave out the Ambassador Award to the IGDA's Jason Della Rocca, the Pioneer Award to Magnavox Odyssey and original Pong inventor Ralph Baer (pictured), and the Lifetime Achievement award to legendary Civilization creator Sid Meier. The Game Developers Choice Awards is presented by GDC, and the voting process is overseen by the editors of Game Developer Magazine and Gamasutra.com, the leading media outlets for game industry professionals. All game professionals with a Gamasutra.com user account will be able to nominate and vote in the 2008 Choice Awards. In addition, for the purposes of picking recipients of the Ambassador, Pioneer and Lifetime Achievement Awards following the public nominations, and to help adjudicate on the awards process in general, the editors of both outlets have set up an Advisory Committee of distinguished industry veterans. As well as the Ambassador, Pioneer and Lifetime Achievement Awards, Choice Awards will be given in the following categories: • Best Audio • Best Game Design • Best Technology • Best Visual Arts • Best Writing • Best Debut Game • Best Downloadable Game • Best Handheld Game • Innovation • Game of the Year These particular categories will be both nominated and voted on by the development community. The call for nominations period for these categories begins in late December. For further information, and to submit a nomination for one of the three Special Awards through December 17th, please visit the official Game Developers Choice Awards website.