This past Sunday, I attended the BAFTA Scotland Awards as a guest of the lovely chaps at Dynamo Games, who were nominated for Best Game with Championship Manager 2010 Express. The awards, dinner and party were all held at the Glasgow Science Centre, and attended by the great and the good of the Scottish screen industries. The whole shebang was compered by Dundee’s own Lorraine Kelly, and awards were collected by Robert Carlyle, Armando Iannucci(who swept the board with In The Loop), and Bill Forsyth. On the games side, Proper won Best Game for Flock! (congrats!), beating Dynamo and Cobra (with Low Grav Racer). More notably from the point of view of industry prominence, the first Outstanding International Achievement for digital media was also awarded, to Realtime Worlds‘ David Jones (described as the “games industry’s Martin Scorsese”), so special congratulations to Mr Jones!
This was the first year that ‘digital media’ had been broken out into three, eminently more sensible, categories: Game, Web and Interactive. BAFTA Scotland are being hugely supportive of these sectors, which is great, but I wanted to note a suggestion on how we can improve our representation: how we sell our products.
For each category, you see a short 20-30 second clip of the nominee. TV and film have this down to a fine art, of course, and are very good at selecting appropriate clips that get the tone, mood and theme of a piece across in a very short space of time. By contrast, the Games, Web and Interactive clips felt very flat. In addition, what the product actually was often wasn’t communicated clearly enough. On the plus side, the clips were well produced and visually striking – they were halfway towards being awesome.
Collectively – and others at the event agreed with me on this – we can do a much better job of selling ourselves and our products to our creative peers in Scotland, and I look forward to seeing all the nominees next year!
-David (@dwlt)