LAS VEGAS—Every year, when I tell people I’m going to Las Vegas in February for video gaming’s version of the academy awards, the response is usually the same: “I didn’t even know video games had an academy awards.”

Yes, those who follow the industry closely might have read the list of winners at Thursday night’s 21st annual DICE Awards (where Nintendo generally—and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild specifically—cleaned up). A few thousand really dedicated fans even watched the livestream on IGN.

But gaming’s own academy awards can’t even come close to the attention and cachet of major industry happenings like the Oscars, the Emmys, or the Grammys. Video gaming’s most “official” award show struggles to even get the same kind of attention as The Game Awards, a bombastic, marketing announcement-fueled spectacle that grew out of an embarrassing Spike TV telecast.

For Meggan Scavio, who took over as president of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (AIAS) last August, this isn’t a surprising or especially worrisome state of affairs. “In my opinion, our audience is the industry,” she told Ars in a recent interview. “That’s who I care about. If the industry wants to watch our awards on Twitch or YouTube, great. Having that wider gamer audience isn’t important to me right now. The Academy serves the industry and that’s who I’m going to serve.”

Of course gaming’s academy award show is never going to have the inherent star power attraction of Hollywood’s various awards shows, where many tune in just to see what telegenic mega-celebrities are wearing. But that doesn’t mean the DICE awards lack the ability to raise the usually behind-the-scenes profile of some of the best game creators.

“I really want to showcase the developers,” Scavio said. “I want them to become the household names. We already have some of them, Tim Schafer or the Cliff Bleszinski, people know who they are. The more we keep putting them out in front, the more they will become household names.”

Star power or not, Scavio thinks the gaming audience in general might be less interested in the back-patting, backward-looking nature of the usual awards show lovefest. “I wonder if gamers, they’re always looking to see what’s new, what’s next, and this is reminding them what they played last year,” she said, noting that people seem to love the forward-looking marketing that dominates The Game Awards.

At the same time, Scavio added, “My hope is that once the public sees how passionate we are about what we do, eventually they’ll follow suit, and then we can maybe broadcast to a wider audience.”

Scavio says the academy is brainstorming ways to showcase that passion more directly. She recalled a situation where No Man’s Sky was nominated and won a technical achievement award at the competing Game Developer’s Choice awards (which Scavio helped run for years before joining AIAS). “Gamers kind of freaked out,” she recalled. “They were mad. The reality was what [the developers] did in that game was hugely innovative. How do we tell those stories so that people understand why that animation is amazing, or why that art direction in particular won?”

More than just awards

For Scavio, the DICE awards stand out because they’re “genuinely peer-based,” with small groups of experts picking nominees and over 30,000 voting members picking winners. That membership, though, is dominated by the major publishers and AAA developers that can generally afford Academy membership. Scavio said she’ll be embarking on a sort of “publicity tour” in the coming months to convince more independent developers, mobile game companies, and international publishers that the Academy is worth joining.

That means making the Academy more than just an annual awards show, too. AIAS recently launched a podcast (hosted by Insomniac’s Ted Price) that helps illuminate how games are made. The Academy is also looking into things like offering more assistance to existing game preservation efforts, helping to arrange guild-style meetings for specific groups of developers, and possibly creating a centralized physical space for industry members to meet, she said.

Scavio said she’s been thinking about more “tangible” benefits to membership, too, such as training. “A lot of people are starting new companies, new studios, they don’t have internal HR departments, they don’t have ways of learning,” she said. Training in things like conflict resolution and workplace harassment is “not offered at many studios, especially the smaller ones, so maybe that’s something we can offer, those services for people.”

“My first priority is awareness—there’s an academy there,” she continued. “My second goal is asking… what people need. What would entice you to be a member, what would entice you to join the Academy?”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1264881