D.I.C.E. Award submissions now open, with two new categories

The Academy Interactive Arts & Sciences has opened the submission process for its annual D.I.C.E. Summit awards ceremony. The 18th annual awards are set for the next D.I.C.E. Summit, which will take place from February 3 to 5 in Las Vegas. This is the 18th year for the A.I.A.S.' awards ceremony, and this year, the organization is debuting two new categories: the Technical Impact Award and the Sprite Award. The Technical Impact Award is a special award that "celebrates unique innovations that contribute to the ongoing progress of interactive media," while the Sprite Award "will be awarded to a game having disproportionate resources for development and exposure (as compared to AAA titles), represent a higher degree of risk tolerance and advances our industry with innovative gameplay and experiences," the organization said in its announcement. The Sprite Award is notable because it seems designed to honor independently-developed games; the awards have long been a bastion of major publishers -- not least because of their $1,000 entry fee. "We named it the D.I.C.E. Sprite Award because graphical sprites remind us of a time when video games just began to ignite our imagination and deep desire for play. Sprites, small but powerful, allow game makers regardless of team size or budgets to express their creative vision in a way that is at once new, yet familiar," A.I.A.S. president Martin Rae told Gamasutra. To be eligible for the A.I.A.S. awards, your game must have been released between January 1 and December 31, 2014. The sole exception is Online Game of the Year -- as games that continue to run as live services are eligible as long as they're around. Last year saw Naughty Dog's The Last of Us win big at the awards ceremony alongside other major titles, including Grand Theft Auto V and BioShock Infinite, among others. The full rules and form for submitting are available at the A.I.A.S. site. The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2014.