The Independent Games Festival Nuovo Awards Finalists

I was judging the Independent Games Festival Nuovo awards this year, and the eight finalists have been announced.

It’s an interesting time, and it’s a challenge to have to rethink what constitutes “new” or “unconventional”. Is a game suitably new if it applies a new theme to an old mechanic? A new graphics style? If it makes a hitherto unseen organic whole of disparate elements? If it shifts the emphasis from traditional gameplay to something else?

At the same time, yesterday’s innovation is today’s entrenched style, and it is a challenge to make sure that we do not simply end up rewarding the same-old genre that was innovative 5 years ago.

(Some might say that pixelated indie platformers have been on the verge of becoming a stale pseudo-signifier of innovation. But I think there is still life in the form.)

From the IGF site:

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The Independent Games Festival (IGF), the prestigious GDC-held video game industry event highlighting and awarding the talents of independent game developers, has announced the finalists for the 2011 Nuovo Award, which honors “abstract, short-form, and unconventional game development.”

Some of this year’s finalists include unconventional party game Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now (B.U.T.T.O.N.), first-person dinner simulation title Dinner Date, Messhof’s chunky 2-player fencing title Nidhogg, and zen-like tree simulation title Bohm.

The Nuovo Award, the top video game art prize, is announcing an increase to $5,000 for this year’s award winner, thanks to the quality of this year’s entries. The winner of the award will be revealed at the Independent Games Festival Awards on March 2, 2011 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, during Game Developers Conference 2011. In addition, all Nuovo finalists will be playable in a special section of the IGF Pavilion on the GDC show floor from March 2nd to 4th.

Now in its third year, the Nuovo Award allows more esoteric art games from among the almost 400 IGF entries to compete on their own terms alongside longer-form indie titles, and has been newly expanded this year to include eight finalists.

The full list of this year’s Nuovo Award finalists, with links to screenshots and videos of the titles on their official IGF.com entry pages, is as follows:

– Bohm, created by Monobanda – (“Gives you control over the life of a tree. It’s a game based on slow gameplay and the act of creation.”)

– A House in California, created by Cardboard Computer – (“A surreal, narrative game about four characters who bring a house to life… with environments and activities drawn from a combination of memory, research, poetry, and fantasy.”)

– Nidhogg, created by Messhof – (“A 2 player fencing game with football & platforming elements”.)

– Dinner Date, created by Stout Games – (“You play as the subconsciousness of Julian Luxemburg, waiting for his date to arrive. You listen in on his thoughts while tapping the table, looking at the clock and eventually reluctantly starting to eat…”)

– Loop Raccord, created by Nicolai Troshinsky – (“Manipulate a series of video clips in order to create… continuous movement.”)

– The Cat and the Coup, created by Peter Brinson and Kurosh ValaNejad – (“A documentary game in which you play the cat of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran.”)

– Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now (B.U.T.T.O.N.), created by Copenhagen Game Collective – (“A one-button party game for 2-8 players. … rather than let the computer carry out all the rules, the players are themselves responsible for enforcing (or not enforcing) the rules.”)

– Hazard: The Journey Of Life, created by Demruth – (“A philosophical first person single player environmental puzzle game. The game presents no goals directly to the player, but they create goals for themselves based on what they know of the world.”)